Birch Bark or the title of this site…5/17

Ok, back to nature again. This time it’s about those white birch trees. So who cares? Bare with me…Birches are pleasant to the eye when mixed with the green needled pines, maples and oaks. This is very true in the fall when the leaves change colors. But the problem with birch trees is they are weak sisters, they have no iron constitution.

Rub them the wrong way and over they go. And as for fire wood… if you don’t split them up breaking the bark you end up with a pile of dry rote all over the floor. When you burn a birch log the bark blazes like crazy but its soots all over the place very similar to some people I know.

Then there are the birch canoes that the native Americans developed. They were lightweight, easy to carry, portag'e and most all of them went in the direction when they were paddled. Even the first early French settlers around the Great Lakes tried using birch bark canoes until they found one draw back. The bottoms were weak. Step in the wrong place and everything started swimming. They finally gave up and built their canoes out of stripped cedar and the advance is on.

Today canoes are made from high tech materials and are a joy to handle...and birch bark? Its exported to China where thy make toy canoes and drums that are brought back into this country and sold our town’s souvenir shops and the local Wal-Mart, progress it’s a grand thing.