The Lives of Rocks (16 page)

It feels good after sitting hunch-shouldered at a desk
these last ten or twelve years to be hauling real and physical things out of the woods: to get the green sweet gummy sap of fir stuck to my gloves and arms, to have the chunks of sawdust tumble from the cuffs of my overalls—to have the scent of the forest in my hair. The scent of leather gloves. The weight of the logs as real as my brief life, and the scent of blue saw smoke dense in my leather boots. The sight of bright new-cut yellow pinewood—a color that soon fades as it oxidizes, as the skin of a gleaming fish fades quickly, immediately after it dies, or as the hue of a river rock is lost forever after it is taken from the waters of its particular stream...

They can never find me here. They have been up here looking for me—with warrants—and may come again, but I have only to slip into the woods and disappear for a while. And perhaps this is where the activism came from, after the storytelling—the desire to defend a land that defended me. The desire to give, for once, after a lifetime of taking. Perhaps one reason none of us knows what's inside the heart or core of anything is that it's always changing: that things are always moving in a wave, or along an arc—and that the presence of one thing or one way of being indicates only that soon another will be summoned to replace it, as the night carves out the next day.

I thought I was made all along for writing short stories, and maybe one day again I will be, as forests recycle through succession, but this landscape has carved and fit me—it is not I who has been doing the carving—and I can feel, am aware of, my change, so that now what I best fit doing is hauling logs, one at a time.

I'm short—a low center of gravity—with short legs, but long arms, and a heart and lungs that don't get tired easily.
The red meat, the core of me, is stronger than ever. Certain accessories or trappings, such as ligaments, cartilage, disks, et cetera, are fraying and snapping—I get them mended, stitched back together, stapled and spliced or removed—but the rest of me is getting stronger, if slower, and I keep hauling the logs out one at a time, stepping gently over and around the fairy slippers and orchids, and choosing for my harvest only the wind-tossed or leaning trees, or the trees that are crowded too close together, or diseased. I try to select individual trees like notes of music. As one falls or is removed, others will rise, and with each cut I'm aware of this.

Art is selectivity—that which you choose to put in a story—and it's what you choose to leave out, too. This new life is still a kind of music, a kind of art, but it is so much more real and physical and immediate. It feels right to be doing this—hauling the logs out, carrying them over my shoulder one at a time like a railroad tie, some as dense and old as if soaked with creosote, or green life: and the more I carry, the stronger and more compact I get—the better I fit this job. As I choose and select, I listen to that silent music all around me, faint but real, of what I am doing: not imagining, but
doing.

Sometimes I work in the rotting areas, other times in the burns. I become smeared with charcoal, blackened as if altered, and that night heading home I will stop and bathe in a stream and become pale again under the fierce stars, and will sometimes think about the days when I wrote stories, and then, further back, about the days when I practiced geology, and then, even further, to childhood and joy and wonder: but, without question, these days I am a black beast moving slowly through magical woods, growing shorter each
year under these logs, as each year a disk is removed—as if I am sinking deeper and deeper into the old rot of the forest, until soon I'll be waist deep in the soil—and it is neither delicious nor frightening. It is only a fit.

A thing I do sometimes, when I have a log I'm really proud of, is to haul it out and carry it on my back and place it in the road next to some other logger's truck, or sometimes even in his truck, like a gift.

It is nothing more complex than trying to work myself out from under some imbalance of the past. I think that I will take a long time.

People are curious about who's doing it—the log fairy, they call him—and here, too, I take precautions not to get caught. I haul the heaviest, densest logs I can handle.

I know I'll get back to hauling the balsa-wood logs from the fields of light. I know it's not going to make a difference—but I try to select only the densest, heaviest blown-down logs from the old forests of darkness, and I try to envision them, after their passage to Idaho, or Texas, or wherever they go, as standing staunch and strong within their individual houses' frameworks. I picture houses and homes getting stronger, one at a time—one board at a time—as they feed on my magical forest, and then I imagine those strong homes raising strong families, and that they will act like cells or cores scattered across the country—like little stars or satellites—that will help shore up the awful sagging national erosions here at century's end. It's a fantasy, to be sure, but you tell me which is more real: an idea, such as a stated passion or desire of one human's emotions—susceptible to the vagaries of the world, and fading through time—or a hundred-inch, two-hundred-fifty-pound green juicy fir on
one's mortal shoulder. You tell me which one is the fantasy and which is real.

