Dappled light, mosquitoes, and the roar of a chainsaw filled the humid air on a morning in early June. Guided by skilled hands, the blade sliced through pale wood. Lacey green leaves trembled against the blue sky before tipping toward a gap in the canopy, brushing past the twigs of neighbors, and easing quietly onto the earth exactly where the feller intended. If a black ash tree falls in the forest, must it land with a crash?
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| Jamie Holly of Cable, Wis. cuts a black ash tree he just felled into logs suitable for pounding into basket making material. Photo by April Stone. |
Deep in the woods east of Lake Namakagon, I’d gathered a small team of volunteers on an urgent mission. Last summer, the Museum hosted April Ogimaakwe Stone, member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and black ash basketmaker, for a series of workshops. She taught us about harvesting black ash trees, preparing basket-making splints, and weaving with this sacred material.
Pounding the black ash strips can be a social activity, and while we worked, we talked. I learned that the emerald ash borer, a non-local being who kills ash trees, had already been found in the swamps of the Bad River Reservation. April, and basketmakers all over the country, are worried that their traditional craft will be lost as the trees succumb to an insect introduced from China to Michigan in 2002, via the wood from shipping crates.
While EAB, as the shiny green interlopers are known, have been detected in every county in Wisconsin, I had yet to see any signs of them around the Cable area. All winter I spread word through the Museum’s networks that we were looking for black ash trees within easy distance of access roads. That brought us to some well-loved family land belonging to Museum members. Their rolling hills dimpled with vernal pools are cradled on three sides by Lake Namakagon and shaded by a northern hardwood forest.
From hundreds of options, we chose to harvest four black ash trees, including one found on Museum land nearby. They were between ten and fourteen inches in diameter with symmetrical trunks, no branch scars, healthy canopies, and wet feet. April’s carrying straps, made from wide webbing, allowed four people to share the load as we hauled each of the heavy six-to-eight-foot logs out of the woods.
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| Volunteers team up to haul ash logs out of the woods. Photo by April Stone. |
Back at the Museum, April set two of the eight logs on her pounding stands. Once the bark was sliced lengthwise, ample moisture in the xylem cells below helped it peel off in one large piece (that’s why we wanted the trees to have wet feet!). Then the pounding began. April’s preferred tools are cylindrical wooden mallets with a sheath of steel on one end. She coached volunteers in pounding hard—but not too hard—and staying in sync with their neighbor so they could have a moment of silence between each blow.
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| Ash log ready to start! |
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| Anne Clauser, Gus Smith, and Hannah Burch peel the bark off a black ash log. Photo by Emily Stone. |
Because black ash grows in wet areas, their new cells expand especially fast in the spring. Growth slows down in the summer. This creates the rings you’d count to learn their age. Pounding the log compresses and destroys the spring wood and separates it from the denser summer wood, which can then be peeled off the log in long strips about three inches wide.
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| Black ash growth rings tend to be wide. Photo by Emily Stone. |
There’s more fine-tuning before these splints are ready to weave, but it’s not nearly as loud or as tiring as the pounding. That’s why we invited volunteers to take turns and help April put up a supply of materials. The pile of cream-colored splints plus the six untouched logs she took home will allow her to continue teaching and keeping this tradition alive for at least a while longer. (Learn more about the process, and about April, on the Cable Natural History Museum’s YouTube channel.)
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| Museum staff members Heaven Walker, Elora Repman and Mollie Kreb stand next to an ash log, with basket splints pounded by volunteers in the background. Photo by April Stone. |
Just halfway through our second day of work, I tore myself away from the fun and drove south toward a family funeral. Somewhere along the I-35 corridor I started noticing the skeletons of trees poking out of forests and fencerows. Even driving 70 mph, I could see that the twigs were stout and oppositely arranged—the signature pattern of ash. My sadness multiplied. This was more ash death than I’d ever noticed before.
At a rest area near Clear Lake, Iowa, I pulled in for a closer look. The lone picnic table—once shaded by a grove of giants—was surrounded by skeletal green ash trees. The bark of one tree peeled off in huge sheets, revealing a bare trunk entirely patterned with the squiggly galleries left by EAB larvae as they fed on the nutritious inner layer. On another tree with bark still holding firm, I spotted the tiny, D-shaped holes where the larvae had metamorphosed and exited as adults—ready to mate and lay more eggs.
A single ash tree may not crash if we harvest them carefully, but all species of ash trees (Fraxinus spp.) on our entire continent are expected to crash and crash hard. Scientists predict that even a healthy forest will lose 98% of its ash trees within six years of an EAB infestation. Death has a way of making us think about legacy, and my hope is that the work our volunteers did this June will help extend the legacy of ash.
Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.
For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar is open for registration! The Museum’s new exhibit, The Wetland Way is now open! Discover how life thrives at the intersection of soil and water, and why we must care for these special places as they care for us. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.
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