My friend Craig Thomas sent me another e-mail note the other night. It nearly broke my heart. He is lonely. He misses his wife and kids and being home for the summer in Stevensville, where you can see mountains in every direction.

            "I woke up homesick again," he wrote on Sunday, July 30. "Thinking about home and family; would you do me a favor and go over and hug your spouse for me?"

            "Well, sure Craig," I thought to myself.  Of course I will; anything to help you get over missing yours."

            Craig is working somewhere around St. Louis, Missouri now. I'm not exactly sure where, but I you may remember me telling you in "This is Embarrassing," that he is part of a crew that is clearing right-of-way for an oil and gas pipeline from Canada. I don't know if he's still staying in Sabetha [that's in Kansas] but that's where he was for a couple of months.

Anyway, Craig is missing home and family and all of the other stuff that the rest of us take for granted. I would be too if I was stuck in the middle of no where in the Midwest, not knowing when the hell I'd be home again.

Of course, Craig could be home if our Congress would get off its butt and fund a national forest restoration program that actually tried to make a dent in the millions of acres of dead and dying trees we look at daily. But, noooooo, Craig and Vanessa - that's the name he's given his Timbco forwarder - are still wandering through our country's heartland clearing pipeline right-of-way, when they should be home clearing dead trees from our sick and dying forests.

And speaking of pipelines, I'm old enough to remember when we actually drilled for energy in American soil, but we don't do that anymore. Might kill the planet, you know. Better that we import the stuff from some other country: out of sight, out of mind. That's our motto! Bring our oil and gas from somewhere else and, while we're at it, bring our timber from somewhere else too.

Congress should be embarrassed, but to be embarrassed I think you first have to understand the difference between right and wrong. Common sense helps too. You get the picture.

"This really sucks," Craig wrote. "So far, I've missed my wife's birthday, our anniversary, the Fourth of July, an outing with friends and most of the summer; not to mention Sunday dinners with the kids and Al after church. Cyke was going to take us to the lake for a boating outing this summer. Do you know how nice it is to mow the yard and sit in it and look at the Bitteroots after sunset?"

Yeah, I do Craig, but we don't look at the Bitterroots; we look at the Missions. They rise to about 9,000 feet elevation just east of our home here in Bigfork. At sunrise, you look at them and about half expect that God is going to stroll up over their summit at any moment. My wife makes a big deal of the first snow in the Missions. At sunset, we can stand in our yard and watch the white turn to pink, then red, then black. It is for sure a sight to behold.

It's unusual for Craig to be so down. He's an "up" kind of guy. And sure as hell, in the very next paragraph of his e-mail note, he swallows hard, regains his composure and writes to tell me how blessed he feels to be working. He is lucky. A lot of loggers back home in Montana aren't working at all this summer. There is no work, mainly because the housing industry is still in the tank, but also because the Forest Service is so mired in regulatory muck that it can't even keep up with the death count in our forests.

Would you believe our trees are dying faster than they are growing? That's amazing when you think about the millions and millions of acres of green forest we once had here. But now, increasingly, we see gray and brown. Our eyes aren't used to this. But if radical environmentalists and their lawyers continue to win in court, pretty soon gray and brown will be the only colors we see in our forests. Imagine the next generation of youngsters seeing gray and brown forests and never knowing the difference.

Anyway, the more hopeful Craig wants us to know that he has a great crew, that the job is "quite interesting" and that he is "learning a lot of knew things." And then he hurts again.

"It hurts that all of us working foresters were too quiet for too long," he writes. "We have lost the battle - actually battles. It is a real shame that the forest has to suffer through what is to come under the guise of natural events. Now, we can't even work near our homes."

It hurts like hell, Craig. I know. I agonize over it every day. But there isn't much we can do. I can count on one hand the lumbermen I've known who see value in forestry education programs. The rest think it's a waste of money. They'll spend millions on a new sawmill, but not one damned dime defending their timbersheds. It's ridiculous.

Meanwhile, the big environmental outfits are spending hundreds of millions of dollars annually telling the public that the insects and diseases that are chewing their way through our country's forest heritage are natural events! Save for environmentalists and members of Congress, I don't know anyone who believes that what they are watching is a natural event. With a little explanation, most folks seem to grasp the idea that removing diseased and dying trees from our forests would help. It's no different that removing a cancer before it's too late. Why is this so damned hard for Congress to understand?

            Meanwhile, somewhere back in Missouri's farm country, my friend Craig and his pal, Vanessa, are clearing brush this morning. He writes to say he hopes "the enviros are having a nice summer. I finally must admit that they are smarter. Not more scientifically or historically correct, but a lot smarter politically."

            You can say that again. The anti-forest management crowd has done a masterful job of hoodwinking the Congress and the public. And the result is plain to see. Millions and millions of acres of dead and dying timber - kindling for the next big forest fire, which, of course, will be explained away as "just another natural event."

            "P.S., Craig writes. "I haven't heard the tornado siren in a week or so. Yippee!"

Hope springs eternal in every logger I've ever known. I hope Craig makes it home for Thanksgiving. Meantime, those of you who do not know Craig, will see his humor in the captions on the photographs below.  They were attached to his Sunday morning note. 

	As we clear the R/W in the fields, we mow the light vegetation.  Here, large four-wheel drive tractors with 24-foot batwing mowers are chopping down the 11-foot high corn in Missouri near St. Joseph. One is just over the crest of a terrace which is a tricky place to mow as the tractor is cresting the steep portion of the landscape and the mower pulled behindis trying to do the same.  The operator must maintain the close cutting height and it is difficult to not cut into the ground as the terrace is crested.  The farmers are reimbursed for the crop losses.
	See the terrace on the left.  They have hay below it before the creek here.  I was proud to see all the goodmanagement of the farms.  Too bad I can't say the same for our USFS forests in Montana.
	Here I am stuck on one in a pasture. The drain tile was plugged and caused the ground to be saturated which trapped me.  Mike told me that by using no till farming practices a normal terrace will keep soil runoff to less than 2 tons per acre per year. 12 tons per acre would maintain 100% soil capability, so the terraces are actually improving the fields by saving of the top soil. Since the fertilizer attaches to the individual soil particles, these devices reduce water pollution of fertilizer keeping it for plant use. Plants can’t move remember, SO if there is a really juicy fertilizer goodie on some fat soil particle that has been moved by rain to just outside of their root system the plant can’t get it. Plants don’t get up and walk around to get food like us. Terraces are a good thing for plants because of this. Same thing with fire too, the plants are stuck in the ground can’t run and just get burnt up.