Conspicuous Beauty

For the past few days, I’ve been breaking up my day by lugging a round or two from the fir tree I chopped up at the cabin out onto the drive and splitting a few pieces of cordwood by hand. This serves the purpose of satisfying my fairly constant need to “be busy” and provides a solid level of exercise.

A victim of pine beetle infestation, the wood clearly displays the gray-blue staining at the butt end of each round. A conspicuous sign of death. Clear evidence of the killing fungus vectored into the tree by beetles not much larger than a grain of rice.

I don’t like to say this, but the staining is beautiful in its own way. Finish wood milled from beetle-kill trees is quite appealing. Over the years, I’ve used blue pine for a variety of finish projects. I first used it over thirty years ago on the walls of a basement in a house in East Helena. The vaulted ceiling in the cabin runs end to end with tongue-and-groove blue pine. The north wall of our living room is finished with lightly whitewashed blue pine.

A Blue Pine Round

Blue Pine Split into Cordwood

Blue Pine Wall in Our Living Room

—Mitchell Hegman