Having Everything Right (9 page)

My first answer came when I heard Boppums falter, heard her suffocation-cough, alone with the doctor where she had collapsed in my sister's room. I heard my mother cry somewhere far off in the house. My father was trying to comfort her. And I held my little sister, telling her the lies of my wish.

“She will be all right. Isn't the doctor there? Don't let her hear you cry!” But Boppums was hearing nothing then. That time, we were the ones to stay behind, while she went on alone.

Twenty years passed before my turn came, and a kind of light filled my body, though I lay in our dark tent at six thousand feet, my eyes closed, my brother beside me and the last flash of lightning sizzling away to thunder. I knew. I knew I was about to die. The next bolt would run down the tree above us and blast through our bodies into the ground.
The light began in my head, then flowed out along the ravines and caves of my chest, arms, legs. The glow within me meant I was chosen, perhaps my brother, too. There was no need to wake him. It would be too soon.

As I remember that moment now, I wonder why it didn't happen, why the glow within me faded to darkness and the storm passed without staking me to the earth with flame. Gripped by expectation of death—it was a fact, not a possibility—I had felt utterly easy. I had felt a joy beyond success. I had seen that moment as a gift to me, had known with brilliant clarity my brother beside me, my sister's husband in the next tent, the tree dead but standing above us, my wife and child distant and spared. I had visited—no, I had become the separate hearth. I had suddenly fit into history and been content.

As the storm passed, I needed to know what the fact of my death could mean for my life. How should I talk now, matured by this fact? How should I drive, or cook, or pay taxes? Was I still an American, a member of the twentieth century? I had to reach back somewhere and answer.

After Boppums died, after my mother reported from the funeral, one of my needs was to step outside after dark. The street light would be there, courted by moths; the moon would be above me, or a tree or ragged cloud. One of my needs then was to look back at the pod of the house from a distance—say, from across the school ground, or from the top of the water tower I had climbed. That house down there was the compartment of human life, was the world Boppums made so calm, but she was gone and I was gone. I had been borne outward.

Now the match-safe I carry must be something about memory. With memory, with words I whittle and bind, hide, magnify, kindle—kindle the path beyond the spider web. Kindle the stump-cave with its roof of fern. Kindle the log high up over the creek, the ribbon of certainty my
feet knew by dark. I kindle Boppums who died. I cup my hands around the soft light of her face. At the sink, I wash my daughter's face. “What did you find today?”

Boppums made me a leather shirt, then sent me somewhere she could never see. Grandmother, mother, daughter—I learn so slow: part of our love must be to teach each other how to live alone.

P
INE
, F
IR
, C
EDAR
, Y
EW

My workbench is a writhing bundle of stories. It sports salty driftwood that crossed the pond, and salvage boards from the day they leveled my sister's house. By a trestle up the Gorge, I plucked for a shelf a clear fir stair-tread that flipped off a train. Another shelf is the sweet pine plank pulled clean from the Camp Sherman dump, and my hand slaps the stub-beam worktop one penitent carpenter dropped off before dawn. He owed us money, but paid us in boards. By wood's magic, that bench fits. On it, I saw pine, plane fir, chisel cedar, split yew. Shavings curl fragrant from the plane iron, as I delve into wooden years. This is like joining words: the material has centuries on the carpenter. Best be humble. Working so, I will learn history as a tree knows it. When the tree is my teacher, I will set the tool aside for a time to simply make hymns
of stories. I will make of concentric memory a stem of praise. I will be the traveler who stays, patriot to this ground. Now choose the tree of life, said my dream. Choose the living Maypole woven of green and sunlight, rooted to earth.

Heartwood burns for stories. A pioneer left his rifle in the crotch of a willow sapling; after fifty years, only the tip of the barrel and the butt of the stock were visible. Horseshoes, nailed up for luck, were lost by the score to the hearts of trees, and later played hell with sawmill saws. While we lived in the house that later burned, my father kept a list of the woods that fed our stove—mostly driftwood from the Tualatin River. When I was three, their names grew dense in my heart like a habit of virtue. They were a pantheon of pious and thorny relatives rattling in the woodbox, speaking from the stove. That list was simply the best literature of the alphabet:

Wood has a way of harvesting centuries into itself, and holding the years compact. The girth of a tree is visible time. When my father sawed through the crotch of a locust log, I touched the double wedding ring that can't be split. It was gold, but fragrant. In our yard I watched time and light spin trees. Every gnarl or burl or branch grew right. This was architecture. Only my sturdy grandmother was a ruin graceful as a tree. She withered like wood, and she grew smaller, we thought—closer to the right size.

