![]() ![]() They’ll never see the ripe, full habit of the tree, never know the sight and sound and smell of their mother’s childhood. And in that salvage mission, men kill any tree that might contain the secret of resistance.Ī five-year-old in Tennessee who sees the first orange spots appear in her magic woods will have nothing left to show her own children except pictures. Use the wood, at least, before it’s ruined. The nascent Forest Service encourages them. Loggers race through a dozen states to cut down whatever the fungus hasn’t reached. A person perched on an overlook above the southern mountains can watch the trunks change to gray-white skeletons in a rippling wave. The blight runs along ridgelines, killing off peak after peak. ![]() The full force of human ingenuity can’t stop the disaster breaking over the continent. The stocks of food that fall shin-deep feed entire counties, every year a mast year. A single tree might yield as many as fourteen thousand planks. Scores of mountain communities are built from the beautiful, straight-grained wood. Whole forests of them flower in rolling clouds of white. ![]() In the Carolinas, boles older than America grow ten feet wide and a hundred and twenty feet tall. They form near-pure stands for miles on end. IF GOD HAD A BROWNIE, He might shoot another animated short subject: blight hovering a moment before plunging down the Appalachians into the heart of chestnut country. ![]()
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