We've frequently used the phrase "infrastructure collapse" to describe the slow erosion of wood product manufacturing capacity in the western United States.

As we use the phrase, it veers close to the notion of critical mass, a term first used in thermodynamics to describe self-sustaining systems, natural as well as manmade.

In wood products manufacturing, infrastructure (self-sustaining systems) describe the relationships that exist between sawmills that sell one another logs or mill residues in order to increase their own profitability and, thus, the efficiency of the entire system.

Smirfit-Stone's recent announcement that it is permanently closing its linerboard plant at Frenchtown, just west of Missoula, Montana is going to remove a lot of efficiency from Montana's milling infrastructure because the mill provided the only reliable market for mill residues - wood waste from which no other product could be manufactured.

Mills (Montana has 10 and will probably lose 3 more this year) sell logs to one another because they do not all use logs of the same size, grade or species and they don't all make lumber of the same grade, species or dimension.

We thought we had the infrastructure concept pretty well figured out until we got this note from our friend Craig Thomas, a logger who lives south of Missoula.

Craig spent most of 2009 traipsing all over the Midwest clearing right of way for an oil and gas pipeline that will run from Alberta to Oklahoma. He did this rather than park his logging equipment, which he otherwise would have had to do because there is no work in Montana. Never mind that Montana's national forests contain millions of acres of dead and dying trees - or that those dead and dying forests are now playing host to the largest bark beetle infestation in recent history.

Of course, these dead and dying trees could be used to make some grades of lumber, or they could be used to fuel a biomass-fired power plant (renewable energy), but the Forest Service is so terrified of radical environmentalists and their lawyers that it refuses to even consider harvesting them. Not to worry, nature will probably take care of the problem this summer in a "natural" wildfire that fills the air we breath with cancer-causing smoke, to say nothing of what it does to earth's atmosphere (remember global warming?).

But, we digress. Here's the note our delightful friend Craig sent us. We'll leave to you to form your own opinions about the direction our directionless country seems to be headed.

"Being unemployed and needing something to do, my son and I have begun tearing down the sawmill we build a few years ago - cutting it up with torches. Vanessa and Joey [the names Craig gave to the two halves of his cut-to-length harvesting system] are lifting and positioning the pieces so that we can torch them into 60 by 18 by 24-inch chunks to load onto a railroad car. Headed to China I suppose. At first, I was pissed but as Ckye (Craig's son) and I discussed each section we tore out, it became kind of a family history lesson.

Ckye looked at the slammers that were used to slam the cant back into position on the carriage after it was turned preparing for the next cut and said, 'Boy, did those work good an fast.' He and I designed, financed, built, installed and operated those things, and it sure made me feel good as a father to have had this experience with my son. The unsolicited comment made my day.

So as we chop up this piece of family history, we are taken to reviewing the how and why we made this or that. The whole ugly operation is now a lot easier. Hopefully, the steel will pay for the cleanup. Hope you and yours are having a nice day. We did."

You can't make this stuff up, and you can't read it without getting so damned mad at the federal government that you can't see or think straight. To learn more about Craig's 2009 escapade, click here to read "This is Embarrassing I, II, and III."