In Hungary, Karl Peter Kirk goes in search of the mysterious disappearing forest
I should have known something was amiss even before winter began. As I drove home from Budapest to the countryside, twilight mixing with the autumn mists, strange figures began to appear in my headlights and sway to the side of the road, under the burden of heavy sacks.
Like most village lads who once longed for big city life, I’d had my fill of the bar-filled nights and smog-filled city days of Berlin, Budapest and Bucharest and so a decade ago moved out to a tiny Hungarian village, nestled in dense forests, 50km north of the Hungarian capital. Perhaps it reminded me of my original home, near the remnants of the forests where Robin Hood once roamed.
As each day passed, the number of misty figures increased – the heavy sacks had been replaced by wheelbarrows stacked with swaying heaps of dead wood from the verges, forcing me to nurse the car out of the deep grooves in the tarmac left by decades of overweight trucks. Meanwhile, the radio news gave
me insight into the occurrence of these figures – the price of gas was rising: 80 per cent, 15 per cent, 10 per cent, and so in the village the chainsaws had started to come out of the sheds.
‘Did you hear about the tree branch that crushed that car?’ my neighbour asked me one day.
‘No, was there a storm last night?’ I asked, confused.
‘Don’t be silly!’ she said: ‘they were stealing it.’
‘The car?’
‘No, the branch.’
The couple in the car survived, but it was a sign that the ghostly figures I could see on the road, were onto something – and it was turning into big business.
I often go down to the woods with my dog and a few weeks later I was assured of a very big surprise. I did not see a teddy bears’ picnic but I did not see any trees either. An entire section of the forest had disappeared and the thieves had left nothing but hacked stumps to show where the thriving wood had been.
A local forester told me how the
forestry agency had bought quad bikes for the local police to hunt down the wood thieves. But the prowlers were a step ahead. They stretched wires between the trees to drag the officers off their quads or used ex-police tyre traps to block the trails. The forester had even heard reports of the thieves shooting at his colleagues who approached them.
By November 2008, the police were taking action against nearly 1,000 individuals in one eastern county alone. Last year, in the same county, 10,000 cubic metres of wood disappeared without trace. But unless the thieves are caught with a chainsaw in their hands, prosecutions are difficult to pursue.
And the thieves themselves are hard to pin down. In some areas organised crime groups have emerged, buying areas of forest in the name of a homeless person, paying a few dollars for their signature, then leaving gangs free to decimate the forests without fear of prosecution.
Others like ‘Gyula’, who I met through a friend in the village, live in near-poverty, sharing a room in his sister’s house with his wife and four children.
Even this close to the capital, the fact that Gyula is a Roma gypsy means that his chances of finding regular work are slim.
‘I can’t pay for gas and I need to feed my family,’ he says, proudly showing off his newly converted, Russian-made, old Lada car. It has jacked-up rear suspension and its underbody has been sealed with steel plates, so it slides along the forest floor almost like a boat, without getting stuck.
‘These cars can only stand a few trips, but then I sell them for scrap and it’s hardly cost me anything,’ Gyula adds.
But he claims his customers are not from among the other unemployed Roma in the village. ‘The rich people come from miles around in their SUVs to buy my cheap wood,’ he says: ‘My son’s learning about the internet at school and he’s made me a homepage that’s already bringing in orders from the other side of Budapest.’
And the forest?
‘It’ll grow back one day, won’t it,’ Gyula says, with only the slightest hint of doubt in his voice.
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