Late in a recent August, a double-bottom flatbed truck shuttled across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, carrying loads of 8-foot, 8-inch logs from a forest landing near Ontonagon, on the southern shore of Lake Superior, to the paper mill in Escanaba, on the northern shore of Lake Michigan.

The sight was hardly unusual – logging trucks are nearly as common as RVs on the lake-to-lake route in late summer – but the loads making that 175-mile journey were different in one particular: I knew those trees. They were the disassembled forest that had graced the end of the gravel road running past my family’s cabin outside Ontonagon.

The trees were a stately northern blend of hemlock, white pine, balsam fir, paper birch and the occasional white cedar – some of them, a ring-count autopsy would late

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