In a tale from the Brothers Grimm, the mother condemned the old man, her father, to eat from a wooden bowl. He would drop no more china with his palsied hands, she said. He ate alone from his trencher
then, sitting apart on his wood stool on the wood floor in the wood house in the dark forest of the old. One day the little grandson began to whittle by the hearth.

“What do you make, my dear young son?”

“Mother, I make a wooden bowl for you. When I am big, you will be too old to eat from china.”

And the mother said, “Oh my son, oh my father.”

Trees shall heal us; wood shall soften our ways. In one parable, not in the Bible, Jesus says, “Turn over the stone, and you will find me; cleave wood and I am there.” What holds the Holy of Holies, what did Brahma become? Wood. Why will aspen always tremble? For the nails driven into the cross. What makes the color of wood? The soil it tastes. In Mexico, the tree called primavera is cut in the dark of the moon, when the sap is down. Cradle, fiddle, coffin, bed: wood is a column of earth made ambitious by light, and made of beauty by the rain. “Praise simply the tree that lives,” an old man said; “do not think so fast what else to make of it.”

The old builders hewing cedars of Lebanon, the carvers of applewood, the toilers who rive pine into clapboards, and roughened hands polishing a spruce pole with sand—all have a beautiful knowledge. The ways of teaching trees to be boards are older than steel. Before steel, the Kwakiutl adz of jade. But even with sharp steel, the question remains: who is the real teacher, tool or wood? The yew has a right, the pine has a healing wish. There still stands one deep grove: four hundred cedars of Lebanon. I would be apprentice now to the wood, not to the tool. I would ask, what can a pine tree teach me? What will fir remember? What lore fills the scent of cedar, the twang of yew spoken by the living branch?

When I walked into the woodyard with Ward, he knew at a glance which boards had grown in the West. His finger went out: “That's western black walnut—nice brown play. That's eastern: closer grain, and no
figure to speak of. Lot simpler to work the eastern: find the downhill run for your plane, and you get a long curl. Your western—now quarter, rift, or flat-sawn board—you'll fight chips all day, but what a face!”

The upshot is this, as Ward told me: west coast trees grow faster. The season for growth stretches out, and spring's early-wood ring runs wide, followed each year by an ample band of the denser latewood of summer. Long, hungry growth makes a rich ripple pattern for western boards. The grain in a flat-sawn plank tends to run wild, to show the moiré of abundant light. And in the Northwest, the wood-grain figure plays marionette to mild rain threaded down from Oregon clouds early as March, when leaves first explode, and deep into October. In the East, balance prevails. The tight, dark wait of a longer winter corsets the heartwood, slows growth to a crawl, and yields a grain that tends to play out even, classical.

I've met workers since who scoff at this guessing. They say it's bluff to claim Ward's regional code for a board. Soil, exposure, crowding, and the sheer genetic pluck of certain trees make the figure in a board, not geography. I'm gullible. I will believe them about wood. Perhaps origin east or west is a minor fact for a board. But I will graft Ward's belief to people. Don't Westerners grow fast and show the wild figure of abundant light?

Believers, Ward and I leafed through planks as if we were loose in the library stacks, reading the lives of trees: bole, knot, heart, pith, checked crotch, cup and wind, figured grain and spalted punk. Here were boards ripped out kerf on kerf by the gang saw, then bundled back into whole logs book-matched for symmetry. I learned the plain complexion of a board has many names. A freshly opened log can thrill with dimple, mottle, bee-wing figure, blue stain, burl. Trouble for a tree often makes the most compelling figure in a board. Spiral grain from windstress gives a rare ribbon figure highly prized in certain woods. But some injuries leave the board flawed: brash failure, heart shake, wane.
I touched a ten-foot flitch of pearwood, edges feathered out in bark. Wood starts warm against the hand. It has fed on sugar all its life.

In a corner of the yard, I had my moment with the flitch of pear. Wood gives back to the knowing hand a musical note. Be intimate. Every plank has a resinous presence, a life splayed visible. Savor the figure by eye, the ripple of its restless growth by hand. Heft it like a dancing partner. Spin it on end to sight its length for twist. If it's thin enough to give, flex it for spring. Lay fingers to its face then, and stroke for grain: does it splinter raw, fuzz out, soften? Rap with your knuckles to sound its timbre. Is it self-possessed? Lean close, chin to grain: inhale. Is life there still, blond pear, the odor of cedar, walnut's bite, applewood sweet as bread, rank pine? Touch lip to the wood. Is it damp? Will it season well, or was it cut too thin too soon? Will it check or wind, cup or bow?

