Keep Walking
Abbey Huber | April 2019
We were in a forest clearing, Appalachian hardwood heavy with dark summer afternoon rain. It smelled of wet rhododendron and wood smoke. Carolina and I were children, young enough to pick quartz out of the creek and try to sell it to our families, $5 apiece, no shame. Our Minnie was calling us to come over to a tree. Minnie taught us a lot of things on those big family camping trips - the names of flowers and bugs, how to catch crawdads, how to tell Jack Tales. This time, she introduced us to a grown tree we had spent hours crouching underneath, a Carolina Hemlock. Gently she lowered a branch and flipped the needle frond, exposing to us rows of white, waxy bumps that looked like insect eggs, and she called them “adelgid.”
My great aunt then proceeded to tell my cousin and I about the deadly power of the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid, its spread from tree to tree, and the ongoing mortality of the Eastern and Carolina Hemlocks. She told us that the adelgid had come to be itself around Hemlocks on the other side of the world, but that when it came here, the trees had no capacity to host it without slowly dying. She told us that the Carolina Hemlocks were only found in our corner of the world, southern Appalachia, on ridges above 3,000 feet, dominating landscapes that other trees don’t have the tolerance for. She told us that the Eastern Hemlock was the foundation of our forests, and that this foundation was being sucked away by the nutrient-leaching adelgid, few trees infected lasting longer than 10 years past initial infestation.
And so my cousin and I were introduced to the feeling in the back of our minds that something large was dying, something we cared about was dying, that thousands and millions of green trees could dry up and die at the hands of some tiny bug, and that we felt we had no power to stop it. Boy did I want to stop it. I begged my mother, please, what can we do to stop the death of the Hemlocks, even just starting with the ones here, in our home, in the mossy green palm of Pisgah. My mother, although sympathetic, was not moved enough to give up her life at the prompting of a six-year old and embark on an unfunded and unresearched crusade against the wooly adelgid. For the next fifteen years, I felt the Hemlocks slip through our fingers, giving way in forest after forest, leaving behind mountainsides covered by brittle snags, dried to bone, robbed of water, sap, and deep green color.
Eastern Hemlock, a dense evergreen, historically grows from Georgia to Canada. Carolina Hemlock only grows in the southern Appalachians, from northern Georgia to southern Virginia, right through my family’s roots in Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina. Under the ground, we are connected, our roots intermingle with the mycorrhizal networks of these trees, the vast underground networks of fungus, fine root bacteria, and nutrient transfer. Scientists like Suzanne Simard have come to realize only recently that these underground networks facilitate communication and collaboration between trees, from mother tree to its children, sending nutrients to each other, supporting even trees that the “invisible hand” of “natural selection” would theoretically weed out. Through mycorrhizal networks, trees continue to send nutrients to the stumps of trees that are cut, until they realize that the stump is no longer living. They communicate with one another. They are a living, transpiring, vibrant community of trees whose connections run deep and on levels we can only begin to understand. And the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid damages this too - its presence clouds the network by disrupting bacteria and colonization levels, so as the Hemlocks dry up in themselves, their connections to others are clouded as well, they cannot help themselves and they cannot help each other.
When Eastern Hemlock dies-off en masse, it becomes what we consider an intermediate-severity forest disturbance, alongside phenomena like tornadoes, landslides, droughts, floods, ice storms, small fires, and the spread of other pathogens and insects. As the Hemlocks die, the ground is littered with overwhelming amounts of woody debris, streams warm, and the canopy overhead is opened up for new species to grow up in the Hemlocks’ place. In places where rhododendron is already growing, often it will be the quickly growing rhodo that fills the gap. In place without rhodo, the space may be grown over by maple, birch, beech, or oak. These intermediate-severity forest disturbances are becoming more common, each environmental change coalescing to cause each other, instability creeping under the skin of the Earth, unsettling.
We have been fighting the Wooly Adelgid here since the 90s. We put imidacloprid and dinotefuran on the trees. We introduced Japanese Lady Beetles to eat the wooly adelgid. We tried to modify the genetics of the tree to make it a viable host to its murderous house guest. But it all seems like an uphill fight.
Over a decade after Carolina and I walked through the woods with Minnie, I continued to think about the Hemlock, as the places I had known them to be were already grown up again with new species. I joined a conservation corps. We all lived in an old red brick nursing home in the southern Appalachians, surrounded by forest and crewmate. It was there that I heard about the Hemlock Restoration projects that our corps worked. My crewmates described walking through the thick underbrush of the forest, looking for patches of hemlock to spray with pesticide, one by one, entirely by hand. They described getting up at six a.m., donning the backpack sprayer, and spending the daylight fighting the wooly adelgid. They said that it seemed hopeless. Crew member and crew leader alike felt that we would never save them. It seemed every Hemlock in the forest had an adelgid guest. And that now all there was to do was to plan ahead and tailor our forest management plans to deal with the consequences. Now all there was to do was mourn.
But I got up every day at six a.m. And I put on my backpack sprayer. And I kept walking through the woods, mourning. Hemlock mortality doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Hemlock mortality occurs in a dynamic web of interaction and disruption, in the currents of global unrest. And the Hemlocks aren’t all gone, not yet. Some still stand. All around us, things are changing. And we keep standing like the Hemlocks. And we keep walking through the woods.
