The Forest That Grew Back

Look at the woods on either side of the road and notice something: the trees are all about the same size, and none of them are very big.

That's because this is a second forest. The original one — the white pine, some of it two hundred feet tall and five centuries old — is gone, essentially all of it. What you're driving through grew up on the stump fields afterward, and it's a different forest entirely: maple, beech, birch, oak, aspen, with red pine planted in rows in places by Depression-era work crews trying to hold the sand down.

There's a reason it came back different. When you take every pine out of a region, you also take the seed source, and then the slash fires burn the seedbed. Hardwoods, which sprout from stumps and roots, had the advantage. So the pine barrens became a hardwood forest.

The upside, and it's a real one: this is why northern Michigan is so spectacular in October. A pine forest is green all year. A maple-beech-birch forest turns the whole peninsula scarlet and gold for two weeks, and half the state drives up here to look at it.

A ruined landscape that healed into something that draws people from a thousand miles away. It's not the forest that was here, but it isn't nothing.