The actual voice saying “remember me” is the voice of a local newscaster. When it speaks, the pillar’s voice has the local ring of authority that has pushed hard news at us for years. There is a story that the newscaster’s daughter worked at the desk beside the talking tree. All day, all summer, visitors came in waves. As the crowds listened, gazed up along the long trunk, opened their silent mouths, again and again she heard her father say, in his trance of authority, “Let’s pretend I’m a real tree . . . remember me.”
The voice of an ancestor speaks rightly from a tree. At my home, the family tree is a literal sycamore. My grandmother gave it as a sapling: a stem crowned with a whorl of four branches for the four children. I am one. Now she has gone and it is giant shade, mossy with age, sprawling across the sky. Passing out the front door, we keep the custom of reaching out to touch its bark. It clatters in storms, and dumps mounds of dusty leaves. We stand against the trunk for photographs. (“There, that is Boppums in the background, the one dressed in lichen.”) We climb or loll in her shade, rake her leaves, watch her roots knee up to buckle the walk. When we chop up a heavy limb that rubbed on the roof, my grandmother’s fire warms us. Through the screen in December: remember me. And my deepest sense of home includes that soft rushing sound of wind through tall old fir trees.
“Can you remember your work as a logger?” I asked Milo, an old bachelor living at eighty with his sister Cora. She was upstairs, sifting photographs to show me. I said to Milo, “Dan Miles tells me he filed saws on your crew—when was that, the twenties?”
First Milo gave me that customary silence of the old, that respectful hesitation. Then he said in a low voice, “When we worked big fir, I had a falling partner. He chopped left-handed, I chopped right, and that made us good partners. But you always have to brush out a trail to run. When the tree starts down, you’re going to drop your saw and run. Before you spring-board up and start the undercut, your two fallers always brush out a trail apiece. Get that tangle-vine maple and other trash out of your way. Tree goes here—you go this way, he goes that.
“Had our trails clear, got up ten foot past the butt-swell on springboards, threw coaloil on the saw, and started that old misery whip back and forth. He was pulling hard that day, and I was bitching about it. ‘Pull steady, dammit!’ So he evens out. We got the undercut sawed, and chopped her out, then took a break for lunch. He wasn’t talking. Trouble with his girl, maybe, trouble with his soul—I never did know. Silent break, and we went back at it silent. We were working a side canyon to ourselves. Real quiet, and that was odd. My partner usually talked along right with the saw. His talking muscle never got tired. But different that day.
“We climbed up to springboards again and started the backcut. Pretty soon we went out of view from each other—he swinging his board away as the saw went in, and he driving his own little wedge to keep the kerf open so the saw won’t bind. You saw a while, and tap that wedge, and the wood hinge between your undercut and backcut slims down to a couple fingers through, and then she goes. It’s then you tap the wedge and it slips in loose, the backcut kerf starts to open, the tree-hinge starts talking, and you jump. We dropped the saw, and jumped down right, and I started running out along my trail without a backward look. You got to just go like hell from those old ones. Any kind of widowmaker trash can fall from the sky. But he didn’t run. I could hear he didn’t, because that big tree coming down was quiet at first. When I turned around, he stood looking at me, stood where the tree would drop.
“‘Milo, you go on,’ he says. Real quiet. There was that quiet before hell. ‘Go on,’ he says.
“A big limb gets him, tears him open and knocks him aside, and then the tree’s down in its own blow of splinters and dust. I run around the stump to where he lies. I held him in my arms god-damn. He’s all split open. I could see his heart, was working. He didn’t talk. I didn’t talk. Nobody came, and he didn’t last. Yeah, my partner. Accident, they said. He stood there. ‘Milo,’ he says, ‘you go on.’”
Milo looked me in the eye. Cara came back into the room. There was nothing more to say that day.
Cedar rings like a bell when split, and a honey whisper rises from the riven shake. The plink of kindling, the clunk of fence rails struck from a log—dressing cedar boards is light, loving work. “Behold, thou art fair, my beloved,” says the Song of Songs; “also our bed is green. The beams of our house are cedar, and our rafters of fir.”
