I guess here's transformation number two.
It's so odd to be reading in front of so many people
who made this book.
Hello, thank you.
It's cool.
This is from the last essay in the book.
It's called "Coda, Codex" and I'm just
reading it because it took place in Tucson with summer.
On our better days, we and the tree seem alike.
Apollo chases Daphne and Daphne turns to laurel.
Hades abducts Leuce and there she
pops up again, a Populus alba in the Elysian fields.
Zeus gives his temple tenders, Baucis and Philemon,
the gift of dying concurrently, and they shake green leaves
and mossy lips until husband and wife become a linden
and oak that stand so close together,
their branches twist from a single trunk.
This is not just tree transformation,
but tree storage.
In Arthurian legend, the Lady of the Lake
entombs poor besotted Merlin in a tree trunk.
In Scandinavia, the oak is said to belong to the dead,
not just because it was material for coffins,
but because it was a coffin itself.
Norsemen would search the woods until they crossed
a suitable find, and there they'd
bury their loved ones in the slingshot split of its trunk.
The Norse also said the gods whittled Eubla,
the first woman, from oak.
Virgil claimed oaks gave birth to the first men.
When my mother likes to reference the Welsh in her,
she will say 'I'm of druid stock.'
She's joking about that moony streak, the Merlin in her,
but what she's really saying, the word druid,
stemming from the Celtic for oak,
is that she's made of wood.
So I have a proposal, if you're looking for ways
to stick around, there are worse fates
than coming back as a tree.
A few summers ago I worked as a wood splitter
for a man named Angelo Romeo.
This was in Tucson, 100 degrees, and I'd
show up to Angelo's backyard at 6:30 or so,
and I worked till noon.
When the heat became too much to bear,
I biked my way back over the pavement built by the WPA
until I reached the closest air conditioned space with energy
drinks and a Panda Express.
My job was simple.
I would break down the rounds of wood Angelo collected
from his tree service details around Tucson,
and I would stack them against a corrugated shed.
We were essentially recycling, turning
what was going to the dump into ethically sourced,
locally harvested firewood to be bundled and sold at marked up
prices to Whole Foods.
I used a machine splitter and I built a wall of wood.
Mesquite, pine, pepper, chinaberry, and birch.
Angelo's backyard was a cluttered place.
A wood chipper hitched to a truck,
a flatbed for hauling rounds, two splitters,
a tarped-over workstation.
Arborist tools hung homicidally from the shed's walls.
There were pole saws and chainsaws, loppers,
alarmingly large pruning shears.
Red Baron pizza and flank steak in the freezer,
ASHA regulations stapled to the wall.
And throughout the yard there were piles and piles of wood.
Wood strewn everywhere, wood that I, Sisyphus,
would eventually split into smaller and smaller pieces.
In one corner, Angelo even kept the pile for the funny shapes.
The knots and gnarls and the human
faces in the warp of the trunk.
The totem carved out of a round of mesquite, its face placid
and content, as it watched over me and my wall,
protecting us from harm.
When he didn't work trees, Angelo was a firefighter.
His looks matched his soap opera name.
He was tan, had dark hair, eyes like lakes, two indentations
sat on either temple, like dimples,
as if a very small, and very round
hammer had pocked them there.
As far as bosses go, Angelo was a good one.
He set up a fan to blow the exhaust
away from where I worked.
He climbed a ladder and he stretched a blue tarp out back
of the shed, where I would take unscheduled breaks
to eat Larabars in the shade.
When I threw out my back because I lifted rounds the wrong way,
he left me a brace and a blanket on which to rest my knees.
He shooed away the tabby that liked to saddle up and scratch.
When he saw me sweeping up palm fronds he said, quite kindly,
'well you see Thomas, the trick is not to sweep like a pussy.'
I made $10 an hour and the mini fridge plastered
with custom magnets reading Romeo Tree Service
Baby was always well stocked with Powerade.
To help pass the time, I thought of my wall of wood
as like the wall of the Grand Canyon.
The different varieties of trees formed
a vast and magnificent patchwork,
all layered on top of one another
like the strata of rocks inside the Canyon rim.
The pre-Anthropocene layers you'd gaze
at after slotting a quarter into parking meter binoculars.
The downside was that I became so carried away
with seeing my wall as something else,
that I failed to create a stable structure.
It sagged and it split apart, under siege
from its own weight.
I quickly learned the structural limitations
of a trapezoid as opposed to a rectangle.
I had stacked so high and so dangerously,
that Angelo forbade his wife and daughter
from walking underneath.
He made me lug the splitter back another foot
so that if the wall did fall, it would not fall on me.
Even the cat didn't saunter back there.
My job, if you were being generous,
was a kind of architecture.
Here I was, to break up the discarded
and find a new and useful arrangement.
As it turned out, my wall never did fall.
The most dangerous part of my job was the wood splitter,
a machine made up a small diesel engine.
A cylindrical piston to latch onto the wood,
and a sharp wedged blade.
The closest comparison I can come up with
is a medieval torture device given
the horsepower of a lawnmower.
The job came without health insurance,
and so Angelo would lecture me very carefully
on the importance of positioning my hands with regards
to the splitter.
I was to keep them on top of the log at all times,
and never on its sides.
If I put my hands directly in line with the splitters blade,
or cylinder, an errant glove thread might snag,
or my hand might slip and mangle.
A tree never fully heals, and so its rings never fully forget.
They grow around their wounds and scars,
incorporating them into their past as imperfections
and blemishes.
One never knows when one of these
would catch and cause a hand to fall in line with the blade.
One must be respectful, Angelo motioned
toward the log, of the things that
were more powerful than us.
When Angelo took to the splitter, he moved quickly.
He'd bend down toward a log twice the thickness
of his thigh.
He would embrace it, then he'd heave against it for momentum.
Once the log rolled onto the bar,
he held its weight against his leg
and then he yanked the lever.
He split the wood down the middle
and let one half fall to the ground.
In short, expert strokes, he pushed the other half back
and then he'd yanked the lever again,
rotating the trunk to shave off individual pieces of firewood.
When the blade split the stump in two,
the wood would make any number of sounds.
Each log had its own personality,
depending on its density, its dryness, its age.
Eucalyptus crumbled, mesquite quartered into symmetrical
chunks, dry pine popped, wet pine pasted.
Some pieces split silently, and some
cracked like a pistol shot.
Some hissed, some wheezed, some shattered.
Sometimes I'd find termite larvae burrowed
into the pockets of wood, columbaria
stacked throughout the striations and rings.
And I'd gather the squishy little things in my glove
and I'd toss them over my shoulder,
like rice at a wedding, to clear the wall
and land a treat for the starlings
in the alleyway behind me.
Then there were the rule breakers, the anomalies.
The logs that for whatever reason, a hidden knot,
an unseen tumorous growth, they'd snap back at my face,
as if acting out some old grudge between us.
At times, stripping around off the blade
was like flaying open veins and arteries.
The edges of a quartered mesquite,
just like the marbled fat of flesh.
Other times, a log would groan, something ancient
and primordial, something battered and hurt.
I don't know much about the last sounds
people make before they die, but I can tell you,
the sound of that wood being split
was a distinctly human sound.
I would look at the log after, the fan whirring, the starlings
chirping on their wire, and it seemed
like I was making a sacrifice.
It was the sound you'd make if you weren't
fully aware of being human.
If you had turned over in your sleep, and in your half state,
groaned about your very bad back.
For a brief instant, Angelo yanking the lever,
me hugging the next round for dear life, the wall growing
ever higher, the sound wasn't the wood being split,
but the voices themselves.
That's where I'll stop.
Thank you so much.