Written most mornings, before the phone starts.

I had never written anything before 2024. Not a chapter, not an article, nothing longer than a timber sale contract. Then I testified in Montpelier, and enough people told me to get the story down on paper that I finally sat down and did it.

What surprised me is that I liked it. I have written nearly every morning since, at the kitchen table, before the phone starts and before anyone needs a load moved. My wife Shari is a teacher, so I have a built-in editor, which is either the best or the worst thing that can happen to a first-time writer depending on the morning.

The American chestnut used to be one of the great trees of the eastern woods, and the blight took nearly all of it a century ago. What went with it was a reliable autumn food crop that deer, turkey and bear could count on. Bringing a few back is where this hobby started.

Chestnuts are only part of it now. There is an apple orchard, and a crabapple orchard, and a number of individual trees planted as experiments over the years. Shari keeps her own flower beds going alongside all of it.

You get a few minutes. There is a table, a committee, a microphone that may or may not be on, and a room full of people who mostly have not spent a day in the kind of woods you are there to talk about.

The things that I bring to the table are my passion and my 50 years plus of knowledge. They are the only credentials I have. I've discovered how powerful they can be.

Hollow Hill Forestry started in 2003. Wes joined me in 2005, and between us we have sent logs from that yard to buyers on the other side of the world. This June the marketing side of it comes to an end.

Fifty years is a long run for any kind of work. I am not sorry about a day of it, and I am not finished being useful either. There is a second book to write and a legislature that keeps finding new ways to need an opinion from someone who has walked the ground.