YGGDRASIL SURVIVES BEING CHAINSAWED DOWN.
Following the arrest of Ron Huber after a two hour standoff with two deputies carried up to him on a crane platform, his tree, dubbed "Yggdrasil" (the Norse World Tree that holds up the heavens and earth), was cut down. Huber returned following his release on bail, with his wife-to-be Samizu Matsuki. Yggie's trunk was gone, but the canopy branches, still green, lay piled around her stump.

He took a thick lushly needled bough of Ygdrassil, about the size and shape of a great salmon or codfish, when they left. Upon arrival in Corvallis, Ron and Sami went to the university's forestry lab, where our friend Donna worked. She wasn't there, but an oriental-looking student, smocked, listened impassively to my explanation that the branch I was holding protectively cradled in my arms, a damp rag over the cut end, was from a thousand year old tree, and couldn't it be grafted or rooted to keep the tree alive?

He looked at the densely covered branch, ran his fingers through it, and then took it from my arms, asking us to please wait there in the lab's lobby. He disappeared through a door. I paced around the room, worried, but relieved that what could be done for the tree was being done.

Time passed. Then the door reopened, and my heart sprang into my mouth as he entered the lobby. He was holding a large tray covered with peat pots. Sticking up from each peat pot was a woody stem, each stem with a plump green shoot from the branch grafted onto it! A paper tag on the tray read: "Cathedral Forest Old Growth Scion. Ron Huber, "Earth First!" "

YGGDRASIL LIVED!

He explained that he'd decapitated a tray full of douglas fir seedlings, clipped the growing tips from twigs on the branch of Yggdrasil, and grafted them onto the little stubs in the peat pots, finishing up with a bit of tar coating the wound junctures. I took them and and thanked him, embarassed that my eyes were tearing up, but incredibly relieved that I'd rescued my tree from death.

Does she yet live? Yggdrasil never made it back to Squaw Creek. Rather than put her into a clearcut, I brought her down to the forests southwest of Corvallis, a place of well-grown second growth firs with lichens on twigs and a reasonable moss mat on the floor. Some died, I know. But others of her, placed into spots with a bit of broken canopy giving her light, may yet be climbing back into the skies. Yggdrasil got a second chance, about the best I could do.

Moreover, that clever forestry student kept a number of these "old growth scions" for his own studies. For all I know, sturdy Yggdrasil may have been grown and cloned, and she may be spread across the Oregon forests, planted into recovering clearcuts by hoedad-wielding hippy treeplanters.

The earth endures.

End.

Ron Huber transcription from paper diary.