A Charred Life 
The War on Cedar
It’s greedy and invasive, choking my oaks and killing my soil. It’s all over my land. So what’s stopping me from getting rid of it?
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Before I left, he gave me a copy of 1997 Juniper Symposium Proceedings, a collection of academic papers on cedar presented in San Angelo last January. And he showed me a book, Cedar Whacker: Stories of the Texas Hill Country, by C. W. Wimberley, published by Eakin Press in 1988. “Read this,” he suggested. “This’ll give you a good background.”
“CEDAR IS THE BANE OF THE HILL Country,” declared C. W. Wimberley several days later, sitting shirtless at his dining-room table at home in San Marcos, sweating out an unseasonably warm autumn morning. The 84-year-old Wimberley (“C.W. stands for Cedar Whacker”) sifted through yellowed newspaper clippings that reflect his lifelong interest in cedar: growing up around Wimberley (the town was named after his great-grandfather), running a cedar yard in Lone Grove, near Llano, from 1937 until 1959, and writing the book as well as numerous heated letters to the editors of area newspapers.
Wimberley regaled me with stories of seeing, when he was a young man, mottes of virgin cedar along the Colorado River from Austin to San Saba. Most of that prime, valuable timber was cut out long ago, he said, leading to the ruination of cedar choppers and cedar-yard operators like himself. Wimberley spoke eloquently of cedar choppers, the poor, salt-of-the-earth, independent-minded individuals who imbued the Hill Country with much of its folklore. In his book, Wimberley divides them into four categories, the most skilled being cedar cutters, “among the last of the truly independent American craftsmen,” then cedar choppers, cedar whackers (“. . . he could turn good timber into the sorriest looking post, leave a sloven mess where he made a track, give you the shirt off his back while stealing you blind, have you laughing ten minutes after you had hunted him down to break his damned neck, never around when you needed him, and about the time you got around to thanking your Lord for good riddance of the pest, he’d show up again grinning from ear to ear”), and at the bottom rung, the cedar hacker, who “took to the cedars like a blind beaver with the hiccups but with less favorable results.”
Wimberley’s cousin, Dorothy Wimberley Kerbow, a writer and historian herself, told me about the cedar-chopper homes that persisted in the cedar brakes around Austin until the early seventies, ironically in West Lake Hills and Spicewood Springs, now two of Austin’s most affluent suburbs. “Their houses had no doors, no windows, no screens,” Kerbow said. “There were always dogs lying around and trash scattered all over, and there was no yard to speak of. The kids’ faces were smudged with all the charcoal that they burned in piles, and the children came to school with so much cedar wax in their hair you couldn’t comb it out. But sure enough, there was always a television antenna on the roof.”
The tree survived while the old ways died, and Wimberley still hates cedar. It’s greedy and it depletes the soil, which in turn creates erosion that pollutes creeks and rivers. And the second- and third-growth cedar that grew in the place of the old wood is almost worthless. “That sapgrowth has no heartwood,” said Wimberley. “It will rot out in no time.” Then, slapping his hand on the table for emphasis: “Mother Nature is a modest girl! You can’t denude her soil or she’ll cover it with something that cattle can’t eat and man can’t use. Mother Nature is covering her nakedness where man can’t control it.” With a cedar loincloth, no less.
Adding insult to injury, according to Wimberley, is the Sierra Club. He showed me a letter he’d written to the editor of the San Marcos Daily Record and amplified its sentiment. “Their invasion of the Hill Country with the Endangered Species Act without doing their homework has done more harm than anything else. Babbitt, Bobbett—the whole damn thing starts with the Sierra Club.”
Wimberley was referring to the act passed by Congress during the Nixon administration, and the subsequent listings of the black-capped vireo and the golden-cheeked warbler as endangered species in 1988 and 1990, respectively. Portions of 33 counties in the Hill Country have been identified by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as prime habitat for the birds. In the eyes of Wimberley and many other landowners, the designation made the clearing of cedar illegal, a foolish government edict if there ever was one. The science was suspect and just plain stupid, tying a law to a bird to a plant.
“Look at this,” he bellowed, digging out a pamphlet from the Hays County extension agent, Billy Kniffen, which included a note cautioning against removing cedar from property because of the endangered designation of warblers and vireos. “Political pressures are such [Kniffen’s] got to bow, by God, to the Sierra Club before he opens his mouth. Piss on ’em. We can do without that damn bird, instead of putting up with that damn cedar.”
WELL, NOT REALLY. AN UNFORTUNATE sideshow of the war on cedar has been the war pitting property owners against environmentalists and the government. High on an oak- and juniper-choked slope on the Post Oak Ridge of eastern Burnet County, Chuck Sexton spent a September morning doing his best to help quiet the hysteria. A wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the same federal agency that monitors endangered species, Sexton was checking the effects of a cedar-clearing fire that he set last March. Along with a volunteer assistant named Eddie Hertz, Sexton was measuring and then photographing designated zones on the 1,000-acre Nagel tract at the edge of the Post Oak Ridge in the Balcones Canyonlands National Wildlife Refuge. Established in 1992, the 15,000-acre refuge is an existing section of a proposed 76,000-acre federal, state, county, and city conservation plan west of Austin. The idea is to preserve enough habitat for wildlife, particularly the black-capped vireo and the golden-cheeked warbler, in the face of the rapidly growing metropolitan population of Austin that is spilling into the hills. Though the morning was as muggy as a day in mid-July, the birds had flown the cedar brakes for the winter—the warblers to southernmost Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras; the vireos to southwestern Mexico.
Sexton, who looked like a Boy Scout with his glasses, brown cap and uniform, and straightforward manner, made it perfectly clear that he doesn’t like cedar recklessly spreading into grasslands any more than the cattle rancher on the other side of the fence. “Overgrazing of native grasses and the absence of fire have created quite an opportunity for cedar and prickly pear, so we’re putting fire back into the landscape,” he said. This burn, however, wasn’t very effective. “You can see our fire fairly sputtered through here, it was so cool and damp on the day we did this.” he said. “It took out some of the junipers, but not many of them. Overall, I think we got about a ten percent kill.”
Sexton didn’t mean that he wants to see nothing but tall grasses waving in the breezes. “The biggest tall tale is that cedar wasn’t here at all,” Sexton said. “There were heavy cedar brakes when man first arrived in these hills, mostly in ravines and canyons where grass fires couldn’t reach. It has always been a heavy woodland component. But there’s a lot more cedar today than there was one hundred years ago, mostly because of us. The Balcones Canyonlands creates the opportunity to protect old-growth cedar in order to protect warblers and vireos and go after cedar like a rancher on the plateaus and watersheds.”
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