Shoes crunch in the gravel as Harry Case and his grandson Shawn Connor head up the forest road. A hairy woodpecker drums on a nearby Douglas fir, but Harry’s eye has landed on something else: alders sprouting in a strip of bare earth on the road shoulder.

He’s pleased, but points out, “I didn’t plant those.” Harry and his grandson did plant some 700 other trees they are babying in wire cages for deer protection. “Those alders are just coming in every place,” he says. “I won’t discourage them. They’ll be big trees in 40 years, which is good. Shawn will be 70,” he adds, throwing Shawn a deadpan glance.

“We used to call alder a weed tree. Not any more. It’s used for furniture – fine furniture. Takes any kind of stain. It’s the only tree that is worth anything in the present market.”

Annette and Harry Case with Harry's grandson, Shawn Connor

Harry has stewarded these woods for 62 years, selectively logging and managing them for forest succession and diversity. He has strong feelings about the right way to do it, having gotten entangled as a young man in logging slash while hiking the Suiattle watershed in the Cascades. “I decided once and forever to obtain a piece of forest land never to be logged that way,” he says.

Harry was 18 when his dad came across this parcel near South Whidbey’s Saratoga Woods in a tax sale in 1946. “I bought it cheap,” he says. “You couldn’t buy it now, if you could find it.”

Harry and Annette are in the final stages of completing a conservation easement that will permanently protect the Incredible Forest, giving up development rights worth perhaps $1.5 million. Harry has harvested more than a million board feet of timber. “The Land Trust did a timber cruise and it turns out I have over five million now, so that’s what I call an increased yield. I have enough value in the timber. That’s what enables me to tie up the development rights. We’re never going to starve.”

Land Trust conservation partners and members already have contributed more than $40,000 of the estimated $60,000 needed to fund the transaction – for the timber cruise, fair market appraisal, land and wetland surveys, forest management plan, baseline survey, legal costs and staff time.

Pat Powell, Land Trust executive director, says the Case easement marks a big day for the Land Trust. “This is our biggest protection project of the year and the first conservation easement we have ever completed on a working forest.”

And she’s thrilled. “This will maintain and enhance the forest cover and promote species diversity by allowing the forest to grow to a mature condition with old-growth characteristics,” she said.
The easement also upholds Harry’s longstanding values and vision. “I’ve carefully done my own forestry work and it’s been a huge success,” he says. That may be an understatement from a man who was not trained as a forester but spent his career as a trombonist with the Seattle Symphony.

What was he thinking, this Seattle musician pursuing a secret life two days a week, camping, harvesting timber with a chain saw and planting his own trees?

“It’s really refreshing out here,” he says, watching a squirrel pilfer suet he’s hung on a nearby tree. “It’s quite complementary – coming here to get away from that high-pressure music. This is a different scene. I came here every time I could find two days to log.” Harry did all the stand improvement himself, carefully using a small tractor to tow out selected logs until the trees got too big for his equipment a few years ago.

The land has given Harry a good second income, peace of mind, physical exercise and a place to bond with his grandson as they observed the forest’s changes together. Shawn makes the point without even trying. “I was just eating a bunch of red huckleberries. What a great year. The red ones are about done but the evergreen huckleberries are just loaded.”

As a child Shawn joined his grandfather on trips to this forest and now is preparing to steward it into the future. He went from catching frogs and salamanders to an education in forest ecology at the University of Washington’s College of Forest Resources.

“This is like having your own garden to play in,” Shawn says. “You read things in books and then go out and apply them in the real world. Here you see the actual application – a unique experience.”

Along the way he became a teacher in some ways to his grandfather.

“There is an ecological crisis as we speak,” Harry says. “We are digging a grave for civilization with all this carbon dioxide in the air. I wasn’t thinking a whole lot about it until six or seven years ago when Shawn came home with the data.” One of Harry’s goals is to help offset the devastation of the world’s rain forests. Preserving trees is one way to practice carbon sequestration.

“There is a lot of carbon tied up in these trees. You wonder where a tree comes from? It takes carbon from the air. Trees are mostly coming out of the carbon in the air – an amazing process.” Shawn points out, “And oxygen is the byproduct.”

Harry adds, “If we are going to save the environment, little people are going to have to do something. The government isn’t going to do it; they’ve done zilch.”

He becomes emotional when he talks of the support Annette and Shawn have given him. “Annette, what are you doing?” he asks, summoning her from the RV he calls their portable cabin.

She’s smiling proudly. He gives her a big hug. Then another to Shawn.

“I want to say that Shawn and my wife have made it easy for me to do this. If they had not been on my side and seen my vision, I probably would not do the Land Trust thing. Shawn is going to forego 34 lots worth $100,000 apiece for saving the world. We’re going to try to save the world.”

“Starting with a postage stamp,” Annette adds. But then she notes that some other chunks of the South Whidbey forest are also protected by Land Trust efforts, and adds: “I like to see that on the map, see that it’s coming together almost all of a piece now.”

Harry is studying the ground at their feet, where last year they disturbed a small patch of earth to clear a pad for their RV. It’s a carpet of tiny alders.

“Well, there’s your lawn,” he declares with a smile.

Many thanks to The Whidbey Camano Land Trust for permission to reprint this article in Ecozome.

Harry Case, our local hero, is also one of five finalists for the Cox Conserves Heroes award! Vote for Harry before June 19th.