Having Everything Right (10 page)

Wind has shaped the ridge-stone into waves. Pine clump shapes the wind. Pine forms and conforms.

Cambium is incredibly thin and busy: one perimeter of life. Yesterday, I slit open a trout and found the ant-hatch packed inside. I saw one spider harnessed to a two-fathom filament riding the vacant wind up over redstone ridge. I tasted the crimson throng of wild currant in their spiny thicket. All this time, pine stood blind.

Below, in a bump of meadow, penstemon is touched by an emerald hummingbird, buzzing from bloom to bloom. Only wind carries pollen for pine. Tap a twig in spring, and pine speaks gold pollen like smoke. What makes pine so good-humored?

Five-needle clump; five-finger fist.

That one word with so many articulations—that word wind makes through pine: I whisper Spanish, Old English, Latin, and the common names of trees. Nothing is old enough.

By starlit snow, wind gusting to eighty, chill factor absolute, winter pine still grows, but slower.

Fir had a poor name in the early days. Back East, pine was king, while fir was working citizen. The first Northwest lumber merchants, loading planks of Douglas fir onto the decks of schooners bound for San Francisco and south, called the wood Oregon pine. The tree is still called Oregon pine in most European languages, though it is technically a spruce. As a final confusion, its scientific name means “false hemlock”:
Pseudotsuga
. To the Northwest innocent, it is simply the fir of the region. And it sold. When the California gold mines hungered, when San Francisco burned,
the forests of the Northwest trembled. When the tallest known Douglas fir was felled in 1895, they summoned the sheriff to witness the crime and measure the corpse: four hundred and seventeen feet. Soon this wood was famous. It grew straight and clean for masts—the first branch a hundred feet up the stem in a thick stand. Fir tests stronger than steel, pound for pound, and it grew close grained in abundant old-growth groves. Dan Miles, an old-time logger, told me how to fall a nine-foot tree with a six-foot saw. It's a matter of clever notches and a mother's patience, he said. Once the tree was down, Dan and his brothers had to split that log with dynamite to fit it through the gang saw at the mill.

Back in Philadelphia, you can push a black button outside the glass house guarding the Liberty Bell, and a voice will tell you history—how that bell was cast and how it cracked and how the crack reached up to split the word “Liberty” while the bell tolled for Washington's birthday. It's an old sweet story. In Oregon, at the Western Forestry Center in Portland, a pillar of plastic and cement (pretending to be a fir tree six-foot through) has been wired for light and sound. When a visitor fingers the right black button, the tree speaks: “Welcome, welcome. . . .” And the story gets told of xylem carrying water up and phloem carrying sugar down: lights ripple within the trunk like the river of this life. “I must admit that I am just a talking tree,” says the tree. “I can't even grow a single cell. All I can do is talk. Enjoy your visit, and remember me—the talking tree.”

The actual voice saying “remember me” is the voice of a local newscaster. When it speaks, the pillar's voice has the local ring of authority that has pushed hard news at us for years. There is a story that the newscaster's daughter worked at the desk beside the talking tree. All day, all summer, visitors came in waves. As the crowds listened, gazed up along the long trunk, opened their silent mouths, again and again she heard her father say, in his trance of authority, “Let's pretend I'm a real tree . . . remember me.”

The voice of an ancestor speaks rightly from a tree. At my home, the family tree is a literal sycamore. My grandmother gave it as a sapling: a stem crowned with a whorl of four branches for the four children. I am one. Now she has gone and it is giant shade, mossy with age, sprawling across the sky. Passing out the front door, we keep the custom of reaching out to touch its bark. It clatters in storms, and dumps mounds of dusty leaves. We stand against the trunk for photographs. (“There, that is Boppums in the background, the one dressed in lichen.”) We climb or loll in her shade, rake her leaves, watch her roots knee up to buckle the walk. When we chop up a heavy limb that rubbed on the roof, my grandmother's fire warms us. Through the screen in December: remember me. And my deepest sense of home includes that soft rushing sound of wind through tall old fir trees.

“Can you remember your work as a logger?” I asked Milo, an old bachelor living at eighty with his sister Cora. She was upstairs, sifting photographs to show me. I said to Milo, “Dan Miles tells me he filed saws on your crew—when was that, the twenties?”

