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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One of the first stops he makes during his land-management seminars is a clearing by a cedar thicket where 37 lopping shears are lined up. “This is a Tom Sawyer deal,” he said, grinning. “I show them all the kinds they can buy in the store and let them try them out for ten minutes or so, trimming dead branches.” A few minutes later, by the banks of a small lake that he nurtured by clearing away rocks and vegetation from the mouth of a dormant spring, he showed me two metal trays, one containing grasses, the other containing a few cedar seedlings, with showerheads above each tray and a faucet and a jar at the bottom. “This is my rainfall simulator,” he said. The showerheads rain equally over the trays, and the runoff collects in the jars. The tray with grasses absorbs the water and takes about ten minutes to fill up with clear water that’s been filtered by the soil. The water runs right through the tray with cedar and fills up in about three minutes with muddy, silty water. “Now which one do you want?” he asked.
He led me down an interpretative walking trail lined with specimens of pin oak, Chinese pistachio, Texas madrone, bald cypress, cedar elm, bigtooth maple, golden- ball lead-tree, and Blanco crab-apple. “I’ve reintroduced over three thousand trees that were browsed out by overgrazing,” he explained. He showed me his eleven concrete spring boxes, or cisterns, that supply all his water needs on the ranch, without pumps, water wells, pressure tanks, or filtration devices. He pointed out the herd of scimitar-horned oryx, “the only genetically pure herd on earth.” He took me inside the one-of-a-kind artificial bat cave under construction (Reporter: “Winging It,” September 1997).
Bamberger was quick to acknowledge that not everyone can buy his own 5,500-acre spread and afford a bulldozer and a crew of hard-working hired hands to clear out the cedar. “But if you have nine acres, you can afford a pair of lopping shears and a wheelbarrow and still make a difference.”
A sense of urgency permeated everything Bamberger said and did over my two-hour nickel tour of Selah Ranch. Back at his hilltop home, he explained why. “We’re the endangered species,” he said. “Kids growing up in a world of McDonald’s and graffiti are going to be making the decisions in the future. I want them to see what their world can be like. That’s why I’m telling the private landowners they’re holding on to a myth. It’s not like it was one hundred years ago. We don’t own this land. We’re only stewards.”
THE MORE I LOOKED, THE MORE I LEARNED. Cedar, it turns out, isn’t totally worthless. The cedar choppers and cedar yards may be long gone, but their legacy hangs on in the form of four processing companies that distill thousands of pounds of Texas cedarwood oil (also known as cedar oil and juniper oil), a key ingredient in all sorts of fragrances, including, according to cedar lore, that cleaner-than-clean aroma in Tide detergent and that peaty fresh smell in Irish Spring deodorant soap. Three processors—Paks Corporation, Chem-pac, and Cedar Fiber—are located around Junction, the geographic heart of the Hill Country cedar forest, and have been major job providers since the first mill went into operation in 1929. Texarome, a smaller fifteen-year-old operation with its own refinery that allows customers to buy specific grades of oil and custom blends, sits on the banks of the Frio River outside Leakey. The processors use only old-growth cedar that has been dead for at least twenty years. Next door to Paks is the next-generation plant belonging to the AERT Corporation (Advanced Environmental Recycling Technology), which uses spent cedar left over from Paks’s juniper oil process and recycled plastic to create cedar fiber, a durable all-weather particle board. “Cedar has put a lot of people through school and lot of beans on the table,” said Don Baugh, the vice president and general manager of Paks.
Getting oil from deadwood cedar is a simple process, according to Baugh. “All we use is wood and water,” he said. “First we hog [grind] it, make it into big chips, then hammermill it into smaller chips, then steam the oil out of the wood and let it condense and separate, draining off the oil that floats on top of the water. Cedarwood oil is literally essential oil. We grind it up and what’s left is the soul of the tree.” The oil is placed in storage tanks and shipped in five-thousand-gallon tanks to Holland and England, where it is refined into cedrone, cedrenyl acetate, and other distillates. The operation is set up to run 24 hours, seven days a week, “when the wood is available.”
Unlike its competitors, Paks runs its own harvesting operation, with machines that pick up the wood and pile it high, then drop it in a trailer that hogs the wood. The process is so efficient that nine people using a grappler, a prehauler, a chipper, and a trailer can cover fifty acres in a day. If only there was that much wood to gather. Over the years the stockpiles have gotten so meager that the company has had to expand its range, seeking wood as far as 75 miles away. The other processing companies depend exclusively on cedar haulers, the modern descendants of cedar choppers, to do their legwork: finding deadwood on ranches, making a deal with the landowner to remove it (usually something like, “I’ll clear this stuff off your land if you want me to, for free”), piling it onto their trucks, and delivering it, earning $38 a ton.
“I’ve got a lot of things to figure,” said Baugh, who keeps lists of large landowners and recent land transactions in the Hill Country and studies topographical maps and aerial photography in search of a pile. Once he’s found it, other factors kick in: “How far is it to fetch the wood? Will I have to build roads to get it? Is the heart of the wood dense enough? We can’t set up on six hundred acres or smaller tracts of land.”
By sight alone, Baugh can tell the difference between cedar from different counties. “See how yellow that wood is? That’s from Sutton County,” he said. “This wood, from Kimble County, is a lot denser. Unfortunately, I can’t be picky. We’re down to getting smaller branches that were left behind when the wood was first harvested years ago. We’re kinda like the old buffalo hunters. We were running out of wood back in the sixties. We see a little less every year, but there’s still a lot out there. I’m tickled to death if I can find cedar with ax marks on it. That means it’s really old and was cut a long time ago. Chain saws didn’t come along until the late fifties. Mind you, we’re looking for heartwood, first-growth cedar that has a round top. Second-growth cedar sure can’t be harvested for timber and is of little use to us. Second-growth cedar doesn’t make a tree, it makes a water-hungry shrub. It has a heart like a banker’s.”
The chip waste is used for horse and poultry bedding, mulch, as filler for crevices in holes drilled in the oil fields, fuel for the mill’s boilers, and for wood composite at AERT, one of the largest employers in Kimble County. The Texarome plant in Leakey even uses small amounts of fresh cedar leaf from green second-growth and third-growth cedar in response to a small but growing demand from aromatherapists, who desire a fresher, stronger scent.
“We’ll continue to do what we do until we can’t do it,” Don Baugh said. “Our challenge now is to make more oil from less wood for less money.”
“I have one fear,” he confided to me before saying good-bye. “And that’s when I die and go to heaven, God would be a cedar tree.”
I’M NO LONGER HYSTERICAL. I understand cedar much better than I did before. I know that it’s not the all-purpose bogeyweed—a tool for big-government intervention or the cause of the ruination of the cattle industry. I can now see in an elegant old cedar the same grandeur and beauty I see in an old oak. I’m thankful for the presence of cedars on steep, rocky slopes, recognizing the role they play in stabilizing the soil and providing windbreaks. I’m happy that a few people can still make a living off cedar. I’m cheering on the concept of aromatherapy. Maybe some enterprising rancher or modern-day cedar chopper will find more uses for new-growth cedar.
Those people can have mine. Not all of it. Like I said, I’ve learned to respect and even appreciate my foe. And I’m not foolish enough to try to clear the whole lot at once. This battle will be a protracted one, fought literally one step at a time. The teeth on my chain saw have been sharpened. I’ve conducted my own seminars with my sons, showing them how to use lopping shears to earn a little money. I still dream of the way it used to be, when grasses grew as high as a horse’s belly.
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