by Don Berry
In any event, after some desultory conversation, during which I became more and more embarrassed, I finally blurted out the thing that was uppermost in my
mind.
"Sam—listen, Sam," I said. "Is it true there's a fellow down here as lives in a tree?"
He looked up from the fire in astonishment, meeting my eyes briefly. He chewed at his lip, and turned quickly back to the fire, squeezing his hands between his knees. He closed his eyes tightly before he answered, screwing up his courage. "Yus," he admitted, so softly I leaned forward to hear. "Name of Joe Champion, him."
He was so miserable in admitting it that I sympathized deeply with him. It was obviously the first time he'd realized he was guilty that Joe Champion had decided to live in a tree.
TWO
1
My first night at the Bay was thus spent curled up on the floor of Sam Howard's rickety, shivery cabin, while the coastal storm roared and prowled around the walls, poking in wet claws of wind. Sometimes in the early morning, before false dawn, I was wakened by the dying of the storm and lay drowsily listening to silence, as attentively as though it were sound.
The next week I spent aimlessly tramping the Bay, picking out the 320 acre claim the future would know as "Ben Thaler's place." I was deeply conscious of my responsibility. Misty, unborn generations of Thalers hiked with me, peering critically over my shoulder every time I paused to survey a hillock or valley that appealed to me. The first few days I tried to see it all through their eyes, but I plainly couldn't. After a while I got very annoyed and resentful and had practically made up my mind never to many, so there wouldn't be any future generations of Thalers to criticize a choice I was making as best I could. It was just spitefulness on my part, of course.
Under the sun the Bay was not nearly so desolate as my first, rain-soaked glimpse, and I was quickly able to restack some of my illusions. The first morning was exceptionally beautiful. The thick bed of ferns that blanketed the whole half-moon of land was still wet from the storm, and the sun rising over the knobby peaks of the coast range picked out individual droplets like some un-imaginable dew fall. The forest was lush and fresh, as though it had been born in a rush of green brilliance under the rain. The sensation of richness and fertility and growth was overwhelming. Out at sea the rollers remained huge for several days, swinging in long stately lines to thunder down across the sandbar, seeming to shake the ground under my feet. The purity of their whiteness in the sun was awesome, and I thought this was probably the most perfect meeting of land and sea God had ever created.
For my land claim I finally chose a tract some distance back from the sea, hoping to avoid the violence and misery of the rainstorms, which were fresh in my mind. The river-bottom land with its rich dark soil was attractive at first, but I avoided it, as it is a source of disease. My land was prairie land, grazing land—or would be, after the near-solid ranks of timber had been cleared off. As in all the coastal forests a dense mat of ferns and brush smothered the soil, but with my future-pointing eyes I could see it all cleared, with vast herds grazing the emerald-green pastures.
The impression of richness and fertility in the Bay was strongly tinged with loneliness, and the sense of isolation was sharp. The flat and fertile plain ran back perhaps six or seven miles from the sea. It raised itself in a line of gentle undulations, as though preparing for the great effort, and suddenly swept up to form the knobby, twisted humps of the Coast Range itself. This single passage of hills was the sole transition. The mountain barrier isolated us from the interior as effectively as any prison wall; It was clear that any settlement here would live or die according to its communications with the Outside, and equally clear that this meant the sea. This impression was confirmed when I talked to some of the other men who had already taken up claims on the land.
Warren Vaughn was perhaps the easiest to talk to, a heavy-set Valley man who had come in the year before. He was sensible and [stable, with no pronounced eccentricities. So much so that it made me vaguely unquiet at first. I'm afraid it is a fact that a perfectly normal man does not throw up goods and job to wander down into a deserted and isolated Bay to live with the Indians, cut off from the society of his kind, hacking out of the raw land a tiny clearing not half as big as what he left behind. The reasons they invent are always the same—good land, opportunity, etc., etc. But there are few indeed who can look you in the eye. It is a question of excusing acts already . committed, and that is always embarrassing. In plain fact there is a deep unrest that churns in the belly of a man and makes him move. The rest is fantasy.
