Sometimes the world hands us metaphors too startling to ignore. A week ago, awaiting takeoff to Alaska on the tarmac of Seattle-Tacoma Airport, a man turned to me and announced he was a seasonal Alaskan logger. Big and bulky and built, his arms golden and glistening and indicating the particular attributes of a man in youth — a tattoo for the Chicago Cubs, and another of a bulldog — he told me this summer would mark his third in Ketchikan, cutting and hauling timber for one of the nation’s largest logging companies.

“You have to picture it,” he said. He stretched his hands out in the air between us. A giant crane, he explained, with knee-thick cables heaved logs larger than most houses high above the forest, high above his head, practically in the clouds, swinging them up and over the forest before lowering them into a boat.

“The biggest boat,” he says, “you’ve ever seen.”

The trees are Sitka spruce, primarily, and they come from the Tongass Forest, nearly 17 million acres that comprise the world’s largest contiguous temperate rain forest and that span the entire Alaskan panhandle. Some of these trees — the trees whose job it is for this man to fell — are more than 1,000 years old, but they are also, it turns out, the finest source timber for musical instruments: guitars, primarily, but also pianos and violins and musical instrument soundboards. That is because of their clean resonance.