First Milo gave me that customary silence of the old, that respectful hesitation. Then he said in a low voice, “When we worked big fir, I had a falling partner. He chopped left-handed, I chopped right, and that made us good partners. But you always have to brush out a trail to run. When the tree starts down, you're going to drop your saw and run. Before you spring-board up and start the undercut, your two fallers always brush out a trail apiece. Get that tangle-vine maple and other trash out of your way. Tree goes here—you go this way, he goes that.

“Had our trails clear, got up ten foot past the butt-swell on springboards, threw coaloil on the saw, and started that old misery whip back and forth. He was pulling hard that day, and I was bitching about it. ‘Pull steady, dammit!' So he evens out. We got the undercut sawed, and chopped her out, then took a break for lunch. He wasn't talking.
Trouble with his girl, maybe, trouble with his soul—I never did know. Silent break, and we went back at it silent. We were working a side canyon to ourselves. Real quiet, and that was odd. My partner usually talked along right with the saw. His talking muscle never got tired. But different that day.

“We climbed up to springboards again and started the backcut. Pretty soon we went out of view from each other—he swinging his board away as the saw went in, and he driving his own little wedge to keep the kerf open so the saw won't bind. You saw a while, and tap that wedge, and the wood hinge between your undercut and backcut slims down to a couple fingers through, and then she goes. It's then you tap the wedge and it slips in loose, the backcut kerf starts to open, the tree-hinge starts talking, and you jump. We dropped the saw, and jumped down right, and I started running out along my trail without a backward look. You got to just go like hell from those old ones. Any kind of widowmaker trash can fall from the sky. But he didn't run. I could hear he didn't, because that big tree coming down was quiet at first. When I turned around, he stood looking at me, stood where the tree would drop.

“‘Milo, you go on,' he says. Real quiet. There was that quiet before hell. ‘Go on,' he says.

“A big limb gets him, tears him open and knocks him aside, and then the tree's down in its own blow of splinters and dust. I run around the stump to where he lies. I held him in my arms god-damn. He's all split open. I could see his heart, was working. He didn't talk. I didn't talk. Nobody came, and he didn't last. Yeah, my partner. Accident, they said. He stood there. ‘Milo,' he says, ‘you go on.'”

Milo looked me in the eye. Cara came back into the room. There was nothing more to say that day.

Cedar rings like a bell when split, and a honey whisper rises from the riven shake. The plink of kindling, the clunk of fence rails struck from a
log—dressing cedar boards is light, loving work. “Behold, thou art fair, my beloved,” says the Song of Songs; “also our bed is green. The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.”

Makoto Imai, our teacher and Japanese builder of shrines, worked three hours before us to sharpen his tools before he hefted a rare beam of Port Orford cedar. “When you hold small tool,” he said to us, “get it balanced like your hand. Your whole body need be very quiet.” The room was quiet as he calligraphed the layout of a scarf-joint in the air before us with a tiny brush of crushed bamboo. We looked around. His tools lay before him on a simple plank—four saws, ten chisels, planes, a square, and the Japanese equivalent of a chalkline: a reel of silk thread with a turtle carved on it that sipped from the bowl of
sumi
ink. Behind him stretched years of exacting practice. He works for nothing sometimes, sleeping at the site of a slow-growing shrine. His tools showed more spirit than steel, more of karma than carpentry. Cedar does this to a listener.

Some read cedar for spirit, some read in it only the metaphor of value called money. So, cedar pirates abound. Moth doth not corrupt, rain doth not soften cedar. Clear heartwood redcedar asks a fair price, and all along the Pacific beach after each storm the big silver driftlogs have been tasted by a beachcomber's axe. A cedar pirate chips wood and sips the wind. If the smell is cedar, he'll be back with a truck, a chainsaw, and a winch. A good western redcedar log can lie damp in the Northwest woods for generations and still prove sound to the saws of the shingle-mill. A flatbed truck stacked high with fresh-cut bundles of cedar shingles will leave a trail of scent half a mile long. Following such a load as I spin down the freeway, I pop open the wind-wing and drink deep: sweet intoxication. The air in Pharaoh's tomb was magic, but cedar mixed with wind is food.

