The Lives of Rocks

by Rick Bass

  In the section of my life after that one, I was an artist, a writer of brief stories in which I was comfortable holding a sheaf of ten or twelve papers in which a lifetime, even several lifetimes, had passed. A few thousand people would read my slim books. They would write letters to me then and talk about the characters in those stories as if they were real people, which strangely saddened me.

  Then came the third life. I became an activist. It was as if some wall or dam had burst within me, so that everything I wrote had to be asking for something—petition signatures, letters to Congress, and so on—instead of giving something.

  But any landscape of significance—or power, whether dramatic or understated—will alter us if we will let it. And I am being bent yet again, though not without some fracturing; now I am into my fourth life, one built around things more immediate than the fairy-wing days of art. Even this narrative, this story, is fiction, but each story I tell feels like the last one I’ll do—as if I’ve become like some insect or reptile trying to shed the husk of its old skin—and even now as I struggle toward the perceived freedom of the next phase of my life—the light ahead—neither you nor I can really be sure of how much of any story is fiction, or art, and how much of it is activism.

  I am trying hard to move ahead cleanly into the next territory. But still, things slip and fall back; the old, even when it is buried beneath the new, sometimes rises and surges, pierces through, and reappears.

  Sometimes it feels as if I am running toward the future, with a hunger for it, but other times as if I am simply fleeing the past, and those old skins. It’s so hard not to look back.

  I cut saw logs to sell to the mill. Prices are high, on the back of an election year (low interest rates, new housing starts), as the economies of man heat to incandescence, fueled by China’s child labor, Mexico’s slave labor—fueled by the five-dollar-per-hour slave labor even in our own country—and in sawing those logs the first thing I notice is whether the log I cut is an old tree or a young tree. I don’t mean whether it’s a big one or not; all the logs I cut are of roughly the same size—big enough so that I can almost get my arms around them. They are each a hundred inches long, a figure I can measure off in my sleep, or can pace blindfolded. I’ve cut so many hundred-inch logs that I tend to see the world now in hundred-inch increments. That’s the size log the L-P Mill over in Idaho needs for its laser mill, which makes short (eight-foot) two-by-fours. There’s not a lot of waste. Those fucking lasers don’t leave much kerf.

  So the logs I cut are all about the same size, but each one is a different weight and density, depending mostly on age, and also on whether the tree got to be that big by growing quickly or slowly.

  The first cut you make into the log will show you this—will tell you just about all you’d ever want to know about that tree’s history. I can handle larger individual logs, and sometimes I’ll hump some big-ass honker, tight green old-growth spruce or fir—four hundred fucking pounds packed into that hundred-inch length—but mostly I try to carry out only the medium-sized ones, which fill up the back of the truck quickly enough. Some of them will be eighty or ninety years old, if they grew slowly, in a shadowy light-starved place (the kind of woods where I best like to work in summer); and others, the same size, will be only twenty or thirty years old, with their growth rings spaced a quarter-inch apart or wider—trees that are seemingly composed of liquid sunlight, trees like pipe straws sucking up water and sucking down sunlight, trees of no real integrity or use, weakened from having grown too fast, and without ever having been tested.

  But I get paid for volume, not quality, and I load them into the truck, too, a hundred inches at a time, though they feel as light as balsa wood after I’ve just handled an eighty- or ninety-year-old log before that one, and I feel guilty thinking of some carpenter three thousand miles away—Florida, perhaps—building some flimsy-shit house with those studs—the wood splitting like parchment at the first tap of a nail, and the carpenter cursing some unknowable thing, groping with his curse to reach all the way back to the point of origin, which is—what? The mill? Me? The sunlight? The brutality of supply and demand, and the omnipresent hyper-capitalism here at postconsumer century’s end? Finish the house, stucco over the mistakes, paint it bright red and blue, sell the sonofabitch and move on. What’re they going to do, dissect the house to cross-examine each strut, each stud? Who knows what’s inside anything? More and more I’m trying not to look back at who I was, or even who I am, but at the land itself. I am trying to let the land tell me who and what I am—trying to let it pace and direct me, until it is as if I have become part of it.

