He wasn't a successful man but he gave the impression of being one, and when he took us out to lunch I marveled at the peremptory tone with which he addressed the waiters, brisk unsmiling men in starched white aprons who, in that adult room of wood paneling and cigar smoke, thoroughly intimidated the lanky, nervous adolescent I then was.
Of the trees that haven't been destroyed, he said 85% are "heavily infested by one or more long-horned beetles" that bore into the wood of adult boswellia and eat them from the inside.