Being normal and sensible myself, I knew it was possible; but still . . . In any event, the only marked eccentricity I ever, discovered in Vaughn was that he was always right. He didn't say so. But you knew it, down deep inside you. If Vaughn told you the sky was green, you realized for the first time what an ass you'd been all your life to think it was blue.
Vaughn was of my opinion regarding transportation. "The sea's our lifeline, Ben," he said. "Hell, lots of ways we're closer to China than we are to the Valley."
I thought about it. "Well, I expect some day there'll be a wagon road into the Valley. That'll make a lot of difference?
Vaughn laughed, throwing back his head. "Ben, my boy," he said tolerantly, "that's what I used to think, too. But just figure it over a minute. How wide you think you'd have to make a wagon road into the Valley?"
"Ten feet, maybe? Twelve? Wagon and team won't take no more'n that, surely."
"It ain't the wagons, friend, it's the trees. You got it in your mind wrong, Ben. Storms, deadfalls, stuff like that. Why, after a good storm you'd have five hundred firs lyin' across your road between here and the Yam Hill district. No, you'd have to cut yourself a road wide enough that falls wouldn't block her after every little wind. Now ain't that right, Ben? Admit I'm right, now."
"Yes, well—I guess, if it comes to that, I guess you're right, there."
"So," Vaughn continued, leaning forward slightly. "Them firs in the Coast Range, they run maybe a hundred and fifty feet, right?"
I looked at him, startled. "Vaughn—you ain't sayin' you'd have to build a road a hundred and fifty feet wide? "
"Oh, no. Oh, no."
I leaned- back a little, relaxing. "Well, god, that's better. I mean, to make a road—"
He lunged forward, pinning me with his confident eyes. "Three hundred feet, Ben! Three hundred. Because, you see, them trees are liable to fall from both sides of the road."
He was clearly right, and I wondered why it had taken me so long to realize that a wagon road was a sort of figment in my head.
"No, Ben, you just get ‘road' right out of your mind. There ain't never going to be a road going inland. This here's coast country, she's tied to the sea?
I was vaguely uneasy about it still, but Vaughn was such a sensible man and he'd thought it all out so carefully I felt like a fool to argue.
"`Well," I said finally, "I guess it's a good thing you got connections."
"Connections? What connections?"
I looked at him, surprised again. I hoped he wasn't going to convince me there was no such thing as a ship.
"We1l, I heard you boys had connections with a big Boston sea-company."
Vaughn sighed, and pulled at his nose. "Yes, that's Means, Captain Means. But he ain't exactly a big company, Ben. He's got a couple of sloops up to Beverly, Maine. He comes out and sets up a cooperage on the beach once a year when the salmon start runnin' into the Bay. Buys fish from the Indians, stacks 'em in barrels, and then runs on home."
I frowned. "Take more'n a sloop to support a honest-to-god settlement?"
"Hell, Ben," Vaughn said impatiently. "Nothing bigger'n a sloop can get acrost the bar out there." He pointed vaguely out across the Bay to the line of breakers thundering down on the bar. "Sometimes not even that," he added. "There's boats tried half a dozen times and couldn't make it. Means is the only one who's kept it up regular."
I mumbled something about h
aving heard this was a perfect anchorage.
"They say, they say. God, Ben, you know people say anything. You know that, don't you? I mean, there's some people get a idea in their heads and then they don't pay no mind to how things really are."
That was right, when I thought about it, but it still started getting me depressed again. I thought I didn't want to hear any more about the way things really were; not if it was all so discouraging.
"Oh, we ain't got it so bad, after all," Vaughn said, taking pity on me. "Means is a good man, he breaks his neck to get in here, and I half suspect he's an honest man to boot, though he charges thirty dollars a ton for freight." My expression must have been worthy of remark, as Vaughn started laughing again. "Oh, I ain't sayin' he's cheap?
