Barkskins (91 page)

“And that's the allure,” she went on. “The slippery composition of ecosystems in general. It is uncomfortable to live in a spinning world of hallucinatory change. But how interesting it is.”

Tom Paulin leaned forward. Felix thought he had loosened up since dinner—maybe it was the wine. “I'm thinking about the other end of the Amazonian stick—not the hyperdominant species but the rarities. The extinct species. I'm thinking about ‘dark diversity.' Like dark matter.”

“Dark diversity?” Felix liked the sound of this.

“A little like absent presence—when you pry a sunken stone from the ground the shape of the stone is still there in the hollow—absent presence. Say there is a particular rare plant that influences the trees and plants near it. Say conditions change and our rare plant goes extinct and its absence affects the remaining plants—dark diversity.”

“But if conditions change again will the absent plant return?” asked Jeanne. “Are you saying extinction is not forever?”

“Sit next to me in the van tomorrow and we'll figure out dark diversity
and
dark matter. Right now I need sleep.” He thought that she was not pretty but she had that soft beautiful skin color. And feelings. And a mind.

•  •  •

No one could sleep under such a moon. Its bitter white light destroyed repose. It was like acid poured over the landscape, seeping into every crevice.

•  •  •

Felix thought first of soil types, then of the unborn millions of tree cutters to come. And Sapatisia's emphasis on how enormously important the work was, not just a job but a cause, a lifework. He had listened to Onehube—was this the big thing he, Felix, could do? A drowsy thought swam to the surface—he might now actually be doing it—forest work. Had he gotten around the barrier of college and even the university? Yes, he was at the edge of the forest. This was his start. They could not pull him back.

•  •  •

And Jeanne felt a stream of joy like a narrow sun ray breaking through heavy overcast, a sense that in this one day her life had become filled with leafy meaning. Because of Sapatisia Sel.

•  •  •

Tom Paulin in his travel-worn sleeping bag was remembering Afghanistan and lost comrades, men welded tightly by searing experiences that outsiders could never understand. There was dark diversity for you. He found civilian life unbearably lonely; he tasted the sour flavor of belonging nowhere but with the old broken group, forever stitched to each other like parts of a coat—the loneliness of a ripped-out sleeve, he thought. And then at Seeley Lake he had found the larches. Running from suicidal despair he had joined a work crew in an old-growth larch forest where lightning storms fried the summer skies. The Indians had burned underbrush to encourage grassy meadows for deer, but in the last century thickets of Doug fir crowded out larch sprouts. He touched one tree's soft needles. A thought, unbidden, came—that one of his lost friends was inside that young tree. The burn of anxious grief for that fallen friend began to soften. The work crew had fired the built-up fuel load around the old larches, and the next year seedlings surged up in their thousands. He went on to different forests and in each of the young trees he saw the brothers he had lost. The more seedlings he planted, the more of them he resurrected.

•  •  •

Sapatisia tossed on her bed in the sleeping loft where once fishermen had stored their gear. It emitted a faint odor of stale bedding and old wool, of ancient seaboots and the wood handles of scaling knives. Every place in the world, she thought, had its own distinctive smell. The smell of old Mi'kma'ki must have been wet stones, sea wrack, pine and spruce, mellowing needle duff under the trees, a smell of salted wind and sassafras, of river fish and the people who lived in it, hair and limbs cleansed in the ever-flowing aromatic air. She rolled onto her side and looked down through a gap in the floorboards and saw moonlight shining on the teacups. She turned again and looked at the glowing sea.

Her thoughts surged like the bubbles rising up the sides of a boiling pot. Nothing done. Everything still unsaid, nothing ready. She had not yet told them of the dangers, that forest restoration workers were attacked and killed, that any kind of interruption to the profitable destruction of forests invited reprisal. She had not mentioned the floods of propaganda and lies that would drown them. She had not told them about the devouring fires, the rich peat-bog carbon mass of the boreal Canadian forests that burned hotter than those of Eurasia, the uncontrollable crown fires were changing the earth's albedo. In the morning she had to tell them.

New thoughts rushed in. Would they work as a group? Not everyone was suited to the life. She thought Felix would be good—he was hungry for the work. Tom Paulin was her rock, he would carry this group—if he stayed alive. Jeanne might be the finest kind once she found her way. Wait and see. Hugdis would leave in November. And there was Charlene, Charlene sulking again over some imagined wrong. And Mayara—no, she did not want to remember, she would not! But there was Mayara, rising in her memory, dark mestizo activist Mayara, sister, daughter, lover. Yes, and beautiful, too. And the treacherous memory would not stop there but leapt to Mayara on the day she had taken the foreign journalist to see a savagely destructive cut in a protected sanctuary, red mahogany logs lying on the ground, the butts still wet, when the cutters returned carrying guns instead of chain saws. As if they had known. Of course they had known. It was over in seconds, short bursts of gunfire. The photographs had shown Mayara cut in half, folded as though she were trying to kiss her own knees. Her knees! Her beautiful brown, rounded knees.

There followed ten terrible days as Sapatisia and Alfred Onehube staggered through a minefield of pain, confessions of betrayal, grief like a heated knife, until their throats were raw, until they were both exhausted by the enormity of what they had lost. And crushing this was the knowledge of another loss so great it obliterated personal dissolution. For after the divorce she had gone to the ice.

