Big Cedars

THERE ARE CHURCHES in the Northwest that have no walls, no pulpit and no pew.

They are older than Notre Dame, as lofty as St. Peter's and as boundless as faith.

Their choir is running water. Their candle a green, filtered sunlight. Their prayer the creak and sigh of branches rocking in rhythm to a winter wind.

And their locations are secret, guarded by Native American tribes and a single employee of the U.S. Forest Service named Jan Hollenbeck. She is caretaker of a map kept only so that the sacred sites are not mistakenly destroyed.

So many are already gone, you see - diminishing because of logging, lamented Ernie DeCoteau, cultural resources director of Darrington's Sauk-Suiattle Tribe.

What's important to the tribes - important to their ancient religions - is old growth, Hollenbeck explained. What's important is what has almost been lost.

Western red cedar is the magic tree of the Pacific Northwest. One of the names of its northern white cedar cousin is arbor vitae, or "tree of life," because Indians cured members of the 16th-century Jacques Cartier expedition of scurvy with a cedar extract. No tree was, and is, more important.

There is spirit power in dark groves of trees so old that a few date back to the Roman Empire, Indians will confide. Natives still fast and bathe and seek visions there. "You can receive that power," Lummi Indian Sam Cagey once assured, pointing to trees he said gave gifts, indicating a supernatural place that restores spirit and mind. "You can experience it yourself."

ORDINARY CEDAR? It seems improbable to modern eyes. The tree is not as tall as Douglas fir, not as numerous as hemlock, not as strong as spruce. Hilary Stewart, in her book, "Cedar: Tree of Life to Northwest Indians," calls its drooping look "weepy and woebegone . . . the lackadaisical giant with the softer heart."

But though not the biggest, cedar was the most sacred and useful of all Northwest trees in aboriginal times, as central to the first inhabitants as salmon. Dismissed as structurally useless by early loggers, its increasing rarity has today turned it into red gold. Its price has doubled in the past 10 years to a dollar a board foot at the mill, and more than that at the lumber store.

People sneak onto our national forests and risk fines and jail to cut blocks for making shakes from old stumps because a cord that fills a pickup can bring $800. Steal a tight-grained, old-growth entire cedar, and you've almost enough to buy a luxury automobile - if you can find the cedar. In Darrington, there's a Forest Service evidence locker with tagged blocks of recovered wood.

Cedar wasn't always so prized. In modern society, species fall in and out of favor like Hollywood celebrities, depending on their glamour and utility at the moment. Whales, wolves and owls are famous examples.

In aboriginal times, however, cedar was the central constant. The trees were hardware store, lumber yard and clothing source. Cedar was used to make diapers, canoes, fishing nets, masks, houses, rope and tools. Nothing else was so easily split, shed water so well, or resisted rot so reliably.

"Cedar was the Kmart store for the Indians because it had everything in it," said Peter Selvig, forestry tech-supervisor at the Darrington ranger district. He uses wood seized from cedar thieves to repair historic Forest Service buildings.

Cedar bark was stripped and pounded to make capes, hats, skirts, baskets, sails and cord for fishing nets. Its thin, wiry withes, or small branches, were braided to make rope or cable. Its trunk wood could be hollowed and stretched to make canoes: At the turn of the century one man sailed a 38-foot cedar canoe around the world.

It was bent to make boxes, shaped as beams and totem poles, split into planks for long houses, or carved as masks, bowls or spoons. Archaeologists have found buried cedar artifacts older than Troy. Tribes were training cedar specialists - men who excelled at working with the wood - when the carpenter Jesus walked the earth.

For primitive craftsmen with stone tools, cedar had several advantages. Its soft wood was easier to chop than Douglas fir, meaning it was feasible for Native Americans to actually cut one down. It could still take three men up to three days to fell a tree, sometimes laboriously chiseling away like beavers and sometimes setting fire to the easily burned base while protecting the upper tree from the flames with a barrier of wet clay.

When they could, the natives also seized cedar drift logs or trees carried down by rivers.

Cedar was light, making it easier to drag and lift. With wedges, a log could be split into planks, making transport even easier. Cedar's cell structure allowed it to break along even planes; its splinters could be polished smooth with sandstone or dogfish skin.