"Thirty dollars a ton!"
"That's it. But we get good money, too, don't forget. Fifty cents a bushel for potatoes, forty cents a pound for butter, seventeen dollars a barrel for salmon. All we need is more cows and more people. Mostly cows. Then, Ben my boy, we're going to be rich, thirty dollars a ton or not."
"Long as Means keeps going."
"Long as Means keeps going. Right now he's keepin' us alive, and that's all there is to it. But like I said, he's dependable and he's honest. You got to pay, is all."
We talked a bit longer, and Vaughn said when I got ready to clear some on my claim, he and the boys would give me a hand.
"That'd be real kind of you," I said. "I'm short on tools, sort of."
"It'll go better. Got to help each other out a bit or we all go under."
He clapped me on the back when I left, and I felt pretty good again. Thirty dollars a ton freight . . . But hell, it was all on paper anyway, no real money ever changed hands because there wasn't any around. I don't suppose it'd matter if you wanted to call it thirty thousand, long as everything else was called thousands, too. One of my troubles is, I've never got out of the habit of thinking of money as being real. It isn't my most important trouble, but it's one of them, and I like to keep track.
2
There is an art to cutting down a tree. Unfortunately it is an art none of us had. One can, of course, simply cut through the trunk, which is more or less the way I had it in my mind. In that case the tree will probably fall down. However, it may not be for another twenty years, if it should hang up in other trees, and it is virtually certain not to fall in any desirable direction. After a lifetime which it sometimes seems I devoted to cutting down trees, I am convinced that they were not meant to be cut down. God intended forests to stand eternally, and He so constructed them. Then He gave man a fixed image of cleared land as Good, just for the hell of it.
Near the exact center of the land I had chosen was a small rise, on which I decided to build my cabin. The top of this tiny mound was strangely clear of timber, and this undoubtedly had something to do with my choice. It was not much in the way of a clearing—certainly too small for a cabin and garden. As though half a dozen trees had been plucked out of the forest. Still, it was something slightly different, a landmark of sorts, something that struck the eye. And as most major decisions are made on no more than that, I don't know why I should feel any need to justify my choice. I was still somewhat annoyed with all those future generations of Thalers riding on my back, and figured if they didn't like the spot they could damn well find land of their own.
Vaughn did come when the time arrived, bringing tools and help and, above all, his knowledge of woodsmanship. Sam Howard came with him, feeling responsible for me since he had seen me first, and also a huge, blondish giant with a perpetual sheepish smile, whom I had not yet met. The big man made me a little nervous at first. He said nothing at all. And when he was not actively engaged in doing something he had a disconcerting habit of putting his hands on top of his head and staring vaguely up at the sky with his mouth half open, as though waiting for something to fall. His elbows stuck out like great, angular ears.
Looking upward from my minuscule clearing was intimidating. Even above the tiny empty space the vast spreading limbs of surrounding trees formed a twisted and tangled web that was almost solid. It is one thing to see the forest as a mass, and quite another to consider it as individual trees to be cut down one at a time. All around us was a perfect infinity of darkly massed trunks stretching upward into the sky. You could see no more than twenty feet into the wall; after that, it was a solid substance several thousand miles thick. Rank after rank of deep gloomy firs that extended unbroken to the edge of the bay, and in the other direction to the edge of the world, as nearly as I could tell.
The vastness, the incredible complexity of number and density that was the forest, was terrifying. It was like contemplating the number of stars, or the grains of sand on the beach.
I think we all felt the same thing as we looked around us in silence, the same awe, tinged with desperation. It was like a nightmare of helplessness. There was a vast disproportion somewhere; the endless packed ranks of the forest, silent and eternal, being faced by—us. Four tiny men with three axes and a crosscut saw.