Abbey Huber | April 2019
We were in a forest clearing, Appalachian hardwood heavy with dark summer afternoon rain. It smelled of wet rhododendron and wood smoke. Carolina and I were children, young enough to pick quartz out of the creek and try to sell it to our families, $5 apiece, no shame. Our Minnie was calling us to come over to a tree. Minnie taught us a lot of things on those big family camping trips - the names of flowers and bugs, how to catch crawdads, how to tell Jack Tales. This time, she introduced us to a grown tree we had spent hours crouching underneath, a Carolina Hemlock. Gently she lowered a branch and flipped the needle frond, exposing to us rows of white, waxy bumps that looked like insect eggs, and she called them “adelgid.”
My great aunt then proceeded to tell my cousin and I about the deadly power of the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid, its spread from tree to tree, and the ongoing mortality of the Eastern and Carolina Hemlocks. She told us that the adelgid had come to be itself around Hemlocks on the other side of the world, but that when it came here, the trees had no capacity to host it without slowly dying. She told us that the Carolina Hemlocks were only found in our corner of the world, southern Appalachia, on ridges above 3,000 feet, dominating landscapes that other trees don’t have the tolerance for. She told us that the Eastern Hemlock was the foundation of our forests, and that this foundation was being sucked away by the nutrient-leaching adelgid, few trees infected lasting longer than 10 years past initial infestation.
And so my cousin and I were introduced to the feeling in the back of our minds that something large was dying, something we cared about was dying, that thousands and millions of green trees could dry up and die at the hands of some tiny bug, and that we felt we had no power to stop it. Boy did I want to stop it. I begged my mother, please, what can we do to stop the death of the Hemlocks, even just starting with the ones here, in our home, in the mossy green palm of Pisgah. My mother, although sympathetic, was not moved enough to give up her life at the prompting of a six-year old and embark on an unfunded and unresearched crusade against the wooly adelgid. For the next fifteen years, I felt the Hemlocks slip through our fingers, giving way in forest after forest, leaving behind mountainsides covered by brittle snags, dried to bone, robbed of water, sap, and deep green color.
Eastern Hemlock, a dense evergreen, historically grows from Georgia to Canada. Carolina Hemlock only grows in the southern Appalachians, from northern Georgia to southern Virginia, right through my family’s roots in Eastern Tennessee and Western North Carolina. Under the ground, we are connected, our roots intermingle with the mycorrhizal networks of these trees, the vast underground networks of fungus, fine root bacteria, and nutrient transfer. Scientists like Suzanne Simard have come to realize only recently that these underground networks facilitate communication and collaboration between trees, from mother tree to its children, sending nutrients to each other, supporting even trees that the “invisible hand” of “natural selection” would theoretically weed out. Through mycorrhizal networks, trees continue to send nutrients to the stumps of trees that are cut, until they realize that the stump is no longer living. They communicate with one another. They are a living, transpiring, vibrant community of trees whose connections run deep and on levels we can only begin to understand. And the Hemlock Wooly Adelgid damages this too - its presence clouds the network by disrupting bacteria and colonization levels, so as the Hemlocks dry up in themselves, their connections to others are clouded as well, they cannot help themselves and they cannot help each other.
When Eastern Hemlock dies-off en masse, it becomes what we consider an intermediate-severity forest disturbance, alongside phenomena like tornadoes, landslides, droughts, floods, ice storms, small fires, and the spread of other pathogens and insects. As the Hemlocks die, the ground is littered with overwhelming amounts of woody debris, streams warm, and the canopy overhead is opened up for new species to grow up in the Hemlocks’ place. In places where rhododendron is already growing, often it will be the quickly growing rhodo that fills the gap. In place without rhodo, the space may be grown over by maple, birch, beech, or oak. These intermediate-severity forest disturbances are becoming more common, each environmental change coalescing to cause each other, instability creeping under the skin of the Earth, unsettling.
We have been fighting the Wooly Adelgid here since the 90s. We put imidacloprid and dinotefuran on the trees. We introduced Japanese Lady Beetles to eat the wooly adelgid. We tried to modify the genetics of the tree to make it a viable host to its murderous house guest. But it all seems like an uphill fight.
Over a decade after Carolina and I walked through the woods with Minnie, I continued to think about the Hemlock, as the places I had known them to be were already grown up again with new species. I joined a conservation corps. We all lived in an old red brick nursing home in the southern Appalachians, surrounded by forest and crewmate. It was there that I heard about the Hemlock Restoration projects that our corps worked. My crewmates described walking through the thick underbrush of the forest, looking for patches of hemlock to spray with pesticide, one by one, entirely by hand. They described getting up at six a.m., donning the backpack sprayer, and spending the daylight fighting the wooly adelgid. They said that it seemed hopeless. Crew member and crew leader alike felt that we would never save them. It seemed every Hemlock in the forest had an adelgid guest. And that now all there was to do was to plan ahead and tailor our forest management plans to deal with the consequences. Now all there was to do was mourn.
But I got up every day at six a.m. And I put on my backpack sprayer. And I kept walking through the woods, mourning. Hemlock mortality doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Hemlock mortality occurs in a dynamic web of interaction and disruption, in the currents of global unrest. And the Hemlocks aren’t all gone, not yet. Some still stand. All around us, things are changing. And we keep standing like the Hemlocks. And we keep walking through the woods.