Because the tree grows in boggy places, cedar contains a natural, aromatic fungicide to resist rot and insects. Properly cared for, cedar siding can last as long as the city of Seattle has been in existence, a century and a half.

Cedar canoes were more easily hollowed, lighter to beach and paddle, and more resistant to decay than those of any other wood.

Bark clothing may strike us as odd, but it is no more odd than using cotton to make shirts or paper to make towels. Cedar cloaks were superior to furs in shedding rain, dried quickly, could be oiled with bear grease and insulated with duck down. Captain Cook called the cedar hats he found on Vancouver Island the best headgear he'd ever seen.

Women stripped cedar bark from young trees when the sap was running in spring and summer by making a horizontal slit a few inches across and then pulling upward. Strips up to 10 feet long would taper to a point and break off. It was the inner bark that was pounded into products ranging from towels to tourniquets. Gnarled cedar roots were cut to make tools, fish hooks and baskets. Burls on the trunk became bowls.

Some pioneers made homes by putting a roof on rotted-out cedar stumps. Modern society uses cedar primarily for siding, shakes, shingles, posts, decking, trim and window frames. Old-growth cedar is a beautifully perfumed wood, the color of honey and amber, that without adornment suggests a rustic richness.

When Lindal Cedar Homes moved to Seattle from Canada in 1962, the wood was still so plentiful that the company's house walls were made of solid cedar, remembers chairman Robert Lindal. Today it's so dear in price that cedar is usually limited to siding and decorative trim, some of that from smaller second-growth trees artfully machined and joined to make bigger pieces of lumber.

Old-growth cedar is still being cut in British Columbia, which supplies 80 percent of global cedar production, but Washington and Oregon are down to mostly second-growth. The Canadian province supplies two-thirds of the cedar sold in the U.S.

OUR CEDAR IS NOT a true cedar at all. The famed "cedars of Lebanon" mentioned in the Bible don't grow here. And though our cedar's scientific name, Thuja plicata, means "false cypress folded in plaits," it's not really a cypress, either.

Our Western red cedar is its own thing, thank you, a unique and noble tree with the longevity to surpass a Methuselah. One almost-2,000-year-old specimen at British Columbia's Cheewhat Lake was recorded at 62 feet in circumference and 194 feet high. (That's tall - but the tallest Douglas fir on record was twice as high.) One study says there are cedars claimed to be 3,000 years old.

Washington is home to several cedars that vie for the world championship. Because the American Forest Association gives 12 times as many points to circumference as height, the current title-holder is the Quinault Lake cedar on the north shore of Lake Quinault on the Olympic Peninsula, measuring 63.5 feet around and 159 feet high. Arguably bigger is the Nolan Creek cedar near Forks, 61 feet around and 178 feet high. A cedar on the Ohanepecosh River in Mount Rainier National Park is considerably taller at 234 feet, but only 20 feet around. The Kalaloch cedar at Sixth Beach is the fattest, at 64 feet around, but only 123 feet high. All have multiple tops because of tendency for cedar tops to break off and regrow.

The smaller Alaskan, or yellow cedar, can be found at elevations above about 2,500 feet in Western Washington and has been prized as a boat-building wood. A larger near-relative of that species is Port Orford cedar in southwest Oregon.

CEDAR IS A VERY RESILIENT tree.

Each conifer has a different strategy for survival. Douglas fir sprouts best in full sunlight, and often dominates after forest fires or clear-cuts. Hemlock grows in the shade of fir, eventually succeeding it. Cedar prefers dappled shade and wet places and only rarely grows in groves of its own kind. Rather, it's a mixer, opportunistically poking its way into the forest here and there, taking over from other conifers that don't want to get their feet wet. There is no cedar forest, but lots of cedar trees.

When most abundant, about one-quarter of the trees in a coastal forest can be cedar, but it represents just 12 percent of the conifers in coastal British Columbia as a whole and about 9 percent of Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest in Washington's Cascades.

It is a beautiful tree, but falls short of the nobility of fir or redwood or sequoia. Cedar's easily identified bark of papery strips looks a bit untidy, as if the tree needs some hair gel to lay down properly. Its needles are flat, its branches don't have the perky bristle of fir, and the whole tree seems to sag slightly, as if burdened with age and wisdom. So well do the branches shed water that some Indians call it shabalup, or "dry underneath."

