"Three, there are 76 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
state.
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 200 years or so.
Still others seek the highest, windiest, most precarious
existences possible, curled up in tiny cliffs
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 a log across my back across both shoulders,
[AUDIO OUT] avoid those 76 species,
whenever I'm fortunate en-- fortunate enough
to find any of them in the woods where I'm 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 stronger than my left, so that 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 fastened 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,
large logs--
hundred-inch lengths of course, and each one weighing several
pounds--
a cold night, occasional star showers,
pulsings 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's an older lady in town who works on plow horses,
gives them rub-downs, massages, hoist their hips and shoulders
back into place when they pop out.
She says, they're easier to work with,
that a horse won't tense up and resist you,
when you press or lean in against its muscles.
And when my back gets way out of line, I go visit her,
and she works on it.
I lie there 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've 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 frogs--
is like that of a staple gun.
And sometimes, I imagine that it is--
that she is piecing me back together,
that she is pausing, choosing, and selecting which treatments
to use on me that day, so that I can go back out into the woods
and choose and select which would take out
and send to the faraway mills, who will then send the logs to.
We're all still connected up here.
Some of the connections are in threads, in tatters,
tenuous but there's still a net of connectivity,
through which magic passes.
Whenever a new car or truck enters the valley,
I run and hide.
I scramble to the top of a hill and watch through the trees
as it passes.
They can never get me.
They would have to get the land itself.
The scent of sweat, of fern, of hot saw blade,
boot leather, damp bark--
I suck these things in like some starving creature.
All the books in my house now sit motionless
and unexamined in their shells, like the photos
of dead relatives, dearly loved and deeply missed.
Sometimes, I pull them down, touch the spines, even
say their names aloud, as one would
the name of one's mother, mom, or one's grandmother, grandma.
But then, I go back out into the woods.
Once, carrying a log across a frozen pond,
I punched through the ice and fell in up to my chest.
The cold water was such a shock to my lungs
that I could barely breathe.
And I had to drop the log and skitter out, then
build a quick fire to warm up.
The heater in my old truck doesn't work.
Some days, many days, it feels like two steps
forward and two steps back, as the land
continues to carve and scribe us at its own pace.
And now, when I take my pickup to the mill
and offload my logs next to the millions of board feet
that are streaming through it like diarrhea
through a bloated pigs butt in the feedlot,
what difference do I think it will make?
How does my fantasy stand up there
under the broad examination of reality?
In protest, I haul the logs more slowly than ever.
In protest, I take more time with them.
I touch them, smell them.
I tie the best ones to strangers.
Sometimes, I sit down and read the cross section of each log,
counting the growth rings.
Here is where one seedling grew fast, seeking light,
struggling for co-dominance.
Here is where it reached the canopy
and was then able to put more of its energy into girth and width,
rather than height, stability.
Here, this growth ring is the drought year, then
the succession of warm, wet, growing years.
Here, the next band of rings is where the low intensity fire
crept through and around the forest, scorching the edges of,
but not consuming the tree.
I read each of the logs in this manner,
as if reading the pages of some book.
Maybe someday, I will go back to books.
Maybe someday, I will be drawn to submerge back
into the vanished or invisible world,
and will live and breathe theory,
and maybe, Hope will start painting again.
But right now, I am hauling logs,
and she is gardening, raking the loose earth with tools,
though other times with her bare hands.
And it feels like we are falling,
and as if we are starving, and as if I must keep protesting,
must keep hauling logs.
We try not to buy anything anymore,
especially nothing made of wood.
It's all such utter flimsy shit.
One touch, one stress upon it, and it all splinters to hell.
A hammer, or ax handle, a wooden stepladder, a chest of drawers--
it is all such hollow shit, and we are starving.
Before I burned out in that third life, I was a sizzle.
I remember awakening each morning to some burning smell
within me, scorched metal against metal, manatees,
ivory-billed woodpeckers, whales, wolves, bears, bison--
I burned for it all and did so gladly.
The forest loves its fires.
The reason I think I left the second life, left art,
left storytelling was because it had become so safe,
so submerged.
It wasn't radical enough.
They say most people start out being radical when they're
young, and then gravitate toward moderation in middle age,
and then beyond moderation to the excesses of the right.
But for me, it has been the opposite, as if
the land itself appears inverted, mysterious, even
magical, turning humans and all else inside
out in constant turmoil, constant revolution.
We, all painters and writers, don't want to be political.
We want to be pure and artistic, but we all know, too, I think,
that we're not up to the task.
What story, what painting does one
offer up to refute Bosnia, Somalia,
the Holocaust, Chechnya, China, Afghanistan, or Washington DC?
What story or painting does one offer up
or create and counterbalance the ever increasing sum
of our destructions?
How does one keep up with the pace?
Not even the best among us are up to this task,
though each tries.
Like weak and mortal wood under stress,
we splinter and try to act, create, heal.
Some of us fall out and write letters to Congress, not novels.
Other-- others of us write songs,
but they are frayed by stress and the imbalance of the fight.
Some of us raise children.
Others raise gardens.
Some of us hide deep in the woods
and learn the names of the vanishing things
in silent, stubborn protest.
I want to shock and offend hauling logs.
My moderation seems obscene in the face
of what is going on on this landscape and in this country--
the things, the misery for which this country
is so much the source, rather than a source of healing
or compassion.
Paint me a picture or tell me a story as beautiful
as other things in the world today are terrible.
If such stories and paintings are out there,
I'm not seeing them.
I do not fault our artists for failing to keep up with or hold
in check the world's terrors.
These terrors are only a phase, like a fire
sweeping across the land.
Rampant beauty will return.
In the meantime, activists blink on and off
like fireflies made drowsy over pesticide meadows.
Activism is becoming the shell, the husk of where art once was.
You may see one of them chained to a gate, protesting yet
another Senate spawned clear cut and think the activist
is against something.
But the activist is for something,
as artists used to be.
The activist is for a real and physical thing,
as the artist was once for the metaphorical.
The activist, or brittle husk of artist,
is for life, for sensations, for senses deeply touched,
not in the imagination, but in reality.
The activist is the emergency room doctor,
trying to perform critical surgery on the artist.
The activist is the artist's ashes,
and what awaits the activist's ashes?
Peace?"