WHITE ROCK, S.C. - The rambling groves of loblolly pine Harold Wessinger owns near this small farm town were supposed to be a retirement plan. He had hoped to tend his 400 acres until the trees grew tall enough to sell to the paper mills, with the proceeds paying for vacations or, if necessary some day, nursing home expenses.
Instead, the trees have been dying by the hundreds, all because of a critter - the Southern pine beetle - smaller than a grain of rice.
"I'm in a downhearted, depressing state right now," Wessinger, 75, said the other afternoon, shaking his head at a heap of dead pines strewn like a wrecked ship across the gray, rocky soil. "It makes you say, 'Why me, Lord?'"
It's a question being asked across South Carolina, where the beetle is strangling thousands of acres of pine forest in the widest and most costly infestation recorded in the state.
More than 12 million trees have died this year in counties spanning from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Atlantic coast. By the end of summer, the value of lost timber is expected to reach $200 million, nearly double the record set in 1995. Only Hurricane Hugo caused more damage to this state's vast forests.
Scientists say the East Coast's long drought is not only making South Carolina's trees more vulnerable, but is easing the beetles' spread north. The insects were spotted this spring, for apparently the first time, in New Jersey's Pine Barrens.
During the last big outbreak in Maryland, in 1993, the beetle killed 3,200 acres of loblolly pine on the lower Eastern Shore. Officials say it remains the largest threat to Maryland forests after the gypsy moth.
The outbreak in South Carolina has put intense strains on state and federal foresters and is trying the patience of small landowners such as Wessinger. Timber is the state's leading cash crop and forest products such as paper and saw timber its third-largest industry. So the infestation is also sending ripples across the local economy.
Loggers have been swamped with requests to cut down infested pines and surrounding buffers of healthy trees, one of the few effective defenses against the beetles' spread. That has glutted the market with wood cut before its time and has sent timber prices tumbling. The cutting has also made a wasteland of woods traveled by hikers and mountain bikers.
Forest managers, many at their wit's end, say their best hope is beyond anyone's control: the weather. Beetle populations will crash if South Carolina gets several days of 100-plus-degree heat, or, less likely, sub-zero temperatures.
In the meantime, Andy Boone, chief of forest health for the South Carolina Forestry Commission, continues to spend the summer mapping the problem from the air. He peers from the window of a small airplane, tracing the widening radius of the attack by the telltale reddening of pine tree crowns.
"It looks like a disaster out there right now," he said after a recent flight over Union County. "It's tragic, all the trees that are dying."
Systematic assault
The beetle, short-legged and stout, does its damage by boring through to a pine's inner bark, where females construct a gallery of S-shaped tunnels and lay dozens of eggs. The larvae feed on the moist bark. Then, as adults, they chew back to the surface, where they fly to neighboring trees for another assault.
Healthy trees release a resin that flushes out attacking beetles. But when trees are strained by drought, the immune system founders.
Thousands of beetles can invade a single tree, and their tiny tunnels block the flow of sugar from pine needles to tree roots. A fungus the beetle carries called blue stain clogs tissues that pump water to the treetop, turning evergreen needles to New England autumn shades of yellow and red.
The beetle is native to a giant tract of pinelands from the Southeastern United States down to Honduras. But a four-year drought has produced epidemic growth in places such as South Carolina and has sped the beetles' drift north during the past two years to Southern Ohio, Northern Kentucky and New Jersey.
"These are not areas where we're used to seeing them in recent memory," says Kier Klepzig, who leads a team of pine beetle scientists at the U.S. Forest Service's Southern Research Station.
In the past couple of years, the insects have moved into species of trees long viewed as outside their diet, such as the red spruce and Fraser fir. When the beetle population booms, their natural predators, the woodpecker and the checkered beetle, can't keep pace.
Hardest-hit state
Though the beetle has also ravaged Georgia and North Carolina this summer, no state has been harder hit than South Carolina. Experts also blame an ice storm two years ago that weakened many trees and stands of pine that have grown so thick that the beetle, much like a forest fire, has been able to spread at high speeds across large areas.
The U.S. Forest Service here has doubled the size of teams it sends out to identify dying trees. Each day, they wade into the national forests with cans of spray paint, marking infested trees for cutting with blue and yellow streaks.
