Rarity intrinsically attracts money, whether it’s paintings, old-growth wood, gold, diamonds, or sporting cards. A Vermeer painting or Nakashima table or Lou Gehrig rookie card can be said to be priceless, yet if you broke them down into their physical components (pigments, canvas, oil, mahogony slab, cardboard, some ink), you couldn’t by a used Yugo with the money. I mean, what is a diamond but a pretty pebble. A rare, pretty pebble, yet still a pebble. It’s the rarity that makes it rich.
There’s a “vintage” lumber store in SoCal that sells old growth lumber beams, timbers, and antique flooring. Of course, “vintage” means that a) the wood’s expensive; b) it’s tight-grained; c) it has nail holes and other character features; and d) it’s, by nature, second-use. They also have some new exotic hardwoods at times, but most of what they sell is reclaimed wood or salvaged wood.
(I saw a stack of huge Koa slabs – est. 3’ x 3’ x 12’ – that they were holding on consignment for Taylor Guitars. From what I understood, somebody from Taylor would come by the yard and choose the one they wanted for veneers, and the rest would be shipped back to the islands.)
I’ve bought various types of wood from them over the years, including some incredibly tight-grained doug fir and old-growth redwood reclaimed from abandoned RR warehouses and barns in northern California.
Probably the most interesting hardwood I’ve used from them was reclaimed flooring from an aussie sheep shearing factory, which they called Tasi Oak. Being a barely capable garage woodworker, I didn’t know until later that this incredibly dense, incredibly heavy wood (as heavy as ebony) is actually a type of Eucalyptus:
Tasmanian Oak: Eucalyptus delegatensis, E. obliqua & E. regnans
Other common names: Australian Ash
To quote Tasmanian Timber: “Warm, dense and resilient, Tasmanian Oak is the preferred hardwood for a wide range of applications. It works extremely well and produces an excellent finish. It can be used in all forms of construction as scantlings, paneling and flooring, and can be glue-laminated to cover long spans. Veneers, plywood and engineered products are available. It is also a popular furniture timber, and eucalypt fibre is sought after for reconstituted board and production of high quality paper.”
For me the wood was rare (brought over from the other side of the world), and I turned these old sheep-shearing floor boards into a warm-toned, unbelievably durable dining room table; if an earthquake strikes our house I’m reasonably sure that I could hide the entire family under that table, the house could collapse, and the table would still be standing, probably without a dent in it.
Like most extensive species (there are something like 165 different types of eucalyptus), the Tasi Oak is part of a large family species that has greatly divergent qualities. To say that all eucalyptus are bad and wasteful is like saying that all surfers from Perth are pro-quality. Some are, most aren’t.
This isn’t meant to be merely an appreciation of the poor, down-trodden eucalyptus, although it does have other uses besides being cut up for wood chips and grown for wind-breaks. What it is about is the issue of harvesting what’s left of our arborial heritage.
Wood is the dead cells of a tree trunk, the inner xylem tissue lying underneath bark. Cellulose and lignin. A little water. Several hundred years and you have a nice, big tree. But look what we’ve done in the last hundred, hundred and fifty years. Rare, old-growth wood has gone the way of many resources, including our glaciers. What was plentiful at the turn of the last century is now almost gone at the turn of this century. I spend a lot of time in the Sequoias wandering through the groves and have seen giant stumps left of 3500 year-old trees. Trees that were growing when Caesar was alive. Trees that couldn’t be more unsuitable for lumber, that sometimes splintered on contact with the ground. Trees used for fence posts. In the late 1800’s there seemed to be an unlimited supply of everything, including arrogance, and they cut down some of the largest, rarest trees on earth to be made into . . . . fence posts. Now, of course, caught in our own brand of arrogance, we look back and wonder how could they.
On some blue sky mornings I glory in being able to walk through the more distant groves without having anyone else in them. There’s one in particular where you can sit on a rock at dawn and look up the hill west across this cathedral bowl of giant trees and imagine that you’re the first one to ever visit them. Birds fly unfettered across the space, cawing at you, while a doe wakes her fawn to move down toward the stream. I can do this today, because people became appalled that the trees were being destroyed and when people lead the politicians sometimes follow.
[One note of irony: “blue sky” in the Sequoias is a euphemisim. Because of rampant pollution in the Central Valley, the air that you breath at 7,000 feet is not necessarily much better than you get in the Fresno, the city far down below.]
Last summer, I spent three weeks hiking around the Big Island, wondering about what it looked like a hundred years before. You see Kona, the traffic, the coast resorts, the golf courses, and all the rest, and think how amazing it would be to go back in time and see it forested without Walmart and McDonalds. There are areas that don’t seem so altered, Walking in the canyons near Waipio, around the emptier trails of the Volcanos, or even under the giant Monkeypod trees in Puna, you feel like you’ve stepped back in time. Yet, time marches on. The monkeypods are recent arrivals, brought into the islands in the 1800s; Waipio has meth labs, and the volcanoes, well, they keep flowing through houses.
Circling back to koa . . . . Right before I left the Big Island I was at a craft fair where one guy was selling small carvings that he’d done out of koa. He also had a box of off-pieces that he sold. I bought one to carve. I asked him where he got the wood, and he pulled out an article that showed down logs being salvaged. We talked for quite a while about the politics of koa, about protecting it, about making sure that it would be around for his grandchildren to see. You could tell that he felt deeply about saving the koa.
The koa is every bit as priceless as a sequoia. Why can’t we save them?
