- Bruce Spencer ’64, ’68G
Despite rain and overcast skies, Bruce Spencer ’64, ’68G, recently retired chief forester at the Quabbin Reservoir, happily donned the hat of teacher to show me some museum-quality trees. As we entered the watershed that he’s tended for 40 years, Spencer offered steady commentary in a pleasing swamp-Yankee accent. “We’re on one of the original roads. . . . There’s an old tavern, note the foundation. . . . I did my first lumber sale over there.”
We parked and Spencer headed on foot down a slight incline while I tried to keep up. A short hike later, opposite a little drumlin, we stopped.
“Here we are,” he said.
Before us rose an impressive stand of trees, one that had escaped the 1938 hurricane. “These are mostly white pines, the king’s trees,” he said. “Much sought in colonial times for ships’ masts, several hemlocks, a few red oaks.” Each stood well over 100 feet high, many with 30-inch diameters; all reached for space in the canopy and traced their origin to the Civil War era.
Spencer stopped talking. The only sound was raindrops. His reverence for these trees—for nature’s cathedral all around us—filled the spaces in between.
“Want to see the tallest single-stem white pine here?” he asked. Back in the car, we retraced our route. “Here it is.” He pointed to a much larger tree. This one had a 49-inch diameter and stood at least 150 feet tall. “It’s still growing,” he said, approvingly. His silence told me that this is a hallowed place, one deserving our best care, the utmost respect.
“The forest comes first,” Spencer likes to say, advice he has given to scores of visitors, from Hokkaido University students to mayors from Honduras, as well as future foresters from UMass Amherst, Harvard, and Yale who have come to him over the years to learn how a first-class forest is managed.
This was my second meeting with Spencer. A month earlier I had visited his home near the watershed. I heard the sound of his tractor and the load of firewood he was hauling before I saw him. I already knew from Thom Kyker-Snowman ’87G, one of the UMass Amherst foresters he hired, that Spencer doesn’t own a tie, prefers to be in the woods rather than at a desk, and is now working with the America Chestnut Foundation to reintroduce to the Quabbin and this nation’s woods a blight-resistant cultivar of the handsome Castanea dentate. I learned that Spencer had accrued more than 3,000 hours of sick leave in his four decades of employment and that he knows the Quabbin Watershed like the back of his own hand.
When he started at the Quabbin in 1965, then a 23-year-old graduate student working on his second forestry degree, Spencer possessed the requisite experience—surprising for someone so young. His family owned a woodlot near Fall River, and from his earliest years, he felt at home there. “I always had woods. I always loved woods,” he said. “It was a place I liked being in. And the beauty.”
There’s a story Spencer enjoys telling: During his first sale at the family woodlot (he was just 15 at the time) one of the loggers tried to take a tree he hadn’t marked for sale, no doubt thinking this kid didn’t know anything about trees. But Spencer did know his trees, and “I ran him off,” he remembers. It was an experience that served him well in dealing with Quabbin loggers in the more than 1,000 timber sales he conducted over the years. They learned to do things his way: no shortcuts, all slash removed, corduroy-wood roads laid over the soft spots in the forest, only the trees marked to be taken.
Part of the Spencer legend is that he was asked to start immediately, and this is not an exaggeration. Fred Hunt ’60, whom Spencer succeeded, was slated for a job with the federal government. He gave Spencer a one-day introduction to his new responsibilities. (One of these was to complete Hunt’s Management Plan, an inventory taken every 10 years of trees six inches or more in diameter; Spencer would finish Hunt’s, then complete three of his own plans in the next 40 years.)
“I was the first person the Metropolitan District Commission bumped into. It was pure luck, being in the right place at the right time,” says Spencer in his characteristically modest way. Those who have observed him over the years see it differently. He was the right forester in the right place at the right time—a big difference. His legacy is the lasting evidence.
Spencer’s philosophy of watershed management helped to maximize the natural filtering capability of the Quabbin’s foreset, one of the main reasons its water is rated as “ultra-oligotrophic,” a technical term meaning of very high quality. Quabbin water is rated as among the very best unfiltered water in America, and the land surrounding it the best watershed in the country. On both counts it’s ahead of the Croton reservoir north of New York City that supplies water to that metropolis. And don’t even think about comparing it to the water in Philadelphia, which is both filtered and chlorine-enhanced. You might get used to it, but unlike Quabbin water, it tastes neither good nor pure.
Spencer’s management of the forest in the watershed is the reason for the water quality. Forty years ago, the Quabbin contained an estimated 127 million board feet of standing trees. In his tenure Spencer oversaw the logging of 150 million board feet (of this number he personally marked 50 million board feet). When he retired, Spencer left an astounding 593 million board feet of standing trees. Under his management the timber in the watershed more than quintupled. It was in keeping with one of his guiding principles: “Leave the forest better than when you started.”
Spencer was honored as a Distinguished Alumnus of the Department of Natural Resources Conservation at a dinner this past May. He summed up his work this way: “We [foresters] need to make our work really count, step by step, hour by hour, day by day, week by week, month by month, year by year, decade by decade. Everything we do has to count.” Bruce Spencer lived that philosophy daily for 40 years at the Quabbin Reservoir, and the residents of Massachusetts are the better for it.
