Falling From Grace (6 page)

“Faye.” Roger Payne rattled down the wooden steps, a wide smile on his boyish ruddy face, hand extended. “Chasing bugs again?” Roger, a transplanted New Zealander, lived in Duncan, the closest town, his wife pregnant, their third baby due in November. The day we met, he, like most people, appeared embarrassed and uncomfortable beneath a polite veneer, but over the time spent mapping out our buffer site together we'd become friendly. “What brings you all the way out here?”

“Did you get my email?”

“Haven't checked yet today.”

“We found timber marks on one of our study trees inside the park boundary. Any idea why?”

“In the park?” His surprise seemed genuine.

“Yes. Our oldest tree. A seventy-metre cedar.”

He took off his cap and scratched the top of his head.

“There's a woman at our camp who says she's here for a protest.” I watched him for a failure to meet my eyes, the clearing of his throat. “And one of your trucks just about ran me off the road on my way out here, loaded, coming out of the upper valley. You weren't going to log in there until the park issue was resolved.”

“Oh that.” He laughed and I heard it—the catch—the microscopic hesitation in his response. He folded his cap in half and flapped it in and out of his palm. “We're taking a few loads out above the canyon. Keeping the guys working. We have a permit. Nothing to worry about.”

“I respect your right to log, but my study relies on intact stands of old-growth at least five hundred metres from disturbance. We agreed on my long-term plots and the buffer. I can't lose those trees. Will you find out about the tag and let me know what's going on?”

“You bet.” He shoved the offending hat into the back pocket of his jeans.

“I'd appreciate that,” I answered, but his words didn't ease the knot that had formed in my stomach at the sight of the timber marking. “Soon.”

“Sure, but don't worry your head over it. I'm sure it's nothing.”

I wanted to believe him, he'd always been one of the nice guys in the company. I turned to go, then caught myself. I'd forgotten my manners. “How's your family?”

“You should see Pam,” he said with a broad grin. “She's a house. I think it must be triplets.”

On my way back to camp and halfway through the clear-cut, I pulled over to allow another oncoming logging truck loaded with old-growth cedar logs to pass. I brooded over Roger's twitchy reaction to my questions.
A few loads?
Were they taking them all out in a day? High grading the best and the biggest trees? I stepped on the gas and steered the car through a puddle. Mud and water sprayed up from the wheels onto the rear window, obscuring the view of the clear-cut behind.

• • •

Over dinner
—chicken and vegetable stew minus the chicken—we learned a few facts about Mary. She was on her own, for one.

“No, I don't have a husband. Or a boyfriend,” she explained with temerity and no apparent discomfort about the lack of a father for her children. “A woman has all a child needs.”

“What do you do for money?” I asked, skeptical about her sincerity.

“I don't believe in money,” she said, polishing off a second plate of our stew. “We go to the food bank and live in a room in a group house for a work trade. Rainbow and I clean the house once a week and keep the veggie garden, don't we, honey?”

“I'm home-schooled,” Rainbow crowed, hopping on one foot on a stump. “Want to hear me count to a hundred? One two skip a few ninety-nine a hundred,” she chanted in time with each hop.

Mary's idealism reminded me of my mother, forever a cause on the go. Grace had dragged my brothers and me around from protest to protest for most of my childhood: the annual peace march, the anti-nukes campaign—save the seals, save the oceans, save everything. When Grace campaigned to send money for starving children in Africa, we had eaten porridge three meals a day for a week. “It's more than they have, and without a nice home. No complaining.” She'd cajole me and my brothers into donating our allowance to charity: Vietnamese boat people, rebels in Guatemala, flood victims in Bangladesh, and when word of an impending energy crisis reached her ears, she turned off the heat and, while we sat around the living room in our winter coats, explained how contributing to the oil-hungry western war machine was a sin. My father, Mel, disappeared during these times, taking refuge in his office at the community college where he taught math, working late in warm comfort with the cafeteria down the hall and a coffee machine outside his office door. I don't recall Mel ever standing up to my mother. I don't recall him ever standing up to or for anything. Including his daughter. When I would run home in tears from school, distraught at the teasing, he'd turn away, his reaction hidden behind thick glasses, and I would dry my face and pat him on the knee. “Don't worry, Dad, I'll figure it out.”

Paul disappeared to the dug latrine behind an upturned root wad. Mary floated off to bed with Cedar asleep in her arms and Rainbow slid across the log to sit beside me. I nursed a cup of tea and tried to ignore her.

“Would you fix Tracey?” she asked, her dirt-smudged face tilted up with anticipation.

“Who's Tracey?”

“She.” Rainbow held up the black plastic doll.

“What's wrong with her?”

“A bear bit her on the foot.”

I took the tiny figure in my hand. “Why do you think I can fix her?”

“You're a doctor.”

“Not a medical doctor.”

She took the doll back. “What kind of doctor?”

“Doctor of philosophy in forest ecology. I went to school for a long time.”

“Are you a tree doctor? Can you fix trees?”

“No, I don't fix trees, I study them.”

“You are like me.”

“I'm not a kid,” I replied.

“I know.” She slid her hand onto my knee. “But we both love trees.”

• • •

The next
day Paul found two more timber markings on trees in our buffer zone. After eight hours in the canopy, we returned to camp, dirty and tired.

“Roger insisted it was a mistake?” Paul stacked samples into a waterproof bin.

“That's what he said.” I pulled off my muddy boot and moaned with pleasure at the release.

“He's a company man.” Paul snorted. “A peon.”

“I'll have to drive over to talk to him again.” I sighed, another morning of sampling lost.

