A walk in a taxable forest.

Many miles and moons ago, four people took a walk in the Chadbourne family's piney woods near Bethel, Maine. The four walkers were me, my wife Barbara, Phil Chadbourne, and his son Bob. I remember fluffy white clouds in a crackling blue sky and the tang of pine-scent pouring from miles of working pine needles.

Phil's P.H. Chadbourne & Co. owned forests and sawmills. The family had been involved in lumber and land for many generations and had built up considerable acreages of some of the finest forests in the Northeast. Bob Chadbourne was the 11th generation of the family to be involved in growing and harvesting forests.

If you want a picture of what tax policies should promote, the Chadbourne's forests would be that picture. The woods were beautiful and productive, yielding jobs and products. Phil made sure that some of the productivity from the forests was returned there to sustain them over large acreages, over long periods of time. Phil spent as much effort maintaining the workings of that forest as he spent maintaining the big bandsaw that screeched through the logs at the mill.

We were "ping-ponging" as we walked through the Chadbourne woods. If you watch foresters and lumbermen go through the woods, it will look like a vertical ping-pong game. We look up, then down, up, down. Looking up, we're ticking off 16-foot logs as our eyes move along the stem, checking for percentage of working green needles, watching for clashing and competing treetops, observing insects and diseases doing dirty work in the leaves and branches. looking down, we're checking for new seedlings (or the lack thereof); watching for root damage or stems scarred by fire or machinery.

Barbara was doing what she likes to do - looking down - for flowers, mushrooms, nice cones. Her yell, "Look at this!" stopped our ping-ponging. Barbara was waving four $1 bills and two fives that she had found at the base of a large maple. Phil was quick. With a tone and a look that implied no surprise whatsoever, he said, "You should be here in the fall when those things come off the trees by the bushel!"

If money really did fall off trees like autumn leaves, we would get a clearer look at how our present forest taxation systems work. The forest floor on privately owned forests would be picked clean because our present tax system (or the most part) takes all the value year after year and - unlike the Chadbournes - it puts no value back.

Phil Chadbourne is gone now. His son Bob runs the business. Bob's daughter, Nancy Lea, is the 12th generation in the business of working forests. Some of the Chadbourne forests have been held for six generations. But even a business has trouble passing on forests without losing some to taxes. I called Bob recently for an update and learned that in a recent transfer of interests between family members, several thousand acres had to be sold to pay taxes.

"I expect to pay taxes. I don't object to that," said Bob. "But they simply take too much and make the rules too complicated for most people to figure out what their investment strategies should be.

"The biggest change I've seen is in regulations," Bob continued. "Like taxes, they are not an option, and complying with them means we spend an increasing amount of time and money - much of it in office work and record keeping. We're starting to buy forest land again to replace what we sold, but we are concerned about being able to hold on to the land as regulations and taxes rise almost every year and rules get more complex."

There is some sadness in Bob's voice. I know he wants to keep the family land and pass it on to the next generation in good condition, just as I want to do with the pieces of my family's land that I've held for many years. But we both have economic realities to deal with. With present tax policies, will our keeping our land in forests at least pay its own way, or will we have to subsidize it from other income with little change of a return?