Last night the hemlock tried to nail the house again. This time it failed. We live in an area that is mixed rural and forest. Just down the street is the river, and across the river is an escarpment that’s the outlier of the Cascades. Western Hemlock, Douglas Fir, and Big Leaf Maple are the most common big trees here, with scattered alder and cottonwood in the understory, especially of disturbed land. The trees used to grow big here—we started as a logging and milling town until we ran out of trees, then switched to agriculture—hops and dairy as the most common. Now we still have some dairy farms, but…