For the Kwakiutl, Nootka, Haida, Bella Bella, and other people of the Northwest coast, cedar bark and wood made rainproof hat, tasseled
cape, box for the dead, housepost face, tall tree carved to the masks of totem, rope to tether whales. When they paddled long cedar canoes boiling upriver, they pulled the wide cedar planks of their homes in rafts. In a Chinook story, when Coyote was trapped in a hollow cedar tree, he had to tear himself apart and slip out bone by bone through a woodpecker hole. But a raven made off with his eyes. Then Coyote tricked an old woman blind to steal back sight. He went off with her eyes, and she with a pair of wild rose leaves. But the story is not about Coyote, or the snail that old woman became, feeling her way along the ground forever. The story is about cedar. Coyote tried to be the spirit of a tree, and failed. Cedar held the life.

“Life is for doing things slow,” Makoto said, “like trees.” We learned much from this man, because he was humble, articulate as the figure in wood itself. He taught us with demonstrative movements more like dance than knowledge, and with a level gaze. His few words only confirmed what his working showed. “Learning with the body—slow, strong,” he said at one point, as he paused between chisel strokes. “Learning with the head—fast, easy to forget.” The long shaving fell away hesitant as lace from his blade. When others edged forward to touch the scarf-joint he had made, I bent to lift the shaving and hold it to my face, like a message I had inherited, breathing in deep.

Makoto wished his dovetail joint, his tenon fit to be tight as the integral growth of wood. He worked with a tree's patience. “In sharpening, in joinery,” he said, “you must use listening sound, trying to be concentrate. Must be quiet in the shop when you sharpen—talk, machine, it will not work.” He chose the tree of life: “If you are working for money, use maybe marking gauge; for yourself, a bamboo brush,
sumi
ink. That is the pleasure for your whole body, making a beautiful thing.”

Yew is a magic stick. When I was twelve, I found it lost in the barn. My nine cousins swung from the rope to perish in hay so deep it muffled
their laughter, rising as they did to play Kansas kamikaze again. From above, I watched them die and rise, in the freedom of the tribe of nine. I was one of four—expendable, yes, but not to the power of nine. And I was from Oregon: for all the glory of the barn, of summer Kansas, a little homesick.

Hid among the cluttered steamer trunks and Midwest history—letters from the Civil War, and horse gear mice inhabited—I found the magic stick: a short yew bow without a string. It was just my height, with a red heartwood belly and a perfectly thin sapwood back. There was a leather handle, and in dim dusty light my fingers followed the notches at the ends so neatly grooved with a rat-tail file—the nocks where a string should fit. I tested it against my knee. The bow was stiff, its limbs tapering hardly at all.

The real magic of the thing was not its strength, but its blemish. A few inches from one end, the wood took a sharp kink where the maker had followed the grain faithfully around a knot in the original tree. A lesser hand would have taken a saw to the blank, and cut straight through, losing strength for symmetry. My fingers curled around that kink. Someone understood the true crippled world could be stronger than plain beauty. Someone had followed the grain.

Someone was calling the nine, and they called for me. I came down the long ladder with the bow through my belt. “Oh, that,” said the nine, “that bow.” I was the finder. I felt I had a claim.

Inside the big house, in the swirl for a place at the sink to wash, my father said, “Let me see that bow.” In his hands it was real, and the big glass of the window shimmered in danger from the invisible arrow he pulled. His face tightened into the scowl for aim, and the nine stood back at bay, Uncle Bob and Mar saying, “Bill, your bow.”

It was his bow. He had cleft a billet from a bolt of Oregon yew, shaved it down with shards of glass, following the grain past that true kink, spliced the original linen bowstring, and sent this gift to the Kansas
cousins. When lives were shorter, people had time for such work. The bow lasted with the tribe the life of one string, and when the mice got that, the bow moved upstairs into the barn of history.

I felt that bow was a wood soul far from home. Shouldn't wood and I live where we began? The nine were generous. Driving west, in the back seat I held it: homeward cousin, Oregon yew.

What makes yew the living talisman of change? What makes it spry for bows and tuneful for the backs of lutes? Something in its tight red grain older than religion makes it right for killing and for music. Up the McKenzie River, just before the road from Sweet Home joins the highway for Sisters, yew trees huddle in a grove, north upslope. I always seem to get there just at dark, and snow lights the ground where I stand among them. The branches turn abruptly back on themselves like the rune named
yew
, the rune for death. I want to ask their twisted forms “Does it hurt so much, coming out of the ground?” I lean on a trunk. The pitchy berries are dull red, the flat needles still. Then starlight.