Paul put a pot of water on the stove for pasta. I set up my laptop—the battery freshly charged on the drive to the
PCF
camp—to transcribe entries from my field notebook into a database, our study too far along to risk losing data. Why would the company go after our study trees? It couldn't be a mistake. They had maps. I stopped typing and pondered the growth rings on the stump. The buffer kept our study site pure, dark and quiet, light subdued, the earth muffled in deep layers of litter and decomposed organic matter. Let in more light and species would be displaced by others that preferred sunnier, drier conditions. I watched the passage of a spider across its web strung between a branch of salal and the bark of one of the large hemlocks next to me. The delicate strands shone silver-gold, illuminated by a shaft of evening sun. Would the spider survive a disruption to its simple existence, at risk from a few extra rays of sun each day, a few millimetres less rain in a year? I turned my attention back to the computer screen and typed a quote from a colleague in Washington State.
Unlike people, trees give back so much and require little in return.

6

A second
trip to
PCF
's yard the next morning proved futile, the trailer empty, Roger's pick-up nowhere in sight, a hand-scrawled note taped to the door.
Baby on the way. Back in a few days.
Rain pelted onto the windshield on the return drive to camp. The wipers slapped back and forth on high speed, the defroster on full to keep the window clear. I stopped in clear-cuts along the way three times to try calling the company regional office on my cell phone but couldn't get a decent signal.

The rain had lifted by the time I reached the bridge. Five mud-spattered vehicles were parked at the trailhead and I squeezed my car into a narrow spot ahead of them. The number of vehicles surprised me and I hoped they belonged to hikers travelling through, the idea of more strangers depressing. I walked the trail to the edge of camp and stopped in mid-step, stunned by the transformation. Eight tents, two tarps, and a second outdoor kitchen had sprouted up in my absence, the ground littered with stacks of boxes and equipment, people everywhere.

Rainbow tripped over a log in her hurry to reach me. She scrambled to her feet, cheeks flushed, hair in her eyes. “Dr. Faye. They came, the tree-saver people came.”

I went in search of Paul. Rainbow straggled behind, chattering non-stop. We found him with Mary and Cedar, staking down the fly on a large purple and white tent.

“Paul, what the hell's going on?” I demanded.

A fleeting cloud of guilt crossed his face before he offered his most disarming smile. “They showed up an hour ago.”

“And you said they could set up here?”

“I didn't have much choice,” he argued. “It's a public park.”

“Dr. Pearson?” A head appeared in the door of the tent and a young man, dressed in a fleece vest, long-sleeved shirt, and cargo pants laden with multiple pockets crawled out. “You're Dr. Pearson?” he stammered.

“I'm her.” I groaned inside at the all-too-familiar reaction. “Is there a problem?”

“No, I wasn't aware . . .” His voice trailed off and he struggled to his feet.

“That I was a dwarf?”

“Yes . . . I mean no. I didn't expect . . .” His clean-shaven face flushed scarlet under his tan.

“And you are?”

“Terry. Sorry.” The man wiped his palms on the seat of his pants, crouched until eye level, and focused on the middle of my forehead. “Terry Seybold from
AFC
.” He held out his hand. “My apology for the intrusion. We weren't aware you were here. Paul said you wouldn't mind . . . considering the cause,” he added.

I ignored his extended hand and glared at Paul, who grinned sheepishly and lifted Cedar from Mary's arms.

“I'm not sure why you're here. I talked to Pacific Coast a few days ago and they assured me we have nothing to worry about.”

“We understand the company plans to cut the upper valley this summer and fall,” Terry said. “All of it.”

“They can't,” I insisted. “He explained they were only taking out a few truckloads.”

“Can't they?” He riffled around in a box on the ground and pulled out a photocopied sheet of paper. “Here's a copy of their licence to cut, issued last week.”

I took the paper from him and tried to focus on the text, distracted by the thought of blue slashes of paint on my trees, my life coming apart like the interwoven strands of a severed climbing rope. One by one.

• • •

Paul spent
a third night in my tent. He claimed he couldn't find anyone else willing to accommodate Mary and her children.

“Oh?” I zipped my bag to my chin. The splat of raindrops on the tent fly promised another cold, wet night. “I'll need to drive to Duncan tomorrow to call the
PCF
office. I'll take them to the bus tomorrow. I can't imagine she'll want to stay under these conditions with those kids.”

“I think she's here for the duration.” Paul hesitated. “You don't mind if I share your tent for a bit longer, do you?”

“No.” The blood rushed to my face and I was glad for the cover of darkness. “I don't mind.”
Stay as long as you want
.

“It's getting pretty exciting out here,” Paul said, cramming his jacket into a stuff sack to create a makeshift pillow.

“Exciting?” I snapped. “Aren't you worried about our trees?”

“Of course”—he wriggled into his bag—“but it's fun to have more company.”

“You think it's fun to get arrested?” I argued. “There are better solutions.”

“Like trying to get
PCF
's attention?”

“I thought you were on my side.”

He was quiet for a moment. “I am,” he answered, then paused. “The protesters are too.”

“We rely on co-operation with the company.”

“A deal with the devil?”

I rolled away from him. “I'm a scientist, Paul,” I said. “I can't get political. Good night.”

Paul was right, Mary wouldn't leave. I managed to get an email out to
PCF
from the clear-cut early in the morning. We spent the day in the canopy, returning late, hungry and tired after hours of climbing, to discover another twenty protesters and a dozen more tents crowding both sides of the stream. A line of cardboard signs propped against a log bore slogans painted in a rainbow of colours.
Trees Not Pulp. Stop the Greed, Save the Ancient Giants. A Tree Farm Is Not a Forest. Big Trees Not Big Stumps
. The group was gathered in a circle under the kitchen tarp, Terry pacing, talking into an expensive-looking radiophone. We stopped and stood at the back of the crowd, unable to reach our food or cooking supplies on the other side of the gathering.