•  •  •

On the Greenland glaciers with ice scientists she suffered a full-force shock of recognition—the coming disappearance of a world believed immutable. She had heard for years that the earth and its life-forms were sensitive to slight temperature changes, that species prospered and disappeared as weather and climate varied, but dismissed these alarms as environmental determinism. On the ice her thinking shifted as the moon shifts its position in the sky. Historical evidence and the intense scrutiny of contemporary changes sent signals like fiery arrows; the earth was exquisitely sensitive to solar flares, the shadow of volcanic ash, electromagnetic space storms, subterranean magma movement. All her life she had assumed polar ice was a permanent feature of earth. She had not understood. “My God, how violently it is melting,” she had whispered to herself. Great fissures thousands of feet deep opened by meltwater that eroded the hard blue ice, fissures that gaped open to receive the cataract's plunge, down to the rock beneath the great frozen bed, forcing its under-ice way to the sea, lubricating the huge cap from below. Standing near the brink of one ghastly thundering abyss someone said, “We are looking at something never before seen.” That night, back at the camp, everyone admitted being shaken by the living evidence.

“A great crisis is just ahead,” said one scientist. “What we saw this last week—” he muttered. Sapatisia Sel thought he meant that they had been looking at human extinction. She wanted to cry out, “The forests, the trees, they can change everything!” but her voice froze in her throat.

•  •  •

The ice had frightened her badly and the next day she called him from the airport: “Can't we try again? Can't we fix what we broke? I need to be with you. Our lives and our work. I understand now that the work is the most important thing.” Onehube had said—“Some broken things can't be fixed.”

•  •  •

She, Sapatisia Sel, was here now and she hadn't given up, but she had to sleep, had to, had to sleep. “What can I do but keep on trying? But what if it was all for nothing? What if it was already too late when the first hominid rose up and stared at the world? No!” What she and so many others were doing was working, it had to work. So many people trying to repair the damage, so selfless many of them caring and trying. And the forests themselves trying to grow back. “Oh God,” she groaned, “oh God! Put out the moon!”

In the eastern quadrant of the sky the moon was small and very white and its impersonal brilliance showed the rocky coast, ravaged forests, silent feller bunchers, a black glowering mass of peat bog and spiky forest like old negatives. It showed Onehube's white-knuckled grip on the steering wheel. The sea lifted itself toward the light. And kept on lifting.

It is not possible to list all of the people who helped with suggestions and resources during the work on
Barkskins,
but here are a few of the many.

Portions of two chapters appeared in somewhat different form in
Brick
and
The New Yorker.

The writing of this book was supported in part by a Ford Fellowship and United States Artists, and in part by my publisher Scribner. Parts of this work were written during a residency in the International House of Literature Passa Porta (Brussels) as part of the program Residences in Flanders and Brussels, organized by the literary organization Het beschrijf and the Department of Culture of the Flemish Community of Belgium. Special thanks to Ilke Froyen and the Passa Porta staff and their excellent bookstore. Thanks also to Isolde Bouten, who gave me a first taste of speaking and hearing and reading Nederlands. I am grateful to my publisher Erik Visser of De Geus, and my editor Nele Hendrickx, for their encouragement and scrutiny of my dictionary Dutch.

Writer Jenny and musician Laughton Pattrick, friends and guides, tui enthusiasts, exemplars of joie de vivre took me into the rich Wilton's Bush (a.k.a. Otari) forest reserve in Wellington to see rimu, totara, kahikatea, rewarewa, tree ferns—a moist forest world of yesteryear. The New Zealand Maritime Museum Library and Archives was helpful. Betty Nelley, Curator, and Andrea Hemmins, Collections Manager of the Kauri Museum, Matakohe, Northland, were welcoming and enormously helpful. I enjoyed the help of Rita Havell, Research Librarian at the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. Karren Beanland of the Michael King Writers' Centre helped with information and connections. One of those connections was Liz Allen, a center trustee, who took several days from her busy schedule to drive me up to the Hokianga to visit kauri museums and one of the few remaining kauri forests. In the Hokianga, Betty Nelley of the stunning Kauri Museum arranged a night foray into the forest to see the great trees by moonlight. Our guide was Kyle Tuwhekaea Ranga Chapman, who added to the drama of the experience with flute, bull-roarer, chant, story and lurid denunciations of stoats and possums that prey on kiwis.

Grateful thanks to Roger Lewis, Mi'kmaw scholar, Curator, archaeologist, ethnologist and mesmerizing raconteur, of the Nova Scotia Museum: Museum of Natural History, for reading parts of the novel and explaining the importance of rivers to Mi'kmaw people. And thanks to my sister Roberta Roberts, who spent a week with me in that province.

The encouragement and support of my agent, Liz Darhansoff, and editor, Nan Graham, carried through several time extensions. I am grateful to Susan M. S. Brown for Herculean labors on the manuscript and for arranging three hundred years' worth of characters in an understandable family tree. It would have killed me to do this hard job. Cheryl Oakes, Librarian at the Forest History Society, came up with hard-to-find articles and references, and Cort Conley of the Idaho Commission on the Arts helped with books on western logging. In Vermont, Dr. John P. Lawrence aided me with some characters' medical details. Artist David Bradley of Santa Fe linked me to reports on the struggles of indigenous forest people forced out of their traditional territory by logging, cattle ranching, palm oil farms and mining. I found many scarce books through the myriad booksellers who list their wares on AbeBooks, and of course the indispensable Internet, especially the Google search engine, brought many obscure personalities and events to the surface. Coe Library at the University of Wyoming was my starting point for many scarce or hard to find books. Thanks also to Morgan Lang for help with the technical end of handling a large manuscript.