Trees Do Better Standing Up

My time in the Tongass began in September of 1997—ninety years almost to the day after Theodore Roosevelt designated it a national forest. I was 19 and left Columbia University to take a Greyhound west, ending up in Sitka, an Alaskan fishing village, working in a salmon hatchery.

To save money on housing, I walked about 20 minutes into the world’s largest intact temperate rainforest, staking a bumble-bee yellow North Face VE 25 in a grove of Sitka spruce and stringing up a corridor of tarps. When winter came on, I’d return to my tent to find my olive oil clouded from cold. As I heated it on the camp stove, the rich, musty scent of pink salmon rotting along the riverbanks behind my tent rose up. I zipped my sleeping bag, bunched a fleece for a pillow and listened to the thick, seaborne snowflakes catching in the spruce needles as I fell asleep with a canister of industrial-strength bear spray cradled beneath an arm.

Photo by Lee House.

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