2005年NPR美国国家公共电台十一月-Stumps of the Northwest: History, Old an（在线收听）

....leftovers from an era gone-by.

In the mid to late 1800s, logging was a way of life in the Pacific Northwest. Loggers made vast fortunes chopping the virgin forest filled with giant trees that were thousands of years old. Few old-growth trees are left, but some communities are celebrating their logging culture by honoring the giant stumps. Harriet Baskas reports.

“I remember when my dad would take me hiking in the woods, he would say: Now those trees could make so many houses. He was a lumberman.”

92 year old Helen Starr likes to reminisce about the old days when she volunteers at a Stillaguamish Valley Pioneer Museum in Arlington Washington. The town, located 40 miles north of Seattle, was once a major lumbering center.

“People don't realize that there were trees like that to begin with.”

But there were. Trees so big and so numerous that Pacific Northwest historian Robert Ficken doesn’t even adventure a count.

“I just prefer to say things like there was a hell of a lot of timber and it was more than people could possibly use when they first started using it.”

Those old-growth trees were often hundreds of feet tall with gnarled basis that Ficken says presented a challenge to early loggers armed with only hand saws and axes.

“The loggers would have to go above the ground maybe sometimes as much as ten feet to find a flat surface that they could stand on to do their work, and they created the flat surface by cutting these holes in the side of the tree and sticking boards in. They will stand on those boards and cut the tree down.”

The giant logs were hauled away, the giant stumps left behind to rot. If you hike you'll come across some in the woods. But in Arlington two huge stumps are community souvenirs: a stump house sits in front of the Pioneer Museum. It’s eighteen feet across and twenty feet high with a wide doorway, a roof and an upper level enclosed in clear plastic.

"Nobody is gonna pick that up and carry it very far.”

85 year old museum volunteer Harry Yost, says the stump has been in this spot since 1935, serving as everything from a storage shed to a stage.

“There used to be a platform up above and there're steps you could walk into it and politicians would yak out through the side, and the governors used to come up with yak, yak. I remember here and then.”

Folks in Arlington are proud of the stump house. But Yost says the town has another stump that's even bigger.

“It is all the way from one side to the other, hooting the holler, across, you know.”

This stump is actually about 20 feet wide and 25 feet tall and is impossible for a motorist like Darcy Kean to ignore at this smoggy point rest area on Interstate 5, a couple of miles up the road from the museum.

“I am from East Texas. We have cedar trees, but not this big.”

There is an archway in this cedar stump big enough to drive a car through and in 1939 Norway’s crowned prince O Louffe and Princess Marsha had their picture taken doing just that. These days, though, the stump is a walk-through attraction that had a share of vandalism and decay. It has been set on fire, cut in half, put back together and moved several times. All worth it, says Harry Yost, because it's an irreplaceable, if unusual, link to the region's past.

“It's Washington, western Washington Red Cedar, for younger generations will never see one like this. If you don't keep that well, it's just gone.”

For NPR news I am Harriet Baskas.


  原文地址：http://www.tingroom.com/lesson/NPR2005/40672.html