Yet even hardened professionals here have struggled against a sense of futility.
"You dream of them never ending," says Jon Dent, who manages South Carolina timber sales for the Forest Service. "It's kind of like sheep jumping over a fence, and you never know when it's going to stop and you wake up in terror."
Dent leads a newly created anti-beetle "incident command," a military-like leadership structure the Forest Service had used in the state to fight forest fires.
On one recent afternoon, a patch of Sumter National Forest swirled with clouds of dust and buzzed with engine noise as hulking machines with whirling blades reduced a shady pine stand to a bleak, sunbaked expanse of red clay.
New trees will be planted, but it will take several years before anything resembling a forest grows back. "This is what stirs the public up," says Dent, surveying ragged earth. "It's hard to convince them there's good to come from it in the long run."
So much wood is on the market that private forest managers such as Lewis Levy have had to lower prices to entice loggers to buy their timber.
"All this timber's available because everyone and his brother has beetle infestations," says Levy, who tends 50,000 acres of forest for Wachovia Corp. Based in Charlotte, N.C., the bank's investment arm manages $1 billion of forest land for pension funds, foundations and wealthy people. "It affects the investment enormously," Levy says.
For loggers, there has been a silver lining. At Foothills Forest Products, in Whitmire, S.C., profits have inched up since the outbreak. The company has been fielding seemingly nonstop requests for tree-cutting and has been able to buy wood more cheaply.
Gambling on purchases
But the beetle has also brought risks, says A.B. "Butch" Green Jr., a co-owner of the company. When Green bids on salvage sales, he can only guess at the exact mix of healthy and beetle-damaged timber, making the purchase a gamble.
Workers at mill gates have begun to scrutinize timber deliveries more closely for beetle damage. "If things aren't right," he says, "they turn back the whole load."
The blue-colored fungus carried by the beetle has forced Bowater Inc., an international paper company with a mill in Catawba, to use more bleach to process the glossy paper it sells to magazine publishers.
Barry W. Graden, the company's forestry official, worries that the bonanza of prematurely cut trees will mean fewer available for harvest during the next 10 to 15 years. "From our perspective, it's good and bad," he says. "Yes, the wood costs become less. But we realize that's a temporary thing."
The beetle is no longer an irritant to just a small group of landowners and forestry officials. At Clemson University, in the state's northwest corner, the beetle has invaded a 17,500-acre "experimental forest," disrupting several research projects, including a five-year study on making forests more fire-resistant.
At Harbison, a planned community of middle-class houses on the outskirts of Columbia, the state capital, the beetles have killed trees in back yards, toppling a few onto roofs and porches. (No one has been hurt this year; but seven years ago, a beetle-killed tree fell onto a state highway and impaled a minister.)
Residents drawn to Harbison by its leafy setting have balked at the idea of cutting trees as defense against a beetle that many had never heard of, says Ken Turner, the community's maintenance chief.
In Harbison State Forest, large-scale cutting has led some walkers and bicyclists to accuse state foresters of overkill. Mountain bikers recently spent six months designing a trail only to see it wiped out by loggers hired by the state forestry commission in the name of beetle-fighting.
"They're turning beautiful trails that run in and out of trees and over creeks into what basically looks like a new housing development," says Derek Everling, 40, a mountain biker from Columbia who organizes bike races through the forest. "It's absolutely like a nuclear bomb went off. You can't even find where the trail is anymore."
It was after one Sunday dinner in the early 1950s that Harold Wessinger's father-in-law, Bill Meetze, said he wanted Harold and Rosmarie Wessinger to inherit the pine groves he had managed since the 1930s.
Wessinger retired in 1989 with a decent pension from 33 years at South Carolina Electric & Gas. But Heritage Farms, as he calls it, was meant to afford an extra measure of comfort. "This was going to be our insurance policy," he says.
He was willing to give away his beetle-infested pines to any logger willing to cut and haul them away. The few who returned his calls were too busy with other beetle jobs. So Wessinger had to pay a friend $2,000 to tip over his pines with a bulldozer. Now they're rotting in piles in the scorching summer heat. "I'm the second man in a two-man race," he says.