The Lives of Rocks (15 page)

She knew the trail well, even in the almost sightless conditions—she knew it almost by touch, and by the pull of gravity—and she knew without even being able to see it when she had crossed the pass and come into their valley. She knew to descend, knew where the path was that led to the valley floor. It was the path of her life as well as of her dreams, and she could have gotten there blindfolded.

With her hair and eyebrows caked with snow and her face numb, Jyl reached the plowed and level field of their
little garden—the autumn-turned furrows resting already beneath two feet of snow—and made her way into their yard, listening for any signs of activity, and then, as the shadowy shapes of the outbuildings and the cabin itself came into view, looking for a glow of light through the curtain of snow.

She was surprised by the absence of sound, and the absence of animals—the corral was open, and no barking dogs greeted her arrival, no chickens clucked or called from the henhouse. Their truck was gone, with no tracks in the snow to indicate it had been driven out recently, and when she came closer to the cabin, she saw with an emotion very close to panic and despair that no smoke was rising from the chimney.

They are asleep,
she thought wildly, even though it was at least noon.
They worked so hard the day before that they are still asleep.

When she drew even closer, she saw that the doors and windows were boarded up, and again, the drifts of snow against the door- and window-jambs indicated that they had been that way possibly for weeks: perhaps since the day after Thanksgiving.

She sat down on the steps in a daze, her mental and physical reserves equally devastated now.

Had they known they were leaving?
she wondered: surely not. And yet she could not help but feel wounded: as if the children had somehow become frightened of her increasing need, her upwelling of loneliness, and had fled from that weight, that extra burden in their already burdened lives.

She knew it was not that way, that surely their itinerant parents had insisted they leave, for some unknown reason, perhaps economic, perhaps evangelical—leaving,
summoned, in the midst of an evening meal, perhaps—but it was how she felt, that they had somehow become frightened of her.

Only the little boats remained, stacked up beneath one window. Out in the garden, gaunt deer pawed through the snow. The cabin was shut down yet preserved, protected, as if one day the travelers might return, though not for a long, long time—years, doubtless—and with the children by that time all grown up.

She sat down on the steps and began to cry. She cried for a long time, and when she had finished, she looked up—as if in her despair she might somehow have summoned them—and then wandered around and around the cabin, and out to the various barns and sheds. They had taken nearly every tool but had left an old short-handled shovel and a rusty hammer with one of its twin claws broken; and with these discards, she was able to pry away the boards over one of the windows and crawl into the cabin.

It was dark inside, with a strange still bluish light, as if she had entered a cave that had been closed off for centuries. They could not have been gone for more than two or three weeks, yet there was no residue whatsoever of their existence. The floor was swept and the walls were scrubbed, and all the furniture was gone, as was every other item—every spoon and fork, every dish and towel and article of clothing, every stick of firewood, every piece of kindling. Only a few more of the little ships remained, stacked neatly on the windowsills.

The gemstones that had been within the ships were gone, as were the drawings and stories. The boats sharpened her despair, for when, she asked herself, could she possibly ever use them again?

She ransacked the tiny drawers, all empty.
Write to me, think of me, speak to me,
she implored them, calling out to wherever they were.

Again and again, she searched through the cabin—examining every shelf, every cabinet, every drawer. She was a child. Had her father ever called out this way to her, after he had gone? If so, she had never heard him, and she feared the children could not hear her.

She crawled back out of the frigid, lonely cabin, and out into the great snowy silent whiteness of late December. She boarded the window back up tightly. She sat down on the steps and cried again, and it began to snow, as if her tears were somehow a catalyst for those flakes to form. As if the shapes and processes of all things followed from but an initial act, an initial law or pattern, like crystals repeating themselves. She sat very still, almost completely motionless, as the snow continued to cover everything, even the silent cabin. She concentrated on the tiny seed of fire housed in her chest. She sat very still, as if believing that, were she to move, even the slightest breeze would blow it out.

When we came into this country, runaways, renegades, we were like birds that had to sing. It was only ten years ago, but it feels like a hundred, or maybe a thousand. No person can know what a thousand years feels like, though in the first part of my life I was a geologist and was comfortable holding a footlong core of earth and examining such time—a thousand years per inch.

In the section of my life after that one, I was an artist, a writer of brief stories in which I was comfortable holding a sheaf of ten or twelve papers in which a lifetime, even several lifetimes, had passed. A few thousand people would read my slim books. They would write letters to me then and talk about the characters in those stories as if they were real people, which strangely saddened me.

Then came the third life. I became an activist. It was as if some wall or dam had burst within me, so that everything I wrote had to be asking for something—petition
signatures, letters to Congress, and so on—instead of giving something.

But any landscape of significance—or power, whether dramatic or understated—will alter us if we will let it. And I am being bent yet again, though not without some fracturing; now I am into my fourth life, one built around things more immediate than the fairy-wing days of art. Even this narrative, this story, is fiction, but each story I tell feels like the last one I'll do—as if I've become like some insect or reptile trying to shed the husk of its old skin—and even now as I struggle toward the perceived freedom of the next phase of my life—the light ahead—neither you nor I can really be sure of how much of any story is fiction, or art, and how much of it is activism.

I am trying hard to move ahead cleanly into the next territory. But still, things slip and fall back; the old, even when it is buried beneath the new, sometimes rises and surges, pierces through, and reappears.

Sometimes it feels as if I am running toward the future, with a hunger for it, but other times as if I am simply fleeing the past, and those old skins. It's so hard not to look back.

