Tom Paulin joins the Seeley Lake larch-forest restoration crew

Tom Paulin joins the Seeley Lake larch-forest restoration crew while struggling with isolation and grief for comrades lost in Afghanistan. The work gives his grief a concrete form: as seedlings surge after the crew reduces accumulated forest fuel, he begins to see the young trees as a living memorial to his friends, and planting them as a way to carry that memory into the future.

Despair and the search for belonging

Tom remembers Afghanistan and the comrades bound to him by experiences that civilians could not understand. In civilian life he feels painfully alone, as though he belongs nowhere except to the broken group he left behind. His recollection of that bond gives his later forestry work its emotional stakes: he is not merely looking for employment, but for a way to live with a loss that ordinary social belonging cannot resolve.

He joins a work crew in an old-growth larch forest at Seeley Lake while running from suicidal despair. The forest offers a place to work alongside others, but the change that matters most is how restoration connects his present labor to the friends he has lost.

The larch forest and restoration work

The crew works among old larches whose regeneration has been impeded by thickets of Douglas fir. Earlier, Indigenous people had burned underbrush to maintain grassy meadows for deer; in the last century, dense Douglas fir growth crowded out new larch sprouts. The crew responds by burning accumulated fuel around the old larches. The following year, seedlings rise in their thousands, making visible the possibility of renewal that had been obscured by the thickets.

This restoration is not presented as an instantaneous return to an untouched forest. It depends on recognizing how the site has changed and acting on the conditions that limit larch regeneration. The resulting flush of seedlings gives the crew’s intervention a measurable consequence and gives Tom a new way to understand what sustained work can accomplish.

Memory, grief, and the seedlings

Tom touches the soft needles of a young larch and finds himself thinking that one of his lost friends is inside the tree. As he continues to other forests, he sees his dead comrades in young trees there too. The association does not erase the loss; rather, it changes how he carries it. The grief that had driven him toward despair begins to soften as the forest’s renewal offers a continuing presence for memory.

Planting becomes, in Tom’s understanding, a repeated act of remembrance: the more seedlings he plants, the more of his friends he feels he brings back. The movement from the tightly bonded but absent war companions to living trees makes restoration both communal labor and a private means of mourning.

Significance

Tom’s work places forest recovery beside human recovery without treating the forest as a mere backdrop. The surge of larch seedlings follows a specific intervention, while Tom’s changing relation to those trees emerges through touch, attention, and continued planting. Ecological renewal and grief remain distinct, but the narrative makes them meet in the young trees: their future growth becomes a form through which the past can be remembered and carried forward.