Guest View: Pine knots hold a lasting value

We recently came across an interesting item by famed Ely outdoorsman, naturalist and writer Sigurd Olson, who once had a syndicated column in the 1940s. This one piqued our interest since it’s all about your favorite newspaper, the Pine Knot. Well, not really, but we enjoyed the spirit of Olson’s words and found in it many traits we aspire to here at the newspaper. Enjoy.

In many parts of the country, pine knots are known as fat wood, because of their great amount of resin and their ability to burn with a bright and colorful flame. Resin or fat, whichever it may be, it is the essence of that strange alchemy by which plants and animals are able to concentrate their energies. Both are heat producing, both concentrated forms of the same elements, both gratifying and necessary to man.

What a joy is fat wood to the woodsman when the earth has been submerged for weeks in wetness. He knows that when a fire is needed all he has to do is find a pine knot, or wood close to a knot and he will have tinder dry as a bone and ready to flar into immediate flame. For resin is impervious to moisture and can stand exposure to the elements without giving up its character. Once wood fibre has been impregnated with it, it is practically indestructible.

Wood well filled with the fatty stuff of plants is always the last to go and wherever a great log has lain one can still find the knots, hard and sound and heavy as stone because of the concentration of resin within them. These knots will burn like torches, hold their flame as though unwilling to squander quickly what has been so long within them.

In the fall, I like to gather these blackened old nuggets of energy so that I have a good supply for the long winter evenings ahead. They are far too precious to burn often, and only on special occasions, when a fine bed of coals has formed and friends are sitting around talking and laughing in its glow, do I bring one in, push it carefully into the waiting embers.

For a moment it lays there quietly, licked and caressed by the exploring tongues of flame, and then it begins to burn, the yellows, blues and greens, and reds of burning resin, the accumulated sunlight of bygone days, shining there before us. We watch it burn with pleasure for the burning is so rich and full of energy. In that black and flaming knot burns the stuff of amber, and, had it grown in a different clime, it might have someday been too precious for common use.

There is something primitive and satisfying about pine knots, or resinous wood of any type. Coal is as natural perhaps, and so is gas, but to me it is not as primitive and close to home as the fatty wood itself. We know the trees and how they grow, and what we understand and have lived with always gives the greatest satisfaction. We have seen how the knots form, how where the branches leave the main trunk the vessels for the passing of sap and resin are bent. How because of the bending, the flow of resin is dammed, how through the years of a tree’s growth the impregnation continues until at such a spot the wood fibre and the spaces within it are filled to bursting with the golden fluid.

When a tree decays, these areas of concentration, these pockets of energy remain intact, seem able to resist the agencies of oxidation for centuries. Though a great log may crumble into dust and new trees grown in the resultant humus, the knots remain long after, a mine of energy and richness for those who know their worth.

— Sigurd Olson, fall of 1941