The mood deepened into a conviction that there was no question of doing this thing. When I was finally faced t with it, I didn't think it was possible to begin, there was simply no place to start. And once started, it would I never finish. You could go on and on cutting trees in this country, and raise your children and your grandchildren and your descendants to the twentieth generation to devote their lives to cutting trees and it would never end. To learn humility, a man must stand in the midst of the Oregon forest. I was caught in a kind of awful paralysis, brought on by the simple contemplation of this infinity and my relation to it.
It was Vaughn who finally broke the silence.
"Let's take this one," he said. "It's small."
* * *
I think, very frankly, that Vaughn was profiting from this magnificent opportunity to perfect his lumbering technique, or at least his theory of it. We worked hard, I all of us, and by noon had felled half a dozen trees. Our control had not been up to the required standard. The fallen trunks were tangled in a hideous mess of intertwining branches, resembling nothing so much as a pile of jackstraws. Getting them disentangled and limbed and dragged to a safe place for burning was going to be difficult. Still, they had been standing straight and eternal, and now they were lying on the ground, which was already saying much.
Vaughn had showed us how to notch the tree on the side we wished it to fall. This we did with the axes. Then we cut through from the other side with the big falling saw and, in theory, the tree tipped into the notch and fell directly on a line with it. As we worked at the notch, Vaughn would occasionally step up with his ax and thrust the head in crossways. The tree would fall, he told us, in the direction indicated by the handle. It was both an impressive and a reasonable demonstration, and we believed it.
In practice—I don't know exactly what went wrong. We were lucky to guess within 180 degrees where the damned thing was going to go. However, as none of them had actually fallen over backward, we still felt we were ahead of the game. It seems a little strange in retrospect, but in all this we never questioned Vaughn's skill; our own crude physical performance was simply not up to that level. Understand, Vaughn himself made no effort to shift the responsibility, or even to pretend to a competence he didn't have. He was as puzzled by it as we were. But it was clear to everyone that when something went wrong the fault was elsewhere. It simply never occurred to any of us that he might be doing something
wrong. It was just a part of his personality, that no one ever doubted him.
In the early afternoon we reached a tricky problem. A fir that was visibly inclined in the wrong direction and, to boot, had a pronounced bend in the trunk. Also in the wrong direction. It was a sick tree, an abnormal tree, and it was a tree that intended to fall in its own way, which was directly across the clearing.
"Well, now," Vaughn said cheerfully. He held his ax up, dangling it head down from his thumb and forefinger and gauging vertical from this handy plumb. He kn
ew more things to do with axes than anybody I ever met. He squinted with one eye along the haft and came to the conclusion we all had: that the thing had a hell of a lean to it. However, it was now official.
"This here's going to be a wee bit harder, boys," Vaughn said.
There were other trees hunched around it, of course, thick as hair on the back of a dog. The likelihood of it
hanging up seemed excellent, particularly with that nasty bend in the trunk. If that happened we'd be left with the job of cutting the tree on which it had caught. The combination of forces in the two trees was such that they might fall anywhere at all; there was no predicting what would happen. In discussing the problem Vaughn said the professional loggers called that kind of situation a "widowmaker," which had a rather discouraging ring. The longer I looked at that tree the more ominous it seemed to me. It was jammed from butt to tip with murderous possibilities.
"I'm going to leave that one," I said. "I like it."
"Nonsense," said Vaughn. "You can't leave it."
"Yes, I can. I like it. I'm going to look at it out my window. It has a variety to it, it isn't straight like all the rest."
"That's a sick tree, Ben."
"I'll take care of it."
Vaughn changed his tactic. "Where you say you were going to put the cabin?"
I showed him again, the place in the clearing. "See how nice that'll be?" I said. "I can see it right out the window there, it'll give me something interesting to look at."
Vaughn considered the cabin site silently. Then he considered the sick tree, looking it up and down and pulling at his nose. Finally he turned away with a sad shake of the head, and put his hand on my shoulder. "Well, it's up to you, Ben. It's your tree. It's been nice knowin' you, fellow. I'm sorry it had to end this way."
That threw me off balance right there. "End? What end?"