Channels in the wood for nutrients and water leave cedar with a microscopic pattern of air spaces that make it light and a good insulator, sort of a natural foam board.

While shallow-rooted, it will entwine its roots with those of neighboring trees to resist the push of storm winds.

Reproduction normally occurs through cross-pollination with other cedars. But a cedar is also capable of selfing - not a bizarre practice but a botanical term for self-pollination, meaning a cedar can fertilize itself if necessary. Scientists theorize this evolved as a survival strategy in the Ice Ages, allowing isolated cedars to reproduce.

Most conifers avoid selfing by having their female cones higher than their male, so that pollen won't reach, or by having the two types of cones mature at different times. Males cones on a cedar, however, release a flood of yellow pollen that can be received by females on the same tree, which in turn produce a prolific release of seed in the fall. Cedar cones are no bigger than a fingernail and their seeds are so tiny that they average about 400,000 to the pound. An acre of mixed trees can produce 60 million cedar seeds per year, only a few of which will ever germinate.

So fecund are Northwest forests with pollen and seed, floating hither and yon, that it might stimulate one's interest in forestry to think of our mountain sides as one gigantic X-rated movie - though not as lively, perhaps, as late-night cable.

Cedar can live for millennia, and even after falling their rot-resistant logs can persist for centuries more.

Yet the grandest cedars have become museum pieces, scattered and isolated. The Nolan Creek giant is in the middle of a clear-cut, its last live root accidentally cut by an interpretive path to give access to its trunk. Tribes seeking cedar trees suitable for canoes, long houses or totem poles must look long and hard.

The wood's usefulness and rising price recently have prompted interest in the tree's survival. "Cedar is now being replanted aggressively," said Paul Mackie of the Western Red Cedar Lumber Association, a trade organization that each year hosts a week-long school in Vancouver to introduce retailers and builders to the advantages of this remarkable wood.

"There is sufficient cedar being regrown to keep us in business indefinitely," said Lindal, whose company gets its cedar from Canada.

HAVING CEDAR FOR THE AGES is a good thing, too.

"Cedar is very important to our lifestyle," said Linda Day, cultural resources coordinator for the Swinomish Tribe near La Conner. When the Forest Service helped the tribe obtain cedar to rebuild its long house in 1992, she reported, "Some of the old songs returned to our elders." Classes are held to teach cedar basket-making and this summer the tribe hopes to build its first new cedar canoes.

We could not replicate Native American life today: Neither the cedar nor the salmon are still there in sufficient numbers. Cedar was once so abundant and worthless, says the Darrington ranger district's Selvig, that loggers would cut stronger firs so they fell into and splintered a cedar, thereby avoiding having to pay stumpage prices on the trees. Structurally weak, cedar was junk wood, good for shingles and kindling but too fast-burning to even make good firewood.

The original inhabitants knew better, of course. They prized cedar for the bounty it offered and the secrets it contained. In 1981, in response to congressional legislation guaranteeing Indian religious freedom, the Forest Service began to collect information on cedar the tribes used for both bark and spiritual retreats. Spiritually, each surviving grove is a sacred place as venerable as a gothic cathedral.

Some 33 sites of undisclosed size were identified in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, which stretches from Mount Rainier to the Canadian border. Most cedar groves are only a few acres, and the ones most frequently used are near roads to make access practical.

Spirit-seekers usually repair to these woods alone when meditating; bark-collecting is done in groups. While tribes prefer to keep details of religious practices private, they often include fasting and ritual bathing in clear, cold mountain streams.

We'll continue to use cedar industrially, as the Indians did: It's too useful a tree to neglect.

But we shouldn't forget cedar is also magical - almost spooky in the sense of presence it gives off when you spend time with the trees. Cedar is one of the spiritual cores of our Northwest. Enjoy its mystery.

-------------------------------- William Dietrich, author and former Seattle Times reporter, writes Our Northwest for Pacific Northwest magazine. Harley Soltes is staff photographer for the magazine. Michelle Lee DePierro is a Times staff news artist. Photos of Indian artifacts are courtesy of the Burke Museum at the University of Washington.

------------------------------- Cedars on the Web

At their Web site the Forks Chamber of Commerce provides maps for finding the Nolan Road and Kalaloch cedars plus other visitor information for the western Olympic Peninsula: www.forkswa.com