Makoto Imai, our teacher and Japanese builder of shrines, worked three hours before us to sharpen his tools before he hefted a rare beam of Port Orford cedar. “When you hold small tool,” he said to us, “get it balanced like your hand. Your whole body need be very quiet.” The room was quiet as he calligraphed the layout of a scarf-joint in the air before us with a tiny brush of crushed bamboo. We looked around. His tools lay before him on a simple plank—four saws, ten chisels, planes, a square, and the Japanese equivalent of a chalkline: a reel of silk thread with a turtle carved on it that sipped from the bowl of sumi ink. Behind him stretched years of exacting practice. He works for nothing sometimes, sleeping at the site of a slow-growing shrine. His tools showed more spirit than steel, more of karma than carpentry. Cedar does this to a listener.
Some read cedar for spirit, some read in it only the metaphor of value called money. So, cedar pirates abound. Moth doth not corrupt, rain doth not soften cedar. Clear heartwood redcedar asks a fair price, and all along the Pacific beach after each storm the big silver driftlogs have been tasted by a beachcomber’s axe. A cedar pirate chips wood and sips the wind. If the smell is cedar, he’ll be back with a truck, a chainsaw, and a winch. A good western redcedar log can lie damp in the Northwest woods for generations and still prove sound to the saws of the shingle-mill. A flatbed truck stacked high with fresh-cut bundles of cedar shingles will leave a trail of scent half a mile long. Following such a load as I spin down the freeway, I pop open the wind-wing and drink deep: sweet intoxication. The air in Pharaoh’s tomb was magic, but cedar mixed with wind is food.
For the Kwakiutl, Nootka, Haida, Bella Bella, and other people of the Northwest coast, cedar bark and wood made rainproof hat, tasseled cape, box for the dead, housepost face, tall tree carved to the masks of totem, rope to tether whales. When they paddled long cedar canoes boiling upriver, they pulled the wide cedar planks of their homes in rafts. In a Chinook story, when Coyote was trapped in a hollow cedar tree, he had to tear himself apart and slip out bone by bone through a woodpecker hole. But a raven made off with his eyes. Then Coyote tricked an old woman blind to steal back sight. He went off with her eyes, and she with a pair of wild rose leaves. But the story is not about Coyote, or the snail that old woman became, feeling her way along the ground forever. The story is about cedar. Coyote tried to be the spirit of a tree, and failed. Cedar held the life.
“Life is for doing things slow,” Makoto said, “like trees.” We learned much from this man, because he was humble, articulate as the figure in wood itself. He taught us with demonstrative movements more like dance than knowledge, and with a level gaze. His few words only confirmed what his working showed. “Learning with the body—slow, strong,” he said at one point, as he paused between chisel strokes. “Learning with the head—fast, easy to forget.” The long shaving fell away hesitant as lace from his blade. When others edged forward to touch the scarf-joint he had made, I bent to lift the shaving and hold it to my face, like a message I had inherited, breathing in deep.
Makoto wished his dovetail joint, his tenon fit to be tight as the integral growth of wood. He worked with a tree’s patience. “In sharpening, in joinery,” he said, “you must use listening sound, trying to be concentrate. Must be quiet in the shop when you sharpen—talk, machine, it will not work.” He chose the tree of life: “If you are working for money, use maybe marking gauge; for yourself, a bamboo brush, sumi ink. That is the pleasure for your whole body, making a beautiful thing.”
Yew is a magic stick. When I was twelve, I found it lost in the
barn. My nine cousins swung from the rope to perish in hay so deep it muffled their laughter, rising as they did to play Kansas kamikaze again. From above, I watched them die and rise, in the freedom of the tribe of nine. I was one of four—expendable, yes, but not to the power of nine. And I was from Oregon: for all the glory of the barn, of summer Kansas, a little homesick.
Hid among the cluttered steamer trunks and Midwest history—letters from the Civil War, and horse gear mice inhabited—I found the magic stick: a short yew bow without a string. It was just my height, with a red heartwood belly and a perfectly thin sapwood back. There was a leather handle, and in dim dusty light my fingers followed the notches at the ends so neatly grooved with a rat-tail file—the nocks where a string should fit. I tested it against my knee. The bow was stiff, its limbs tapering hardly at all.
