By Roger Pinckney
You can hear it in the river wind if you listen hard enough, you can hear it in the sea breeze. You’d be deaf not to hear it in a gale. In a hurricane you hear nothing but the roar of the wind, a shriek when it hits one-forty.
Longleaf pine, Pinus palustris, we call it “heart pine,” needles a foot long, cones big as cantaloupes, once the defining tree of the Southeastern coastal plain. Something about those long needles. They sigh, they whistle, they moan like they got something to tell us.
They do.
When Hernando de Soto blundered through these parts in 1541, looking for China and the Court of the Great Kahn, he brought along 700 men, horses, hogs, cattle, war dogs and three journalists to record his heroics. Two hundred-odd survivors stumbled into Mexico four years later, minus livestock, journalists and de Soto, with matchlocks and crossbows rusted to disfunction. Monks transcribed what was left of the journals, shipped them off to the archives in Spain, where they remain to this day, nearly 500 years later. Though much remains lost, there is enough remaining. We know where de Soto went, when he went there and what he saw.
“We caught an Indian,” one entry relates, “and asked him the way to China. Though we burned him alive, he would not tell us.”
Somewhere in either northwest Georgia or northeast Alabama, the expedition walked three days through a cathedral of pines, “like a park, with grasses and berries beneath,” the first recorded mention of the longleaf forest, which once covered 93 million acres from Virginia to East Texas. Ninety-three million acres? Yes, because longleaf seeds will not germinate unless cracked by fire, and the eastern Indians burned the woods.
They had 50 or 60,000 years to figure it out, a fire in the spring beats back the bugs, runs the snakes, promotes browse for deer, sedges and seeds for turkeys and quail. But the land was stripped in the 1880’s and an ecosystem was destroyed. But there was no concept of ecosystems back then, not even a word for it. But the indigo snakes and the great gopher tortoises were gone, bears and panthers driven to the brink of extinction. Southern longleaf timber was shipped world-wide and, in a generation, maybe two, 93 million acres became nine. In its place came beans and wheat and corn and Southern yellow pine, planted like corn, harvested like corn. But it made a sawlog in 30 years where longleaf took two centuries. Didn’t seem to matter if inch per inch, longleaf timber was three times as strong, strong enough to shore up coal mines and Buckingham Palace.
My pappy built a house on the river in 1956 with rafters of salvaged heart pine lumber. Three years later, it stood up to Hurricane Gracie, one-sixty in gusts. Fifty years later, I built a house on the marsh, drew it out myself on a torn-flat beer box spread across the hood of a four-wheel-drive Ford. But by then, building codes mandated all framing have a lumberyard stamp, and there was no commercially available longleaf lumber so every stick of the new shack was of Georgia yellow pine. Almost every stick, anyway.
I’ve got a friend over in Georgia who salvages heart pine from old barns and factories. He runs over the timbers with a metal detector, pries out every nail and bolt, resaws the timbers into board for flooring, paneling and such, 3 million board feet on hand. I measured up my kitchen cabinets and gave him a call. Two weeks later, he laid the countertops on my porch.
“This came from an old cotton mill in Moultrie, Georgia,” he explained. “It was built in 1878. I tore it down in 2008. I knew you were going to count the rings so I already did it for you. These trees were growing when de Soto came through Georgia in 1542”
I ran my hands over the smooth, amber wood, tight-grained, as hard and heavy as stone and I felt the music in my fingers, the sad whistle from needles long gone.
Maybe it was just my imagination, but maybe not.
