Bare (Clean) Ground
Imagine a stroll through the woods--mixed woods, with some chaparral patches and meadows mixed in. For my area for example you will stroll among live oaks and madrones, bigleaf maple, douglas-firs, clumps of redwoods, often with tanoak or bay trees darkening the canopy, or sunny, magical elfin-woodlands of gnarly buckeye trees. In the favored spot where I find myself living now there are even California nutmegs. Or you may be blessed with a foothill-woodland slope, tastefully canopied/decorated with blue oaks and those elegant lacy gray pines… Or farther up the slope, where black oaks and ponderosa pines take over or maybe in some favored riparian floodplain with majestic sycamores and valley oaks, or by a stream with jungles of willow and cottonwood and elder and boxelder. Almost all these places have something in common--obstacles; something to impede your progress and make your stroll more like a struggle. If you’re lucky the understory will be no more formidable than the low grass and delicate flowering herbs you find in some of the foothill woodlands, or a simple soft carpet of leaf-litter such as you often encounter in the darkest of the coastal forests, or the bare grit and gravel and granite of the high mountains. But in the main, any more or less wild bit of wooded country is a headache to get around in without trails. Shrubby understory thickets, knee-high or neck-high scratchy tangles of blackberry or poison oak (itchy and scratchy), and of course all sorts of fallen branches and trees and such… Redwood forests are full of trip-traps in the form of indestructible long thin curving fallen branches about an inch thick, that invariably trip you up.
Anyway… next time you take a walk in the woods take note of all this stuff--called “fuel load” by the fire people, and think what it would be like to have a forest floor clean enough to to walk around pretty much unhindered (and also mentally thin out all but the biggest trees
around you), and you will be imagining yourself back a few hundred years, when people made a difference in the “wilderness.” The big difference was all made with fire.
Fires set to keep the woods open, parklike, keep understory and litter down, keep acorns unwormy (and probably trees healthier), and keep the little plants coming back for seed etc., and keep the acorn-picking easy.
Also, the woods were gleaned far and wide for fallen wood for fires, and long branches for building shelters etc.
Within and for some distance all around a village the ground would have been free of any obstacles and debris--having been all picked up for the campfires.
(On the other hand, reports of Indians leaving a falling log lying across a trail and never bothering to move it).
Big fallen logs were stripped of their bark for dwellings (no record of taking bark from live trees except as starvation food).
The system made a resource out of what is now a nuisance.
