Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for being a part of the conversation. This
is for stories. I'm the Poet in the Forest, a
children's series that I pinned out in the nineteen nineties. Now,
none of it would be possible if it wasn't for
this forest right here in South Charlotte, North Carolina. I
talk about it so much that I thought maybe it's
time that you get to know what has inspired me
for thirty years. Thanks for being a part of the conversation.
Welcome back to the forest. Planting the seventeen hundred trees
in the year nineteen ninety seven, planning it out, It's
all in the written diaries where it needed to be
a place of growth where there was already too much growth.
I needed to have some sort of plan, and it
couldn't steal from the roots of other living trees, especially
when it comes to creating the umbrellas that in my
mind I could see them, but to a six inch
seedling that was going into the ground, that was several
years up the road. But seventeen hundred seedlings. Now, let
me be open and upfrontier. Seventeen hundred trees requires a
lot of room. I only have so much of this
forest that meant without permission, I was going to be
traveling onto other people's property. The reason why any of
this even started was because when I came here in
nineteen ninety two, this forest looked like crap. It looked
like those forests they used to call acid rainforests where
everything was falling apart and not growing in proper order.
They looked almost naked, destroyed, And it was like, if
you have this one particular section of land and you
want to plant twenty trees, then why does the other
parts of the forest have to suffer? Because one particular
tree farmer decided that he wanted to let his area
be plentiful, why not let it all be plentiful. So
there I was January of nineteen ninety seven, ordering my
seventeen hundred tree seedlings from the state of North Carolina,
and I knew that I was going to be going
on to other people's property, and I knew I didn't
have their permission. So I had to do secret, covert
operations really early in the morning and late late late
in the afternoon and night to get those seedlings in
the ground. But the thing about those seedlings is that
if you've truly walked through a real, authentic forest and
not one designed by forest rangers and other people of science.
Walking on a forest floor is rugged. Oh my god,
where those tree roots used to be or where they're
continuing to grow. There's no soil there. Maybe there's leaves
in other soot, but there's also that vacant space that
one wrong step could put you down to your ankle
or put you down to your knee, because everything you
thought was there didn't exist, because in an authentic forest,
there's nothing out there grooming the land to make it
look all home depot and lows pretty. So that was
the struggle that I had to face, is that this
forest was built by man back in the early part
of the nineteen eighties. They came in with their bulldozers.
They tore down those trees and basically they buried them.
That's it, put dirt over them, buried them. Well, when
the trees deteriorated, what happened those big old holes in
the dirt that this forest farmer was going to find
out in a very hard way how they existed, and
the injuries that I suffered putting those trees in the ground.
I can laugh about it now, but if you go
back through the daily writing, which is always open for
anybody to read nineteen ninety seven, you will see that
a vision, far far, far greater than me put those
trees in the soil, or what I assumed was soil.
It was a real authentic forest floor. Hey, thanks for
being a part of the conversation.