The real magic of the thing was not its strength, but its blemish. A few inches from one end, the wood took a sharp kink where the maker had followed the grain faithfully around a knot in the original tree. A lesser hand would have taken a saw to the blank, and cut straight through, losing strength for symmetry. My fingers curled around that kink. Someone understood the true crippled world could be stronger than plain beauty. Someone had followed the grain.
Someone was calling the nine, and they called for me. I came down the long ladder with the bow through my belt. “Oh, that,” said the nine, “that bow.” I was the finder. I felt I had a claim.
Inside the big house, in the swirl for a place at the sink to wash, my father said, “Let me see that bow.” In his hands it was real, and the big glass of the window shimmered in danger from the invisible arrow he pulled. His face tightened into the scowl for aim, and the nine stood back at bay, Uncle Bob and Mar saying, “Bill, your bow.”
It was his bow. He had cleft a billet from a bolt of Oregon yew, shaved it down with shards of glass, following the grain past that true kink, spliced the original linen bowstring, and sent this gift to the Kansas cousins. When lives were shorter, people had time for such work. The bow lasted with the tribe the life of one string, and when the mice got that, the bow moved upstairs into the barn of history.
I felt that bow was a wood soul far from home. Shouldn’t wood and I live where we began? The nine were generous. Driving west, in the back seat I held it: homeward cousin, Oregon yew.
What makes yew the living talisman of change? What makes it spry for bows and tuneful for the backs of lutes? Something in its tight red grain older than religion makes it right for killing and for music. Up the McKenzie River, just before the road from Sweet Home joins the highway for Sisters, yew trees huddle in a grove, north upslope. I always seem to get there just at dark, and snow lights the ground where I stand among them. The branches turn abruptly back on themselves like the rune named yew, the rune for death. I want to ask their twisted forms “Does it hurt so much, coming out of the ground?” I lean on a trunk. The pitchy berries are dull red, the flat needles still. Then starlight.
Pascal said a strange thing: the sole cause of human unhappiness is our inability to remain quietly at home in our rooms. In a fist of working forest duff are more small lives than the human population of Earth: in secret, a busy power of being. Eden is there, compact. Heaven for a yew tree lies below. Is this why yew stands bent but cheerful? “Our songs are short,” said the Papago woman, “because we understand so much.” Yew stays home, grows slow, lives long: guest most faithful to this ground.
Any table of virgin fir, any maple chair, any oak floor is a bundle of stories. At a lull in the conversation, move your napkin aside. There are centuries under one hand’s span, and the timbre of a long, spirited life for the rap of a knuckle. Woodworkers sometimes hear it—the sweetest yelp of the violin before they brush on the varnish of maturity. There was a man who made rifle stocks of curly maple. His son made skiffs of Sitka spruce. Both gave up their ways, and sold their wood to my friend, who makes violins: spruce for the bellies, maple for the backs, with ebony fingerboards. So it has always been done. Tree of life, teach us to give up war and distance for the plain, local thrill of this music: pine, fir, cedar, yew.
THE GREAT DEPRESSION AS HEROIC AGE
Heartbeat takes me forward, stories take me back. Waking on the midnight train, or wakeful in my bed at home, in orbit memory I hurtle past the houses where my people grew. I ramble the vagabond circuit, the foggy geography of time, and glance through windows lit by a pincushion on a table, a book in hand. In this Kansas house my father will live. At this Nebraska farm my mother will arise. Tornado wants them dead. Fear wants them sad. I batter with the moth on screen doors, sipping a rusty fragrance, wanting in. My wings dissolve, I wake. I travel locally. In Oregon back home, when we gather for tea, I listen hard. In stories from the Great Depression and the ribbons of experience it sent outward, my kin live simply. By their telling, hard times trained them to be happy. Their hardship stories work on me. Before dawn, alone at my desk, I try to sift it all, to give it all a shape. On this computer screen, my words spin green from light. How shall I live?
