for Dylan Madenski
Four miles up a logging road in the Coast Range of southern Washington, there used to be a stand of ancient spruce and hemlock. On all sides of it were enormous clear-cuts — skidder-scarred, slash-burned, and replanted in the late sixties with the two-foot-tall monocrop the U.S. Forest Service and other logging companies like to call “trees.” Just across the road to the south was a thousand-foot-high, two-mile-long ridge that had also been clear-cut. In 1971, my big brother, Everett, and his fellow Wahkiakum County Work Camp cons — Vietnam draft resisters and illegal aliens, most of them — replanted this vast ridge.
Just a few days into their four months’ labor on it, Everett learned that our father was too riddled with cancer to travel anymore. The only chance Everett had of seeing Papa again, he realized, would be to escape and sneak home.
The Mexicans tried it all the time. Vaulting the work camp’s laughably low wall, sometimes in broad daylight, they’d make their way through the clear-cut hills and down into the relative anonymity of towns and cities. It was amazing how far even the old or overweight men could sometimes run. The guards loved them for it: a chance to use the dogs and off-road vehicles. But one in three of those men got away. My brother, a lifelong baseball nut, figured he had “a .333 shot at a farewell hug from Papa.” These seemed like good odds to him.
But Papa knew his eldest son well, and so asked him not to try to escape, not to come see him, even forced Everett to say out loud over the phone one of the last times they spoke, “I will not come. Yes, Papa, that’s a promise.”
It took our father many months to die — months Everett spent replanting that ridge and battling back and forth between his longing to see Papa and his promise not to try to escape. And all day, every day, that stand of ancient trees faced him across the valley.
They weren’t much to look at as you passed by on the road: just two hundred or so acres of shaggy trees in a sort of bowl on the side of a mountain; trees whose bark was marked with pink plastic tape and orange foresters’ graffiti, gaudily announcing impending doom. But on bright, clear days when there were no clouds in sight, a little patch of mist would gather over the bowl, just above the treetops. The bowl shape also sheltered the stand from Pacific gales, preventing the trees from becoming storm-topped, so that they grew unusually tall. So however humble they looked from the road, and however brief their future, they were an untouched patch of intact creativity — a patch of what the world chooses to be when humans have no say in the matter. And something about that manlessness called to Everett as he slaved on the ruined ridge.
“Imprisonment — the bluntness and harshness of it — would be unbearable,” my brother wrote us from the work camp, “if you didn’t learn to soften it by either training or tricking your mind. One prison favorite, for instance, is to make your confinement even tighter than your captors make it. Say you’re given a ten-foot cell. OK, fine, you think: I’ll use just six feet of it. That leaves four feet free to plant in imaginary beans or corn or alfalfa, four feet of unexplored wilderness in which to go wandering any day you choose.”
Everett grew skilled at such tricks. He learned to just laugh at the length and unfairness of his sentence. He found ways to turn his longing for his girlfriend and their newborn son — whom he’d never seen — into a furious energy that obliterated the pain and fatigue of tree-planting. He even held his own in the struggle, the thousand times Papa’s face passed through his mind, not to snap back into abject boyhood and run down off the ridge screaming, “Don’t die yet! Please, Papa! Not till you hold me.”
But the trees across the valley broke again and again through his mental defenses. The sight of that old grove made the ridge he was replanting more oppressive than a jail cell. Everett wasn’t the only one who felt this; as the weeks passed, all the cons reacted to the mist-topped trees in one way or another. One guy — oddly enough, a pacifist — said at least twice a day that he wished the loggers would whack down the whole grove. Everett knew what he meant: to have it gone would spare them its allure, its almost mocking beauty. Then there was the guy — a Jehovah’s Witness — who swore up and down, one quiet August morning, that he’d heard music coming from the trees. No one laughed at him. On the contrary, some dropped their hoedads and fir bundles cold, straightened their backs, and listened hard — till finally the guard noticed and snarled, “Get the fuck back to work.” Everett thought he’d heard something, too. Just the trickling, perhaps, of a tiny hidden stream — yet the urge to see that trickle sang in his blood.
