For the Love of Trees

David Kotz is a one man island institution. For years he was the town sawyer, the guy with the mill who loved every tree he met. He was who one called when, for instance, a fifty inch diameter madrona fell across one’s driveway in a heavy storm, as happened when I was employed by Dave as a woodworker in the custom furniture shop that grew from his sawyering business.

We arrived on site together that St. Patrick’s Day morning eight years ago – Dave to buck the behemoth into chunks small enough to hoist onto his flatbed, me to document the process for our social media page. He rigged thick yellow webbing around the tree and, with the boom arm on his flatbed, put it under tension. Using a thirty inch Stihl chainsaw he made a pair of perfectly aligned cuts that severed the trunk from its rootwad. Another pair of cuts ten feet or so up the tree’s length left the bulk of the trunk dangling from the boom arm. He carefully swung the ten foot length around and into the bed of his truck and off it went to the mill. 

I asked Dave recently how he became this guy, and if he could name the ethic that shaped his business through which local wood that came or had to come down – like the St. Patrick’s Day madrona – was celebrated. I asked him if he considered himself a woodworker, a sawyer, or a forester, or if he could even choose one. 

“Yeah, probably all three,” he said. “I guess there’s one thing that’s becoming more and more clear to me everyday is that – I don’t know if I would say it’s part of the problem, but it’s a thing we humans do – we break things down to one category and try to do one thing. And our world doesn’t work that way! If you look around you, it’s a web of so many things coming together. That’s what’s important and how things should run.

“I get myself in trouble for that because I’m doing a hundred and one things and I can’t manage them all, and yet there is a beauty to having my web be big, and having a lot of tendrils out. It supports me, and I think it supports our community too.”

It does. It’s hard to have a conversation about farms, trees, woodworking, milling, or forestry on Bainbridge Island without Dave’s name coming up. Not only does everyone know him, but everyone considers him a friend and has a story about the time he came to help out with their once-in-a-lifetime tree project. 

Dave’s parents moved to Bainbridge Island, to the land where Dave still lives with his family, in 1962, the year before he was born. The circumstances on and surrounding this land began shaping the person Dave is today.

“Probably one of the biggest things that happened for me was that directly to the south of my property there was a gentleman who bought a twenty acre piece there, and moved in when I was about eight and built a house. I loved building, and after the guys had left for the day I’d go examine all the framing and climb all over the whole thing. 

“And then in my later teens, the gentleman that moved in there and his wife hired me to help them manage the property. They had a bunch of it in forest management. 

“At that time the management was to remove the deciduous and plant the coniferous. This has obviously changed a lot, but I would cut down alder, and I got to work with wood in that way – cutting trees down, cutting them up. 

“And when you split firewood, all day long all you do is open up wood and see the beauty of the color and the grain of it. And sometimes that grain doesn’t want to split! But it’s a beautiful thing.”

Dave kept at it, making a close friend in high school who shared his love of hard work and building projects. “It’s just something I gravitated toward. We used to just go and do a lot of jobs, we worked a lot, and some of those were clearing, cutting wood. We’d find old logs and just figure out how to get them to the truck. 

“There was a guy, Dorsey was his name, out in Port Madison that had an old sawmill out there, a circular sawmill, and we’d take our logs. He was this ancient guy, just tottering around running this huge sawmill. We got him milling stuff for us and then we’d build things out of it.”

Dave began farming the land he grew up on with a group of friends at about the same time he bought his first sawmill. The farm got its organic certification, and Dave began learning about soil health and composting, all of which, he said, “was a great thing, but I realized really quickly that I was too interested in wood to do only farming.” 

The collaboration dissolved after a couple years, but he referenced an aerial photo of Coyote Farm in its heyday. “In the picture you can see the foot of a helicopter,” he told me – his friend and helicopter pilot Virginia Pell snapped the shot – “and how much land we had opened in tillage. We’re still working quite a bit of it. I have a large garden, and a large orchard, and we’re getting into mushrooms now.”