  This country—the Yaak Valley, way up in the northwest tip of Montana—burns and rots, both. The shape of the land beneath the forests is like the sluggish waves in an ancient, nearly petrified ocean—the waves of the northern Rockies sliding into the waves of the Pacific Northwest—so that it is like being lost, or like having found the rich, dense place you were always looking for. You can walk around any given corner and in less than a hundred paces go from fire-dependent ponderosa pine and grassland into the shadowy, dripping, mossy cedar-and-hemlock forests, rich with the almost sexual smell of rot. Tree frogs, electric red salamanders, hermit thrushes, ferns; climb a little farther, past the trickling waterfall, past the mossy green skull of a woodland caribou, and you come to a small glacier, across which are sculpted the transient, sun-melting tracks of where a wolverine passed the day before. The tracks and scourings of the glacier across the stone mountain, beneath all that ice, are only slightly less transient.

  Down the sunny back side of the mountain, you can pass through one of the old 1910 burns, where there are still giant larch snags from that fire, each one a hollowed-out home to woodpeckers and martens and bear cubs. This old burned-out forest still has its own peculiar vital force and energy and seems almost to seethe, drunk or intoxicated on the health of so much available sunlight, and drunk on the health of the rich fire-blackened soil—the nutritiousness of ashes.

  Then farther down the mountain, you’ll be back into damp creekside silent old growth: more moss, and that dark Northwest forest—spruce and fir.

  Back home, in your cabin, your dreams swirl, as if you are still traveling, still walking, even in your sleep, across this blessed landscape, with all its incredible diversity, and the strength that brings.

  In the first life, back in Louisiana, I took things. Just the oil, at first, from so deep beneath the ground and from such a distant past that at first it did not seem like taking—but then, gradually and increasingly, from the surface.

  I took boats, big boats, from their moorings at the marina at night: sailed them all night long—sometimes alone, other times with my wife, Hope. Before dawn we would sail back toward shore, then open the boat’s drain plug to try to sink it, or sometimes we would even torch the boat, and swim back in that last distance to shore, and then watch, for a while, in the darkness, the beautiful flaming spectacle of unmitigated waste.

  I would take everything, anything. The manhole covers to flood sewers in the street. License plates. Once, a sewing machine. From a backyard in suburban Lafayette, a picnic table. It was as if I were trying to eat the world, or that part of it. The newspapers began reporting the strange disappearances. They couldn’t find any rhyme or reason to it—there seemed no logic in it.

  I went in through windows and from dresser tops took jewelry and other riches. I didn’t ever sell anything; I just took it. It pleased me. I would place the objects elsewhere. There are diamond necklaces hung in the boughs of cypress trees in Louisiana—pearl earrings in bird nests in the Atchafalaya.

  I took cars: got in them and drove a short distance, then hid them, or sank them. It filled a need in me. I would look at my two hands and think, What are these made for, if not to take?

  II.

  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 seedlings in the forest fight and scramble for light.

  I like all that goes on in the hundred years of a tree’s life, or the two hundred, or five hundred years of its span—all the ice and snow, the windstorms, the fires that creep around the edges of some forests 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 hunch-shouldered at a desk these last ten or twelve 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 dense in my leather boots. The sight of bright new-cut 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 have 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 forests recycle through succession, but this landscape has carved and fit me—it is not I who has 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, disks, 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 to 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, blackened 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 am a black beast moving slowly through magical woods, growing shorter each year under these logs, as each year a disk is removed—as if I am sinking deeper and deeper into the old rot of the forest, until soon I’ll be waist 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. I think that I 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 to select only the densest, heaviest blown-down logs from the old forests 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 houses’ 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 a hundred-inch, two-hundred-fifty-pound green juicy fir on one’s mortal shoulder. You tell me which one is the fantasy and which is real.

  I am 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 multinational timber companies are inhaling this forest’s 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 into a hole, or have 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 notebooks, sitting out at the picnic table, the sunlight bright on that paper, my pen curlicuing words and shapes across that parchment like lichens spreading across the page at time-lapse 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, so that she seemed 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 in some child’s fairy-tale book, except that after Louisiana’s slow motion, the seasons in Yank seem almost to 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—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 of 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, or any other color. And we just don’t talk about art anymore. An overwhelming majority of the art that we see discourages us, depresses us—no longer inspires us—and whether this is a failure within us or one with the artists of this age, we’re not sure.

  It seems like a hundred 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 an elk or a grouse—but mostly I would just think 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-end, and of resolutions within a story, and epiphanies—all the old things. They were new to me back 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 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 am sinking deeper in the earth, ankle-deep in mulch now. I keep trying to move laterally—am 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.