"Two, 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 the seedlings in the forest fight
and scramble for light.
I like all that goes on in the hundreds
years of a tree's life, or the 200, or 500 years of its span--
all the ice and snow, the wind storms,
the fires that creep around the edges of some forest, 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.
It feels good after sitting, hunched shouldered at a desk
these last 10 or 12 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 dents in my leather boots, the sight of bright cut
new 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've 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 forced recycle
through succession.
But this landscape is carved and fit me.
It is not I who have 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 disk,
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 and 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, charcoal, blackened myself, 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'm a black beast moving slowly through magical woods,
growing shorter each year under those logs, as each year,
a disk is removed, as if I'm sinking deeper and deeper
into the old rot of the forest.
Until soon, I'll be wasted 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.
It 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 only to select the densest, heaviest, blown down
logs from the old forest 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 house's 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 100-inch, 250 pound, green,
juicy fir on one's mortal shoulder.
You tell me which is the fantasy and which is real.
I'm 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 timber companies
are inhaling this forest 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 in a hole
or 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 notebook, sitting out at the picnic table,
the sunlight bright on that paper,
my pen curlicueing words and shapes across that parchment,
like lichens spreading across the page in timelapse 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, though--
so that she seemed to be 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 if in some child's fairy tale book,
except that after Louisiana's slow motion, the seasons in Yaak
seem almost a 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.
And 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 on 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 nor any other color.
And we just don't talk about art anymore.
An overwhelming majority of that art which we see,
discourages us, depresses us, no longer inspires us,
and whether this is a failure within us or within the artist
of this age, we're not sure.
It seems like 100 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 elk, or grouse, but mostly just thinking
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,
and end, and of resolutions within a story,
and epiphanies, all the old things.
They were new to me 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 by 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'm sinking deeper
into the earth, ankle-deep in mulch now.
I keep trying to move laterally and 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 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 bury--
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,
when plastered and dried, pinned to the grill of the truck,
looking remarkably like the silk scarves 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,
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 and 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."