Rake Force’s Jake Dailey and a small group of colleagues drove two pick-up trucks, a mini-excavator, and a handful of chainsaws up to the tree-covered ridgetops south of Cle Elum Lake. The small agroforestry company, had contracted with The Nature Conservancy to thin stands on the Ellsworth Creek Preserve, located halfway between Naselle and Bay City in Pacific County.

This basin is nestled in the Willapa Hills, one of the most biologically rich ecosystems in the state.

The Nature Conservancy purchased the entire watershed in the southwest corner of Washington above Willapa Bay to protect it from habitat fragmentation and logging.

Now, TNC was bringing them to Washington’s Central Cascades.

During the days that followed, while now President-elect Donald Trump held a series of increasingly profane and aggrieved rallies across the country, Dailey and his crew did just what the soon-to-be president had once offhandedly suggested: They “cleaned” the forest. Or more precisely, they thinned several acres of young conifers to reduce fuel density and obtain the biomass needed for biochar production.

But to Dailey and a few others up on that ridge — veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — the work was more than just good land stewardship. It was also a form of personal healing.

‘What are we doing?’

There was a time when Dailey was much more politically aligned with the president-elect and many of his supporters. Those views were part of what drove him to join the military in the first place.

“I was super-patriotic, like, born on the fourth of July, born at Pearl Harbor,” says Dailey. “I grew up as a conservative Republican, and I believed … in American exceptionalism, and that’s why I joined.”

From Idaho, where he spent much of his childhood camping, hunting and fishing, he went first to Fort Lewis (now Joint Base Lewis-McChord), then to Iraq, where he served as an Army combat medic from 2009 to 2010. The hypocrisy and trauma he witnessed there, culminating in the suicide of a fellow soldier, crumbled his previously jingoistic worldview and left him with PTSD — part of what Dailey considers a grave “moral injury.”

“You learn to accept being uncomfortable, and then it’s just your new norm,” says Busen.

“And then obviously, fuels reduction is really straightforward,” he adds. “And sometimes it’s nice to work like that, because you don’t have to think too much. It’s like, ‘All right, here’s my task for the day.’”

Dailey got into conservation work when he and his wife began homesteading near Toledo, and also found the physicality of it to be “a lot like Army PT.” But what felt even more familiar was the way working in the woods gave him a chance to once again rely on the person next to him, as he was trained to do.

“We can’t do anything without a battle buddy, and when we get out, they expect us to go it on our own,” he says. “We suffer in that case, and I believe this work re-immerses us in that camaraderie.”

The positive effect on his health was almost immediate. Prior to homesteading and practicing small-scale agroforestry, Dailey had attempted to use his G.I. Bill benefits to return to school, but ultimately floundered as he struggled with PTSD and reintegration into civilian life.

He’d considered pursuing nursing and criminal justice, but both turned out to be false starts. He then landed on selling real estate, which he did successfully for three years in the early 2010s before burnout set in.

“I’d been struggling with insomnia, social media, all this stuff, but when I got home from working in the forest, I’d be able to sleep at night,” he says. “I’d ballooned up to 350 pounds after the Army, and [after] my first few months in the forest, I’d dropped 50 pounds, and I just knew it was healthy for me.”

But conservation work was having an even deeper effect on Dailey. The relief it brought was more than just physical, or even mental. It was metaphysical. It provided healing for the moral injuries he’d suffered during the war — not by replicating the military ethos, but rather by actively undermining it.

“We committed to serve our country … but what we did over in Iraq and Afghanistan wasn’t really service to our country,” he says. “I believe it was theft of resources.”

And the choices Dailey believes veterans are left with, as they wrestle with this cognitive dissonance, are stark.

“You either lie to yourself, or you kill yourself — that’s our options. Or, you get into conservation — you get into atoning for the thing you contributed to.”

‘Pay attention to nature’

To Busen, conservation work is perhaps a little less monumental than an act of moral atonement, but no less important or impactful. Simply put: It provided meaning and fulfillment in a way none of his previous jobs had. It gave him a chance to exercise certain deeply gratifying sensibilities that he’d developed well before joining the military — ones he acquired as a young man and avid birdwatcher.

“When [you] get heavy into birding … you can’t help but start seeing all the destruction,” he explains. “It was through birding that I started seeing the bigger picture of our ecosystems.”

Busen still remembers the specific bird that got him hooked and opened his eyes to this bigger picture of ecological interconnectedness — the species that many in the birding community call one’s “spark bird.” He was 20, and living and working in the Midwest. The bird was a black-necked stilt, which typically dwells along coastlines, but was somehow in front of him in a Minnesota farm field. And the strangeness of this situation induced a paradigm shift in his thinking.

“The world had suddenly opened up around me, and I started paying more attention to it,” says Busen. “There was this whole world I had been ignoring all of my life … so it kind of just introduced me to, like, ‘Hey, pay attention to nature, because it’s everywhere, and it’s interacting with us, and we’re interacting with it, and we’re surrounded by it.’”

Busen brought this newfound awareness with him to the Army — to Afghanistan, South Korea and Alabama. When he wasn’t flying helicopters, he was paying attention to whatever birds were around him. In Korea he conducted shorebird surveys with a local nonprofit. In Alabama he worked weekends as a coastal bird steward for the Audubon Society, and would spend whole days answering questions and talking to beachgoers.

He brings his sensibilities to his current work as a wetland technician for the Tulalip Tribes — to the way he crafts planting plans for riparian areas and food forests.

“I try to make sure that insects and small mammals and birds and any larger fauna are accounted for and have habitat and space in whatever I’m developing,” he says. “And not just, ‘Oh, it’s pretty from a distance,’ or ‘It’s only for human use.’”

He thinks on behalf of, and tries to give back to, the whole ecosystem. “It pays a quarter of what I used to make,” he says. “But now I have a purpose I believe in.”

‘Go outside’

Dailey has advice for how best to appreciate veterans. It does not involve thanking anybody for their service or calling anybody hero. It’s much simpler than that: “Go give back.”

He pauses for a moment, and adds: “Or don’t. Just be with yourself, even. Turn everything off. Go outside.”

Photos by Riley Yuan / Chinook Observer David Grover, a forester with The Nature Conservancy, checks his map while standing in a recently thinned unit on the Ellsworth Creek Preserve.

Young hemlock trees on the Ellsworth Creek Preserve. The Nature Conservancy is partnering with Rake Force, a regenerative agroforestry start-up, to thin the hemlock to reduce fuel loading and improve overall stand health.