It made no sense, really. His urge to explore the trees should have been nothing compared to his urge to see and touch his lover or son, his need to be with his dying father. Yet, with so many greater freedoms denied him, the one constraint Everett could not tolerate was his inability to drop his tree-planting tools and hike over into that grove, just for a half hour or so, to see what there was to see.
So, on the day he was paroled, Everett told his shocked lover not to come pick him up, not to bring the baby, and told us all not to surprise him, not to celebrate his release with him in any way. “Let me come to you,” he said. “I can’t explain. It’s just a feeling. But please, let me be.”
Say you’re given a ten-foot cell. OK, fine, you think: I’ll use just six feet of it. . . .
Thirteen months to the day after Papa died, Everett began his new life of freedom by going to visit the forbidden stand of trees.
A Greyhound dropped him, near midnight, in the logging town of Kashelweet, Washington. He slept in a plastic garbage bag in a clump of hydrangeas behind the combination hardware-grocery store. He woke when it rained at dawn and stayed inside his bag, shivering, till the store opened at seven, then bought a box of eight Hostess applesauce doughnuts, a quart of Rainier beer, and one ten-inch white emergency candle. With these items in hand, he hiked out of town.
On the way up the road he felt half sick to see three log trucks coming down, each loaded to the hilt with hemlock and spruce. But a few miles later his little grove eased, unscathed, into view. And as the clouds broke open and the October day grew bright, Everett saw once again that the only patch of mist for miles around was hovering over that bowl of ancient trees.
He’d been planning for months to climb the ridge to the south first — the ridge that he and the other inmates had planted in corporate fir. He’d hoped that by sitting up there awhile, looking cross-valley at the grove, he could recapture the old feelings of confinement and longing, then enter the grove to quell them. But the brush and scrub alder on the replanted ridge were shriveled — the result, most likely, of a little bargain-basement Agent Orange that Weyerhaeuser had snagged cheap from the government and sprayed to choke the weeds after the trees were planted. So Everett had no sane choice but to abandon his plan and enter the grove point-blank.
Just ten steps in, the light, filtered through two hundred vertical feet of life, turned an eerie undersea green. Several more steps in and the road and clear-cuts vanished behind him. And the softness beneath his feet, the silence of his footfalls on that nutrient-rich, fragrant, fern- and sorrel-covered loam, brought the reality of the place home to him: this was death he was walking on. No mistake. The smell, the softness, the cessation of sound: this was natural death.
It is hard for me to imagine any appearance of piety in an incorrigible old rebel like my eldest brother. This is a guy who called his first sex partner “the piece that passeth understanding”; a guy who calls Christians “POWs”: Prisoners Of Worship. But in the heart of that grove, Everett lit his white emergency candle and sat “like some credulous damn peasant,” as he put it, among the trees and logs and loam. He would have wept like a peasant, too, he said, if twenty-seven months of prison life hadn’t hardened his face into a plaster wall. Thanks to prison, he settled for sitting, munching applesauce doughnuts, and watching his candle burn. No bleeding-heart bullshit, no prayerlike mutterings, no beseechings or lamentations from Everett. He’d come a long way, after a long wait, to do a simple thing, so he shut up, sat down, and did it.
He looked around the grove, though, as his candle was burning, found himself bathed in the deep green light that had previously been denied him, and began to understand why that denial had hurt: to see, in such light, the sinuous sunward and soilward groping of trees and root wads was to read a kind of poetry — a poetry of gesture, straining upward and downward; of divided yearning, half for dark earth and half for sky and light. And in the midst of that two-way straining, there was nothing Everett had to reason out or believe or imagine in order to see life and death entwined, making a world together.