One of the many and varied directions Dave’s love of trees has taken him is on his most recent foray into mushroom growing. “I’ve actually been loving it, in that it’s almost like the missing piece,” Dave enthused. “Because in woodworking, you’re just thinking of the trees as something you take something out of to make wood projects, but the mycelium piece is the missing piece. The spalting, which you know all about. And also using the whole tree, too.”

Spalting refers to the patterning wood takes on when it’s been infested by certain fungi. The fungus will affect one ring at a time, leaving delicate ink-black lines throughout an otherwise intact piece of wood. If the spalting is caught before it decomposes the wood too much, the effect is striking. The same tree unharvested will eventually be entirely decomposed by this fungus – this is one of the processes by which a forest maintains itself.

Dave has been growing shiitake, lion’s mane, and three kinds of oysters in a small shop he converted into an indoor growing space on his property. “It’s challenging! It’s funny, because it’s super simple, and yet it can be quite challenging. Getting everything just right – the moisture and the CO2 and the heat and the light – all the factors you have to monitor and adjust and tweak. [We] grow the cultures and inoculate the grain bags. So it’s like a whole new part of working with wood, if you will.”

I appreciate Dave’s sense of somehow having come full circle in a lifetime of working with wood by growing mushrooms. I've always imagined him as someone who lives close to nature in that way – in an active relationship, part of the processes that surround him. He was among the first people that came to mind when I started thinking about who I should talk to on the subject of place attachment. Maybe it’s his refusal to call himself any one thing or focus in any one area – his insistence that a life can’t be both full and narrowly focused – combined with where he ends up applying that focus: local forest health, running a farm, and for years, operating a sawmill. 

He’s been watching the trees on Bainbridge for sixty years and has witnessed an overall decline in forest health in that time: “I can say what I think it is, I can’t say if I’m 100% correct or not, but I think the lushness, the density of fir trees – that’s the one I’ll start with – they’re so much more sparse, and their foliage is so much thinner. They don’t have the vibrancy and strength they used to have, I feel,” reported Dave when I pressed him on the subject.

“There are a lot of fir trees, cedar trees too, that are dying. Trees always die, that happens, but I think it’s more. And it’s not only whole trees, but you’ll see firs that have lost all the needles on a limb here and there.” He tried to fit this decline into a context that made sense. “I’m not surprised, because of what I’ve just said. I’ve been thinking a lot about human impacts. I mean, people who don’t believe global warming is caused by human activity, I mean, think about any other creature, what their carbon footprint is – just about nothing! And we cause – number one there’s just so many of us, and number two we do so much – how can we not be huge contributors?”

We ventured into invasive species removal, the new complication of fire in our otherwise generally wet forests, forestry management, and all the little chores that come along with caring for a place. We talked through the highlights from his years of harvesting trees – a pair of diseased elms with beautiful birdseye figuring from Bloedel Reserve; a forty inch walnut in Seward Park that mysteriously died over a winter and had to be milled in place. We talked about the jobs that have been most rewarding – the lumber package that built the Heyday Farms barn and much of the furniture in it. As we talked I kept circling back toward the idea of place attachment. I wanted to understand what had informed his particular way of being in this world and how he felt about this place.

“That’s a very good question,” he said, thoughtfully, “I’m not sure I have a good answer, I think, I mean, it’s just some sense of direction that I think that I have.

“I don’t necessarily feel attached to my property,” he continued, addressing the subject directly. “I have lived on it my entire life. But it isn’t that I’m attached to that property so much as I do enjoy taking care of it while I’m there. 

“But we talk about the fact that we may move somewhere else, and that doesn’t necessarily tear me apart. I do love the place, and I do love taking care of it, and I do love that I’ve been there, that I’ve gotten to raise my kids there. It’s all a beautiful thing. 

“But for me there’s something that trumps that, and it’s about taking care of the place we’re at, and carrying with one one’s sense of place, and recognizing that every place we go is important and needs to be taken care of.”