Cinchona hunter.

IN THE LAST ISSUE, we featured Henry Kernan's story, "From Tree Farm To Forest Farm," on the pleasures and rewards he finds in the ownership of a thousand acres of woodlands along the Charlotte River in upstate New York. That story, we have since discovered, marks quite a milestone: Kernan's byline has appeared in this magazine over a span of 50 of our 100 years. Subsequent phone calls and correspondence with Henry turned up many other facts about this fascinating writer/forester/landowner/consultant: He was a staffer on this magazine back in the '40s; he has traveled to some 45 countries as a forestry consultant for such organizations a the World Bank and the United Nations; during World War II, while working for a paper company in Quebec, he was ordered to leave Canada because that nation's Department of Labor determined that in his job he was displacing a Canadian.

We asked Henry if he would put down on paper some reminiscences of the many forest roads he has traveled, especially those touching on AMERICAN FORESTS and its magazine of the same name. This article is the result.

DURING THE WINTER of 1943 the editor of American Forests received a list of lumberjack nicknames collected among the logging camps of Idaho's Bitterroot Range. They were my first contact with American Forests, then known as the American Forestry Association. At the time, Potlatch Forests employed me to select and mark trees for cutting or leaving where the company had extensive holdings of old-growth white pine along the Clearwater River.

Each week I worked out of a different camp, and thereby came to know well the heavily Scandinavian workforce, which favored rye-crisp bread at every meal and paper-thin Swedish flapjacks for breakfast. The backpocket mark of the old-timers was a round can of Copenhagen "snoose" (Swedish for snuff). They filed saws, drove teams, rolled logs with peavies, piled brush, and tended the camps as cooks, flunkies, and bullcooks. Higher on the perch of prestige were those who operated the trucks, bulldozers, and loaders. Perched highest of all were the gypoes, who felled and bucked the forest's huge white pine, tamarack, and fir. Among them the champion team was Swanson and Swanson--blond, burly brothers, mighty wielders of ax and saw, with the skill and brawn to earn their 10-spots a day plus keep.

And foresters?

Camp boss Maury Thompson met me returning to camp from work the first day and asked me who I was and what I was doing. I replied that my work was to mark timber.

"Are you one of those foresters?" he asked.

I allowed as how I was, at which he guffawed, spat, and went about his business.

The following summer the nicknames appeared as an editorial note in American Forests. They reflected a culture and way of life that are gone, along with the Maury Thompsons, the Swanson brothers, log drives, crosscut saws, and log flumes running six miles up into the mountains along the then free-flowing Clearwater River. On my list of nicknames were Cold Ham (a cook), Tame Ape Cooligan (an irascible foreman), Dakota Yon (as my coworkers pronounced John), Snoose-Juice Johnson, and Alpena Slim.

My second experience in publishing came about two years later upon my return from South America. For months at a time I had been traveling in the high Andes of Colombia in search of cinchona trees, then the only source of quinine. Remote homesteads had sheltered me, but often I stayed in one-night huts of leaves and in caves. Kagaba Indians had been my guides and porters, mules and oxen my sumpters.

Editor Erle Kauffman published my account, "Cinchona Hunter," in the February 1945 issue and hired me as an editorial assistant to work on book reviews and articles on the war effort and the American Forest Survey. The latter, conducted from 1945 through 1947, was the Association's project to study the war's effects on forest resources.

A dominant force behind that survey and American forestry in general at that time was Gifford Pinchot, whose ideas were expressed in his book Breaking New Ground. Taken very seriously were his predictions of timber famine and his demands for federal control over logging on private lands.

He had much to back those concepts. Stump prairies were a common sight in the Lake States and the South. The chestnut blight was finishing off an important hardwood; white-pine blister rust was threatening an important softwood; a hurricane had flattened thousands of square miles of timber in the Northeast. The war's demands had made lumber expensive and scarce. Many people believed that private ownership of forest land was inherently short-sighted and destructive.

The survey's purpose was to give a factual basis to such issues. Regional consultants studied and reported upon forest resources and conditions, state by state. A coordinator in Washington received and organized the flow of information. He was John Woods, graduate of the Biltmore Forestry School and veteran of the forestry battalion of World War I. Reports and conclusions were to be discussed at a summer conference in Michigan and at a forestry congress in Washington during the fall of 1946. I transferred from the magazine staff to the Survey, a likely and willing candidate for its Northeast consultancy.

The Survey took me from Maine to Virginia and the states between, to the South, the Rockies, and the West Coast. One result was a series of articles for American Forests.

My conclusions were more hopeful than alarmist. The war years had not seriously depleted the forest resource. Timber stumpage was not lacking as much as manpower and industrial capacity. More important, the forest resource had been revealed not only as essential to national defense but as one of unsuspected resilience. The hurricane, once seen as the end of white pine in New England, had resulted in a tremendous crop of seedlings. Fire was finally being accepted as necessary for the natural regeneration of southern yellow pine. The public had become much more aware of forests, and was clearly looking for broader and more imaginative policies than those advocated by Pinchot.

The Forestry Congress confirmed new interests and trends. One speaker announced that the timber famine was upon us; another demanded that no tree be cut without the stamp of a federal forester. Nevertheless, the consensus was for cooperation, research, and education.

Soon after the Congress, I left Washington to become a woodland owner in upstate New York and a consultant in international forestry.

I have since often traveled, in thought, the road not taken. If I had remained with American Forests magazine, I might have become editor and perhaps even executive director. But my choice was for travel and rural life. At the crossroads, like Frost:

"I took the road less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."

For me, that road led to an ax that earned me 60 cents an hour and to a woodstove that kept off -40 degree fahrenheit temperatures, but also to about 1,000 acres of northern hardwoods along the upper reaches of the Susquehanna River to which, in 1946, I took a wife and a month-old baby. Those richly wooded acres have enchanted me ever since as years of work, leisure, study, and harvest have brought out their inexhaustible treasures of beauty, interest, and use. After 47 years I am still exploring the lake, waterways, bogs, and waterfalls.

The forest cover ranges from the hawthorn and steeplebush of old pastures to primeval stands of hemlock, pine, maple, and oak. Lately wild turkeys have arrived to join the songbirds and waterfowl. There are furbearers, predators, burrowers, and browsers. I have learned to trade hunting permits and trapping permits for venison and maple syrup, standing wood for firewood, and Christmas trees for goodwill among my neighbors. Last spring they took 6,400 seedlings for planting free of charge.

Those are some means by which my stewardship is reaching over the boundaries of time and space. Somewhere I hope people are joyfully dancing and bowling on my maple, hitting home runs with my white ash, and dining from a table of my cherry.

Nevertheless, goodwill and delight in forest ownership alone are not bankable. I had to find a living, and I found it with international organizations. My first consultancy was with the United Nations in Bolivia and my latest with the World Bank in Mexico. The 60 between have taken me to 45 countries and given me occasion to learn 13 languages and forget four. And although I have made the acquaintance of forests the world over, all that traveling has shown me not one woodland more perennially enchanting than my thousand acres along the Charlotte River in upstate New York.