He couldn’t help but see, for instance, that his burning candle rested on the decaying body of a huge, pre-Columbian spruce. There had been no burial or burning or embalming of this tree’s body, no ritual to disguise its fall. The spruce lay in plain sight, and it lay lifeless. Yet all along its length, infant trees had sprouted: hundreds of them, rooting in the nutrients the tree had amassed during its six- or seven-hundred-year life, feeding like piglets along the supine body of a thousand-nippled sow. What those trees are feeding on, Everett realized as he ate his doughnuts, is a corpse.
And with this thought, things began to happen. With this thought the memory of our father entered my brother’s head so powerfully that he knelt. “Not to pray,” he was careful to point out later. “It just hurt. Just felt like a shut-up-and-kneel situation. And it still felt odd. So while I was kneeling, I popped open the quart of Rainier.”
But to kneel, even beer in hand, in light that reaches you only after sifting down through two hundred feet of life; to smell the freshly crushed sorrel and feel your kneecaps sink into ton upon ton of dark, death-rich loam; to see insect, plant, and tree life springing from that loam, to see constant composition springing from constant decomposition, is not at all like kneeling on church linoleum or cathedral flagstone or even in the dust behind home plate. This was a new kind of kneeling for Everett.
And it takes a ten-inch emergency candle a very long time to burn. Time enough, in my brother’s case, to forget just who he was or wasn’t, and what he did or didn’t believe. Time enough to forget, for instance, after kneeling “like some credulous damn peasant,” not to take solace in that same peasant’s feelings and beliefs. Everett knew damned well that the living and dead can’t just meet when they please in some kind of middle realm. He knew that, even if they could, a remnant stand of trees in a corporate rape site is no such realm. He knew, as he began madly washing down doughnuts and strange peasant feelings with beer, that the loss of a loved one was a slammed door, a locked gate, a termination. Yet neither beer nor this knowledge could stop him, in the end, from actually mumbling a few outright peasant sentences. For instance:
“Papa, I’m back.”
As if he had knelt in the ancient trees before.
And as if his father — who’d never even seen those trees — had never left them.
“I’m back,” the candle, beer, prison, green light, root wads, spruce log, and silence made him say. “And I kept my worthless promise. I didn’t try to see you. So now I can’t. Ever.”
Trying to sound strong and caustic, he added, “Are you happy now?” But his voice broke like an old stick over the words. And after speaking them he paused — pure peasant again — actually waiting for some word or sign in reply.
Of course, he heard nothing. Or nothing but wind moving through a billion spruce and hemlock needles, and a tiny creek some cons once mistook for music as they stood on a nearby ridge. Just wind, and a creek. But at the sight of the spruce log before him, using all the structural integrity of its vertical centuries to support, in death, one silly candle and a thousand green children, Everett’s prison-wall face began to slowly crumble, till he heard himself declaring to the candle and to the dead log and to the still palpable integrity of a vanished father, “I kept my goddamn promise, and now I’ll never see you. That’s where promise keeping gets you! That’s my fucking reward. And it was wrong of you to make me promise, wrong of me to keep it — it stinks, it sucks, you were wrong! Because now . . .” Another stick broke. “Now, God damn it, Papa . . .” And another. “Now you’re gone. . . .”
Yet even as my brother sang his honest heartbreak, his chest was heaving, his eyes were streaming, and the soul he swore to No God he didn’t own was slamming up and down in him like a salmon’s tail in its spawning bed. And he felt a gone father’s spruce-sized pride — in him. “I’m not happy!” he told that pride. “Not one bit!” he lied to himself and to his father.
“But you are, aren’t you?” he finally whispered as the wind moved through the billion needles and the unseen creek played its notes. “You are,” he repeated, listening, then faintly nodding. And trapped, fifty-fifty, in his joy and his sorrow, trapped between the death-loam and the endless rising life, he could say no more.
“Just Wind, and a Creek” is excerpted from David James Duncan’s collection of stories River Teeth. © 1995 David James Duncan. It appears here by permission of Doubleday.
— Ed.
