Cedar
If I had to put a date to it, my relationship with Thuja plicata, Western Red Cedar, began on Thursday, October 16, 2008. I had just been hired by Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, an environmental education non-profit that operated an outdoor school from a 1920s era mining camp surrounded by the Opal Creek Wilderness of Oregon’s Western Cascades. I was visiting Opal Creek for the first time, and the executive director took me on a walking tour of the watershed that included a visit to a lowland along the creek called Cedar Flats.
My first visit to the 1,000 year old matriarchs at Cedar Flats in the Opal Creek Wilderness, October 16, 2008. Photo: Tom Atiyeh
I was first introduced to the trees I encountered that day in David Seideman’s 1993 book Showdown at Opal Creek. On its pages, George Atiyeh–the founder of the organization that hired me fifteen years later–toured Seideman through the venerable stands of old growth. These behemoths became the hallmark of the entire watershed in the legal and political battle that resulted in the Opal Creek Wilderness designation of 1996.
“Hi guys,” George is quoted greeting the trees. “You’ll be immortal in this book. Of course, you’re immortal anyway. The book is biodegradable. You’ll still be standing here.”
Seideman notes that cedar trunks, this pair ten feet in diameter, can grow to twice that girth, making them the broadest of the famed conifers of the Pacific Northwest.
George continues, “Some people don’t feel comfortable in a forest. For me, it’s like a security blanket. No matter how bad things are, all I have to do is get here. There’s a spiritual recharging, like those endorphins you get from exercise. They’re far more satisfying than any drugs.”
I was eager to meet the trees I’d just read about, excited to feel for myself the security blanket, the hit, that George referred to in the book I’d just read. It hadn’t adequately prepared me though. Until that day in the autumn of 2008, I had never experienced trees like these. Their size struck me as so unbelievable that I laughed out loud as I circled their swollen bases and touched their alternately smooth and rough expanses. The sound was swallowed in the density of life that surrounded me and a quiet reverence replaced it.
Ancient cedar, Quinault, Washington. Photo: Alex Mondau
“Traditional teachings recount that the power of cedars is so great and so fluid that it can flow into a worthy person who leans back into the embrace of her trunk.”
The smell–a citrusy, musky mash up–left me trying to best each inhalation with my next. I craned my neck to make out the trees’ crowns, some two hundred feet above where I stood. I remembered George’s words: no matter how bad things are, all I have to do is get here. I adopted them as a mantra while collecting, with every sense available to me, the magic of Cedar Flats in that first encounter.
I visited the ancient pair in the watery grove dozens of times in the six years I worked for Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center. I became so familiar with Cedar Flats that it became a fixture in my dreams, the first place I brought visitors, and the quick out and back at the beginning or the end of a day’s work when I needed some time alone to recharge.
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Ten years later, in a new state and a new job, I encountered the research of Qing Li when I was editing a piece of writing about shinrin yoku. Shinrin yoku is a Japanese term and therapeutic practice that translates as “forest bathing.” Li’s 2009 article “Effects of Forest Bathing Trips on Human Immune Function,” is filled with compelling scientific findings that corroborate the sense of wellness George claimed in Seideman’s book.
There’s a spiritual recharging, he’d said, like those endorphins you get from exercise. Li’s careful studies have helped illuminate this claim as fact.
Trees, cedars and other aromatic conifers in particular, are rich in phytoncides. As the suffix -cide connotates, there is a killer quality to these particles. Phytoncides are volatile organic compounds, like the chemical signatures we concern ourselves with when we paint a room or use caustic cleaning detergents. Phytoncides are sensorily experienced as scents. In the case of cedars, they’re in the form of terpenes like limonene, responsible for the citrusy smell we associate with conifers. These chemical signatures are released as defensive mechanisms against harmful fungal and bacterial infections and are beneficial to both the tree and the animals that smell and breathe them in.
Twin cedars, Hoh Rainforest, Washington. Photo: Alex Mondau
When humans breathe in the phytoncides of cedars, they have the effect of increasing our natural killer (NK) cells. NK cells are an important aspect of immune response, and help us to stave off disease. Li’s studies have shown that phytoncides and the associated boost in NK cells are even capable of killing cancerous and virally infected cells in our bodies. Other positive effects include boosting our endocrine and nervous systems.
Forest bathing subjects in Li’s studies experienced significant decreases in adrenaline, which is known to inhibit NK cell functioning, and cortisol, which is connected to stress and instability in the autonomic nervous system. Subjects also experienced decreases in blood pressure and increased activity in the parasympathetic nervous system, which is associated with relaxation and decreases in measurable stress levels. Li’s studies showed these effects had a half-life of seven days for women, and as much as thirty days for men.
“Every part [of cedar] is medicine for the body,” writes Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass, “from the flat sprays of foliage to the flexible branches to the roots.” To the invisible chemical signatures that rain down from her boughs to protect the tree and the life that surrounds it from disease. What a gift.
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In the community where I live, my husband and I have become the wood people. We heat our little home with a wood stove and we build things–furniture, outbuildings, art pieces–entirely with wood that is gifted to us through a generous island-wide network. When a neighbor cuts down a tree, or one falls in a windstorm, we get a phone call: “Hey, we’ve got a tree down, do you want it?”
In the fall, we received such a call from our neighbor Lisa who had a line on a massive cedar that had to be taken down because it threatened the house over which it loomed. We drove across the island the next day to meet Fred and the cedar that had grown for over 100 years on his property. The tree was beautiful, he told us as we stood gaping at its fluted felled lengths in his driveway. But where it forked, some distance from the ground, it had begun to rot and fill with water. He had consulted with an arborist, hoping to wire the tree together for an added measure of security, but the extent of the rot made that course of action untenable. He’d brought a crane onsite to take it down safely. The main stem of the tree weighed a staggering 14,000 pounds.
The fluted trunk of a cedar gifted to us by our friend Fred. Photo: Alex Mondau
Some lengths had already been gifted to the Suquamish Tribe and hauled away, but the remaining pieces, the main trunk and the lower lengths of each fork, were too large for their uses. He offered the wood to us.
We called another island friend, Jerry, who had knocked on our door one day to ask us about our plans for a stack of fir and madrona logs he’d spotted on the back of our property. Jerry had a trailer with the capacity necessary to move a tree this size and a mill to process it. He was as eager as we were to exchange resources.
And so on Saturday, while I sat at my desk studying for a midterm exam, Alex and Jerry milled the first of the cedar logs from Fred. A few hours after he left home (towing our neighbor Betty’s generously loaned trailer behind his truck), Alex returned with his truck bed and trailer full of beautiful, clear grained cedar milled in one, two, and three inch slabs.
Cedar log in the milling process. Photo: Alex Mondau
The smell reached me before I made it down my ladder and through our entry door–that signature cedar scent, chock full of phytoncides, that has since filled our shop and permeated the floor between it and our living space.
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The thousand year old trees at Cedar Flats that George lovingly greeted in Showdown at Opal Creek were consumed in the Beachie Creek Fire of 2020 that decimated the ancient forest and took George’s life.
Interestingly, smell is the sense most closely tied with memory. George and Cedar Flats remain with me in this sense, especially today, while the drying cedar stacked and stickered in my shop downstairs releases its beneficial phytoncides in wafts across our property, which we lovingly refer to as the Cedar Draw.