One winter day on the bus bound east through central Oregon, just as we dropped over the rim to the reservation at Warm Springs, I glanced across the aisle at a Wasco boy. He cradled a book that devotion had worn to tatters: The Incredible Magic of the American Indian. Late sunlight struck the page and lit his face, his eyes that hunted as he read. One seat back, in the hands of a ski bum about the same age, I saw Kerouac’s On the Road. He traveled the kinked road twice: once by body, once by mind. The bus geared down. Outside, the steep sage hills tapered into darkness. I put my hand to the heart-pocket of my coat, where I had tucked away a tiny notebook to write down what I heard and saw and remembered—my own chosen stories of magic and departure. Traveling alone, each of us carried a book as medicine bundle, as survival kit of stories, as possible sack of belief and remedy to help us through the world.
Late that night, when I arrived in Burns, I learned my shirts and socks and sleeping bag had all caught the wrong bus in Bend. Surely now they traveled toward Los Angeles. The woman at the station counter, sleepy and ready to close, would put a tracer on my pack, she said, in the morning. Her hand on the counter flicked open, then slowly folded shut to show her regret and her fatigue. Beside her hand, in a rusted coffee can, a spindly tomato vine still grew—her pet and a February miracle. Marooned in Burns, I would grow beyond my custom, too. I turned away, starting off for the all-night Elkhorn Cafe. Outside, wind pumped snow and newspapers along the street. When the station lights had flickered out, the stars shone bold.
When you lose everything, what do you lose, and what do you keep? When you move with short notice, what do you take along? That night in Burns, I thought of the people of Sugar City, Idaho, the people told by bullhorn the dam had given way and they had minutes to abandon their homes and scramble for high ground. One man grabbed his electric razor and ran. A woman gathered only her Hümmels with one loving sweep of her arms, and lurched away. The last man out just had time to snatch his cowboy hat before clambering into his nephew’s wading pool and spinning away on the flood down Main Street. Before the water went down, it erased the town with a smear of mud, but everyone had a story.
I had to leave like that, and now I travel, an exile at a distance of thirty years from childhood. I carry stories from the old country, the point of origin, the central decade of the family’s hard times. The Great Depression of the thirties makes our heroic age, our Iliad, our Odyssey, our trickster Coyote’s time before the world was changed. I travel by bus, by foot, by dark, with a heart-pocket bundle of stories that light the road.
By habit I carry this notebook in my pocket, and travel as professional eavesdropper, because of the training I bring from home. When I played student there, my mother had a beautiful listening ear for our stories, and my father had a teacher’s fine trick that made us feel part of something big. When one of the four wild kids would mention a fugitive thought, an idea in infancy, no matter how small, my mother would draw us out fo
r more, or my father would stop the talk to savor what we had said. Often, they would match our saying to a line from literature or a story from the family lore. The literature flavored our lives then, but the stories stuck for good.
“Daddy, when I held the bow and arrows this time, I thought how Bobbie Elliot can hit a baseball better, but I know how to shoot.”
“You know,” my father would say, “Milton had the same idea.” He would reel out a grand, soothing passage then from Paradise Lost, a stretch of line from Shakespeare, a chanted reverie from Wordsworth, from George Eliot, Willa Cather, Thomas Mann. He would knot our feeble syllables to the cadences of the great. The exact words of the poetry did not stay with me, but the feeling of being companion to Shakespeare struck like a bell in my heart. Child, parent, and saint of the language joined as fellow pilgrims on one road.
It happened the same with family stories, but I remember the stories. In the teaching episodes from my parents’ memories, customs from Kansas and Nebraska where they grew might get linked to any detail from our lives. Packed in my parents’ granary minds, stories sprang from seed. When we made small complaints, our whine could sprout a story from that golden void.
“My milkshake’s all plugged up. I need a bigger straw!”
“In Kansas,” my father would answer, as if citing scripture, “my father would take us in the Model T to a wheatfield at the edge of town, and we’d each cut a real straw the mowing machine had left. Then at home in the evening, my mother would make strawberry milkshake—strawberry jam dropped in a quart of milk and shaken. Sure the seeds got stuck in the wheatstraw. That just slowed us down enough to taste it.”
Having Everything Right Page 9
