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Act of Faith

May 7, 2008

by Jim LeMonds

My college roommates didn’t believe me when I told them about cone picking. The subject came up our sophomore year during a game of pinochle that evolved into a discussion of jobs we’d held in junior high and high school. When my turn came, I ran through the usual list for a boy growing up in southwest Washington—haying, mowing lawns, working in the bean and strawberry fields—before mentioning that I’d also earned a few dollars picking cones. My companions were native Northwesterners, but childhoods in Tacoma and Seattle had provided few contacts with the natural world. Pine cone? Fir cone? They didn’t know there was a difference.

Fir cone pickingSuspecting a ruse, they smiled and waited for the punch line as I explained that pickers gathered Douglas fir cones in gunnysacks, and then sold them by the bushel to timber companies that used the seeds for replanting. I’d begun to convince them I was telling the truth when someone asked if climbing the trees and picking the cones was difficult. When I said, “Squirrels cut the cones; you only have to pick them up,” they laughed until they cried. I realized then that they would never understand.

For three decades in my corner of the world, cone picking served as a symbol for independence, reverence, and self-sufficiency. It epitomized our long-standing milk-the-resource mentality while simultaneously expressing the love for landscape we are often reluctant to acknowledge. Cone picking was a harvest uniquely Northwest, and we took it as both a benediction and a confirmation of the rightness of our lives. Cone picking is gone now, though the loss seems trivial when contrasted with the eradication of old growth forests or the steep decline of native salmon and steelhead runs. Yet it’s one more item deleted from the list of wonders that defined our place and made it livable.

After World War II, Weyerhaeuser Company came to grips with the gloom-and-doom prediction that forestry experts had been attempting to sell for decades: the timber industry’s cut-and-run modus operandi would result in severe shortages of product once the majority of low-elevation old growth was logged out. Weyerhaeuser and the Washington State Department of Natural Resources formalized a plan to regrow Northwest forests. They offered money for Douglas fir cones with good seed counts from elevations matching those of clear-cuts designated for replanting. Cones purchased from area pickers were laid on screens in drying sheds. As the cones opened, their seeds dropped out and were gathered for aerial distribution by plane or helicopter.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, cone picking was a September ritual for my family, wedged between summer’s warm, lazy days and the opening of deer season in October. A sense of excitement rode with us on our trips to the woods, the sort of anticipation that moves hunters and fishermen with the joy of possibility. We were blessed with an in during those early days: Uncle Tiny was delivering diesel and oil to logging outfits in the Toutle River drainage. He had keys to nearly every gate on Weyerhaeuser land and didn’t mind sharing them with family and friends. The road numbers are lost to me now, but I remember the names of the place where we picked: Green River, Old Camp Five,

Hemlock Pass, Coldwater Ridge. There is magic still in the simple act of their recitation.

When we spotted cones scattered across a logging road edged with firs, Dad stopped the pickup and we bailed out with buckets and burlap sacks. It was easy to get turned around, to lose our way as we searched the woods, heads down with no consideration of landmarks, always thinking, “One more tree.” We tried to maintain voice contact, calling to each other like geese in a fog every few minutes, but the possibility of a significant find could take a picker a ridge beyond where sound carried.

Pay varied, but the rate I recall was $2.50 a bushel; a gunnysack typically held two bushels, so we could make five dollars a bag, provided the seed count was decent. On a good day, it wasn’t unusual for our family—my father, mother, brother, and myself—to fill eight to twelve sacks and earn upwards of fifty dollars. The money was a nice lure, but it wasn’t just the pay that drew us to cone picking. Even when the luck wasn’t with us, we could explore shadowed vales of jack firs and hear the wind catch in the treetops. The money merely lent legitimacy to our quest for what we and our fellow Northwesterners have always been intent on validating: the belief that we have an intimate and wholly compatible relationship with wildness.

Like hunting and fishing, cone picking has its own family mythology: my mother shucking off her pants like a quick-change artist when a hornet found a way in through a hole in the seat; Uncle Otto, out of sacks in the midst of a major find, peeling off his rain pants, tying the bottoms shut, and filling the legs with cones; my cousins, Larry and Bob—high school studs at the time—taking me along on a cone-picking trip at their mother’s behest when I was ten and making sure I got the privilege of dragging a bag of cones I couldn’t carry down Tower Road on our trek home; my father-in-law, wearing White Ox gloves and a white dinner jacket I’d bought for a buck at a garage sale, wading through sopping huckleberry and Oregon grape and breaking into laughter every time he paused to consider how he was dressed.

But mostly my memories are of things native: the angry jabber of squirrels whose goods we commandeered; the rustle of cones dropping through layers of boughs and the thud that accompanied their landing on the cushioned forest floor; nurse logs dissolving into needles and soil; rich smells of dampness and decay; caches of lime-green cones, sugared with pitch, tucked beneath windfalls; silence thick as rain-fat clouds; the skin-prickling sense of aloneness beneath the overstory of firs.

My daughters got in on cone picking’s final hours. Six and four at the time, they still talk about the trips we made, though what they remember most are sodas and pastries purchased at some convenience store after we’d been paid. By the mid-1970s, timber companies had learned that hand planting gave new trees a three- to five-year growth boost. Nurseries began crossbreeding genetically superior trees that grew far more rapidly than those germinated from seed. There was increasingly less call for cones, until, by the end of the decade, Weyerhaeuser was employing only a handful of private pickers.

But some things haven’t changed: squirrels still go about their business on autumn days when rain triggers instincts woven to harvest and survival. Troves of cones stowed safe in hidey-holes light the fuse on rodent dreams, while we humans are left with one less reason to set foot in the woods. Looking back now, I understand that cone picking was a gift.

When money isn’t involved in our relationship with nature, we shuffle awkwardly, embarrassed to rationalize a love for the land that is not contingent on a profit motive. To care about beauty for beauty’s sake would be like walking the forests without a chainsaw or hunting rifle to justify our presence. Insistent on pragmatism and unwilling to openly express our love for place, cone picking was as close as many Northwesterners ever came to an act of faith.

Posted by Northwest Coast · Filed Under Nature