There are thousands of acres of forest land around where we live here on the mountain. Berry College, which backs up to Lavender Mountain to our south and east, has a 27,000-acre campus, much of it in forest. Their property extends across Fouche Gap Road. Boral Brick Company owns hundreds of acres along Fouche Gap and Huffaker Road, which we take into town. Most of that is forest land. A few weeks ago we noticed that there was logging equipment along Huffaker Road four or five miles towards town. It didn’t take long for a huge swath of mostly pines to be cut, delimbed, and trucked away.

And then I noticed that an entrance had been cut into the woods at the intersection of Fouche Gap Road and Huffaker Road at the bottom of the mountain. It took only two or three days for the area to look like this.

As you can see, to the right of the road the woods are still intact. The area in the image used to lookd like this.

And now a large part of the area to the right of the road has been logged.

Loggers have pretty amazing machinery these days. They have equipment that can grab a tree and cut it off at the base. They have other equipment that can skin the limbs off the trunk. Then they have yet another piece of equipment that grabs a bundle of trunks and places them onto a trailer. When they finish, it looks like a battle has been fought. And it has, a battle in man’s war on nature.

The forest they are cutting is not mature; it’s really not even a healthy forest. The trees are mostly pine, which is what pulpwood loggers want, and they are crowded, tall, and thin. This is a Google Earth image of the area at the intersection of Fouche Gap Road and Huffaker Road.

Although this image is obviously from prior to the logging, you can see pretty much where the logging is taking place. It’s the area that looks smoother, with a finer-grained texture compared to the other wooded areas. This area has been clear-cut before, maybe 30 years ago. It’s much closer to flat land than the area just to the top of the image, where the road starts climbing the mountain. The forest that’s higher up the slopes is older., Although I don’t think it’s mature, it is approaching maturity, with a mix of pine and hardwood. The trees are bigger with wider crowns, and they are more separated from each other.

Everyone in the area is wondering what’s going to happen with the land now that it has been cleared. The brick company has had the land for sale, but the signs are gone now. Some neighbors are worried that Georgia Power plans to use it to store coal ash from nearby coal-fired power plants. There is already one storage area on the opposite side of Huffaker Road just out of sight to the right of the image. The closest coal-fired plant that is still operating is visible from our front porch about 25 miles away. I think some of our neighbors worry about heavy truck traffic, which is bad enough, but coal ash can contain arsenic, lead and mercury, among other things. I would just as soon not have another storage pit in the neighborhood.

I think the wood is bound for pulp, probably a few miles away at the International Paper mill where they make liner board for corrugated cardboard. The sulfur stench from the mill used to provide eastbound travelers from Alabama with their first hint that they were approaching Rome. If the wind was just right, we could smell the mill nearly nine miles away where I grew up.

A lot of the machinery of the modern world is either unpleasant itself, or leaves the world a less pleasant place.