I am so hungry for something real.

 

As I said, when we came up here to escape the law, we were artists: that second life. I breathed art—inhaled it, as the multinational timber companies are inhaling this forest's timber, and I exhaled it, too. It was easy to write stories, even poems. I don't even know what I'm doing, telling this one—only that for a moment, and one more time, it is as if I have stepped into a hole, or have put back on one of the old dry shed coats from an earlier time.

It was like a pulse, back then. There was an electricity between me and the land, and there was one between Hope and the land, too, and one between Hope and myself.

I'd work in my notebooks, sitting out at the picnic table, the sunlight bright on that paper, my pen curlicuing words and shapes across that parchment like lichens spreading across the page at time-lapse warp speed—and Hope would paint landscapes with oils, as she had done down in the South.

Back then she had worked in greens and yellows and had always walked around with dried smears of it on her hands and face, so that she seemed of the land, and of the seasons down there, as I tried to be—the incredibly fertile, almost eternal spring of greens and yellows, in Louisiana—but then, once we got up to this valley, the colors changed to blue fir, and blue rock, and to the white glaciers, and white clouds, and those became the colors affixed to her body, the residue of her work. There are four distinct seasons up here, as in some child's fairy-tale book, except that after
Louisiana's slow motion, the seasons in Yank seem almost to gallop—the quick burning flash of dry brown heat,
August,
then an explosion of yellow and red,
October,
then more blue and white, blue and white, then winter's black-and-whiteness, seeming to last forever but snatched away finally by the incandescence of true spring—even now, after a decade (the trees in the forest around us another inch larger in diameter, since that time). Hope is still searching to settle into the rhythms of this place—the fast rhythms of the surface, as well as the slower ones frozen in the rock below.

Between her chores of running the household and helping raise the children, I do not see much blue paint smeared on her, or any other color. And we just don't talk about art anymore. An overwhelming majority of the art that we see discourages us, depresses us—no longer inspires us—and whether this is a failure within us or one with the artists of this age, we're not sure.

It seems like a hundred years ago, not ten, since we first came up here. Back then I would stumble through the forest, pretending to hunt—sometimes taking a deer or an elk or a grouse—but mostly I would just think about stories: about what had to be at stake in any given story, and about the orthodox but time-tested critical progressions, or cyclings, of beginning-middle-end, and of resolutions within a story, and epiphanies—all the old things. They were new to me back then, and seemed as fresh as if none of it had ever been done before.

I did not know the names of the things past which I was walking, or the cycles of the forest, or the comings and goings, lives and deaths, the migrations of the animals. At night, hiking home after I'd traveled too far or been gone too
long, I did not know the names of things by their scent alone as I passed them in the darkness.

Those kinds of things came to me, though, and are still coming, slowly, season after season, and year after year; and it is as if I am sinking deeper in the earth, ankle-deep in mulch now. I keep trying to move laterally—am drawn laterally—but recently it has begun to feel as if perhaps the beginnings of some of my old desires are returning—my diving or burrowing tendencies: the pattern of my entering the ground vertically again, as I did when I was drilling for oil, desiring to dive again, as if believing that for every emotion, every object, every landscape on the surface, there is a hidden or corresponding one at depth. We tend to think there are clean breaks between sections of anything, but it is so rarely that way, in either nature or our own lives: things are always tied together, as the future is linked, like an anchor, to the past.