 

I cut saw logs to sell to the mill. Prices are high, on the back of an election year (low interest rates, new housing starts), as the economies of man heat to incandescence, fueled by China's child labor, Mexico's slave labor—fueled by the five-dollar-per-hour slave labor even in our own country—and in sawing those logs the first thing I notice is whether the log I cut is an old tree or a young tree. I don't mean whether it's a big one or not; all the logs I cut are of roughly the same size—big enough so that I can almost get my arms around them. They are each a hundred inches long, a figure I can measure off in my sleep, or can pace blindfolded. I've cut so many hundred-inch logs that I tend to see the world now in hundred-inch increments. That's the size log the L-P Mill over in Idaho needs for its laser mill, which makes short (eight-foot) two-by-fours. There's not a lot of waste. Those fucking lasers don't leave much kerf.

So the logs I cut are all about the same size, but each one is a different weight and density, depending mostly on age, and also on whether the tree got to be that big by growing quickly or slowly.

The first cut you make into the log will show you this—will tell you just about all you'd ever want to know about that tree's history. I can handle larger individual logs, and sometimes I'll hump some big-ass honker, tight green old-growth spruce or fir—four hundred fucking pounds packed into that hundred-inch length—but mostly I try to carry out only the medium-sized ones, which fill up the back of the truck quickly enough. Some of them will be eighty or ninety years old, if they grew slowly, in a shadowy light-starved place (the kind of woods where I best like to work in summer); and others, the same size, will be only twenty or thirty years old, with their growth rings spaced a quarter-inch apart or wider—trees that are seemingly composed of liquid sunlight, trees like pipe straws sucking up water and sucking down sunlight, trees of no real integrity or use, weakened from having grown too fast, and without ever having been tested.

But I get paid for volume, not quality, and I load them into the truck, too, a hundred inches at a time, though they feel as light as balsa wood after I've just handled an eighty- or ninety-year-old log before that one, and I feel guilty thinking of some carpenter three thousand miles away—Florida,
perhaps—building some flimsy-shit house with those studs—the wood splitting like parchment at the first tap of a nail, and the carpenter cursing some unknowable thing, groping with his curse to reach all the way back to the point of origin, which is—what? The mill? Me? The sunlight? The brutality of supply and demand, and the omnipresent hyper-capitalism here at postconsumer century's end? Finish the house, stucco over the mistakes, paint it bright red and blue, sell the sonofabitch and move on. What're they going to do, dissect the house to cross-examine each strut, each stud? Who knows what's inside anything? More and more I'm trying not to look back at who I was, or even who I am, but at the land itself. I am trying to let the land tell me who and what I am—trying to let it pace and direct me, until it is as if I have become part of it.

 

This country—the Yaak Valley, way up in the northwest tip of Montana—burns and rots, both. The shape of the land beneath the forests is like the sluggish waves in an ancient, nearly petrified ocean—the waves of the northern Rockies sliding into the waves of the Pacific Northwest—so that it is like being lost, or like having found the rich, dense place you were always looking for. You can walk around any given corner and in less than a hundred paces go from fire-dependent ponderosa pine and grassland into the shadowy, dripping, mossy cedar-and-hemlock forests, rich with the almost sexual smell of rot. Tree frogs, electric red salamanders, hermit thrushes, ferns; climb a little farther, past the trickling waterfall, past the mossy green skull of a woodland caribou, and you come to a small glacier, across which are sculpted the transient, sun-melting tracks of where a wolverine passed the day before. The tracks and scourings of the
glacier across the stone mountain, beneath all that ice, are only slightly less transient.

Down the sunny back side of the mountain, you can pass through one of the old 1910 burns, where there are still giant larch snags from that fire, each one a hollowed-out home to woodpeckers and martens and bear cubs. This old burned-out forest still has its own peculiar vital force and energy and seems almost to
seethe,
drunk or intoxicated on the health of so much available sunlight, and drunk on the health of the rich fire-blackened soil—the nutritiousness of ashes.

Then farther down the mountain, you'll be back into damp creekside silent old growth: more moss, and that dark Northwest forest—spruce and fir.

Back home, in your cabin, your dreams swirl, as if you are still traveling, still walking, even in your sleep, across this blessed landscape, with all its incredible diversity, and the strength that brings.

 

In the first life, back in Louisiana, I took things. Just the oil, at first, from so deep beneath the ground and from such a distant past that at first it did not seem like taking—but then, gradually and increasingly, from the surface.

I took boats, big boats, from their moorings at the marina at night: sailed them all night long—sometimes alone, other times with my wife, Hope. Before dawn we would sail back toward shore, then open the boat's drain plug to try to sink it, or sometimes we would even torch the boat, and swim back in that last distance to shore, and then watch, for a while, in the darkness, the beautiful flaming spectacle of unmitigated waste.

I would take everything, anything. The manhole covers to flood sewers in the street. License plates. Once, a sewing
machine. From a backyard in suburban Lafayette, a picnic table. It was as if I were trying to eat the world, or that part of it. The newspapers began reporting the strange disappearances. They couldn't find any rhyme or reason to it—there seemed no logic in it.

I went in through windows and from dresser tops took jewelry and other riches. I didn't ever sell anything; I just took it. It pleased me. I would place the objects elsewhere. There are diamond necklaces hung in the boughs of cypress trees in Louisiana—pearl earrings in bird nests in the Atchafalaya.

I took cars: got in them and drove a short distance, then hid them, or sank them. It filled a need in me. I would look at my two hands and think,
What are these made for, if not to take?

I believe in power. What I mean to say is, I ascribe great value to it, and like to observe power in action. I like the way continents are always straining to break apart or ride up on and over one another, and I like the way seedlings in the forest fight and scramble for light.

I like all that goes on in the hundred years of a tree's life, or the two hundred, or five hundred years of its span—all the ice and snow, the windstorms, the fires that creep around the edges of some forests and sweep through and across others, starting the process all over, and leaving behind a holy kind of pause, a momentary break in power before things begin to stretch and grow again, as vigorously as ever.