Ward pulled hardwoods. He does law firms and opulent waiting rooms. He sculpts mahogany banisters to lead the supplicant up corporate stairways. He carves chairs and credenzas, sunburst conference tables that stun in walnut and oak with a purfle of brass. He works in rosewood buffed to a shine, in ebony from India. He joins furniture tough enough to forget the punishment of use, and sometimes too graceful to be used at all. These pieces have returned to the state of sacred trees.

Behind his swathe, I touched and savored the thrifty Oregon woods that grow fast and remember everything—the light sanded pine I could score with a thumbnail, rusty heartwood fir rippled with planer marks, fragrant cedar dressed by the spinning turmoil of the saw, and a heavy yew bolt for bows. Ward's boards filled a cart. I was not in the mood to acquire, but to remember. My hands came out of the woodyard empty, but my head filled with the pantheon of pine, fir, cedar, yew.

Pine, whitebark pine is a soft, light wood designed to hold up trees. Once, on Strawberry Mountain, when
I was honed by hunger and alone, I sat by one isolated tree to learn what I could. A tree like that is kin to me, is intimate without the keen distraction of a face. It stood, or rather hunched, more like lightning's path than a stem. In silhouette against stone, it twitched for occasional wind. Something graceful in this wood soul beckoned me to remain, to settle on a flat stone and confer in the dialect of tree. I asked my brothers to go on down to Hidden Lake. I would follow, after a time. In an afternoon, that stunted, five-needle whitebark pine had twenty-seven lessons for me:

Pine stands limber in its bones. Every fiber holds, and gives.

There is a way to heal yourself alone. Pine's life is a constant healing urge.

Pine stands older, but shorter. This is my first lesson about humility, about the smaller ambition of pure life.

Pine has not a mind for prophecy, but a concentric memory, its earliest youth clenched at the heart.

Pine's blood is fragrant. My hands stick together like prayer: bitter sugar of its life.

Visible pine is rooted to an equivalent unseen self. While the limbs seek light, the roots seek water—never so much as a chickadee's sip, but simple wet. That unseen self is no ghost; that dreaming mind is gritty, actual, anchor.

Pine is not powered by a busy heart, but by the seasonal pump of earth, by the long need and suck of transpiration, the tidal year-throb of change.

Pine is born to a cleft in stone, and makes the most of it. Whitebark is most primitive: the cones must rot before the seeds can split and live. As in the parable, one fell here on stony ground. Unlike the parable, this tough seed lived anyway.

When wind blows, travel in place. Trade the gypsy-foot for residence. This means the impossible acrobatic persistence of a limb toward light.

Pine nourishes the clump of sweet duff that nourishes it. Above eight thousand feet, there is an abundance of time, but not of soil. After half a dozen winters, each fallen needle dwindles to plain mineral food. Thrifty pine. Where a boulder blocked this thin ravine, scree piled up and pine grows—root in shade, except at noon.

Stunted by cold, kinked by wind, this tree has no commercial value. America will not take this pine. It shall seek its own time.

Avalanche took the growing tip: snowpack five feet deep, the tip exposed and splintered away. Pine grows sideways.

Pine's failures remain: limbs thinned by shade. Sap goes up to the next lit branch. There are no mistakes.

Dressing in spring and undressing always, green pine sheds gold needles. I'm draped in an exotic ensemble of wool, cotton, steel eyelets, felt cap, and leather; pine bark stands dressed by sunlight, starlight, frost, rain.

This pine is one of many nameless wood souls on Strawberry Mountain, and is host to a few slow ants. I follow one from the root-maze of needles, up the twisted road of the trunk: stunted Eden of its kind.

Most thrifty angle for growth is a spiral bowed by snow: down, jut out, up, feint, twist, crack, bud.

At this altitude, pine wants little and has room. Nearest neighbor is stone underfoot, then lupine downslope at ten feet in a pocket of scree, then the wild roving grayjay rollicking downwind and perching but now and again. Pine simply entertains the wind. Contrast stone: wanting so little it never moves but to fall. Contrast lupine: wanting to be blue, soft, seasonal. Contrast grayjay: wanting so much it must flap and shout. Contrast my life.

In that shimmer downslope, at Hidden Lake, infant toads hunch poised at the warm seam between water and land. Pine does not seek marvels; marvels seek pine.

Pine has the vagabond heart of a hermit, the wild local character rooted to one place.

Branch out, slough off.

Pine has failed many times: twisted, split, shattered, beetle-bored through, scraped raw by ice, but not uprooted.