 

Hope and I don't talk about art anymore. We talk about getting our firewood in for winter, or about the deer we saw that day. We talk about the wildflowers, or the colors of the leaves—that's the closest we come to discussing the shadow or memory of her work—and we do not come close to discussing mine, either, or the memory or buried shadow of it. We talk about
things,
instead, and hand things to each other, for us to touch: a stone found on the mountain that day, or an irregular piece of driftwood. A butterfly, wind-plastered and dried, pinned to the grille of the truck, looking remarkably like the silk scarves and blouses she used to paint. We step carefully, desiring to travel further into this fourth life, being pulled into it by unknown or rather unseen rhythms.
Walking quietly, carefully, as if believing that perhaps we can sneak away from those old lives and be completely free of them, and in pace—once more—with the land.

 

The logs that get you are almost always late in the day. You overextend, in your love, your passion for the work, the delicious physicality of it—the freedom of being able to work without acknowledging either a past or a future.

You spy a perfect fallen tree just a little bit out of your reach, at the bottom of a steep slope. You have to cross a tangle of blowdown to get to it. It's a little larger than you should be carrying and a little too far from the truck—you've already hauled a day's worth—but all of these things conspire within you, as you stare at the log, to create a strange transformation or alteration: they reassemble into the reasons, the precise reasons, that you
should
go get that log.

And, always, you do, so that you will not have to go to bed that night thinking about that log and how you turned away from it.

There are seventy-six species of rare and endangered plants in this forest—Mingan Island moonwort, kidney-leaved violet, fringed onion, maidenhair spleenwort—and I know them all, each in both its flowering and dormant states. Most of them prefer the damp dark depths of the last corners of old growth up here, though others prefer the ashes of a new fire and appear only every two hundred years or so.

Still others seek the highest, windiest, most precarious existences possible, curled up in tiny clefts at the spartan
tops of mountains, seeking brief moisture from the slow, sun-glistening trickle of glaciers. I know all of them, and I watch carefully as I walk with the log across my back, across both shoulders like a yoke. Again it is like a kind of slow and deliberate, plodding music—the music of humans—choosing and selecting which step to place so as to avoid those seventy-six species, whenever I am fortunate enough to find any of them in the woods where I am working. They say the list is growing by a dozen or so each year. They say before it's all over there won't be anything but fire ants and dandelions. They say...

That is my old life. This is my new one. My newest one. This one feels different—more permanent.

Still, the old one, or old ones, try to return. My right side's stronger than my left, so I use it more. By the end of the day it's more fatigued than the left, and it feels sometimes as if I'm being turned into a corkscrew; and because of this slight imbalance, accumulated and manifested over time, my steps take on a torque that threatens to screw me down deeper and deeper into the ground, like the diamond drill bits I'd fasten to the end of the pipe string when I worked in the oil fields. And late in the day I find myself once again daydreaming about those buried landscapes, and other hidden and invisible things.

A midnight run to town with four gleaming, sweet-smelling larch logs—hundred-inch lengths, of course, and each one weighing several hundred pounds. A cold night: occasional star showers, pulsing of northern lights, sky electricity. Coyote yappings on the outskirts of town. A tarp thrown over the back of my truck, to hide the logs. One in one logger's truck, another in his neighbor's truck. So silent. They will think it is a strange dream when they look out in
the morning and see the gift trees, the massive logs, but when they go out to touch them they will be unable to deny the reality.

The third log into the back of yet another sleeping logger's truck, and the fourth one in the front yard of the mill itself, standing on end, as if it grew there overnight.

Home, then, to my wife and children and the pursuit of peace, and balance. In the winter, Hope and I sleep beneath the skins, the hides, of deer and elk from this valley.

 

There is an older lady in town who works on plow horses—gives them rubdowns, massages, hoists their hips and shoulders back into place when they pop out—she says they're easy to work with, that a horse won't tense up and resist you when you press or lean against its muscles—and when my back gets way out of line, I go visit her and she works on it. I lie on her table by the wood stove while she grinds her elbow and knee into certain pressure points, and she pulls and twists, trying to smooth it all back into place, and she uses a machine she calls “Sparky,” too, which I have never seen, as she uses it only on my back. It sends jolts of electricity deep into my muscles—which, she says, are but electrical fibers, like cables, conduits for electricity—and the sound that Sparky makes as she fires round after round of electricity into me (my legs and arms twitching like some laboratory frog's) is like that of a staple gun.