THE GIVING TREE

     I have noticed how, over time, trees seem to make decisions and take action.  Indeed, it takes time to see this; each year a line of lesson.

     To ask the trees for lumber I walked into the forest.  I approached an elder Ponderosa.   I showed her my adoration and whispered to the rough bark, “I need some trees to enlarge my life.  Will you help?”

     I went away, thinking that yes or no, I had done what is right.  I love trees.  Who am I to choose which were to fall?

     That was in the late fall of 1996, shortly before the Jet Stream combed the Northwest.  A rare 100 miles per hour and trees all over the Columbia River Basin laid down facing East by Southeast.  I awoke the night it came.  I heard the wail climb and the pitch rise.  I thought, “It cannot howl higher.”

     It didn't.  The high note dropped into a very deep note; a new voice speaking power and room for more.  But it was enough, and by morning it had become the air we know around here.

     Bryan and Kim, two friends who dwell in my little pocket of forest fled in fear from their shelter on the cold clay oxbow as the wind grew.  They fled to the lower oxbow by the runoff pond.  There a great, dark Ponderosa, one of my favorites, had crashed down six or eight feet from where they had pitched emergency shelter.

     The forest was littered with fallen trees.  Maybe 25 or 30.

     The ground was too soft to log the trees out, so we sat back to wait until the earth was dryer.

     But on April 11th, 1996, a train derailed about 3 miles upstream.  At least three cars of raw, elemental, liquid chlorine ruptured.  The chlorine gasified quickly.  It also mixed with some petroleum crysilate, forming a madhouse of random toxins.  My neighbors fled to cleaner air.

     I would not return to claim the given trees.  Wild Robert and I found some clear days and bucked limbs and cut timber to length, but the winds came up and crazy, dizzying smells arose and chased us away.

     Pine rots very quickly if it touches the ground, and because we had limbed the trees, they were lying directly on the earth.  I felt I had betrayed the forest.

     Years passed.  I returned from the arduous trek of unhoming.

     I began my project anew.  I went down into the pine barrens and prayed and asked an older tree the same favor.  Give me 25 trees to enlarge my home.  A few months later, after the fall rains had begun but before the earth had frozen, a wind came up; not like the 1996 wind, but it was enough.  The earth around the trees was drenched.  Nothing but soaked earth existed to hold the roots.  Trees fell.  25 to 30 of them.

     A new friend said that if I could get the trees into decks, he would bring his portable mill and cut it all into lumber, for half.  A series of obstacles arose.  My car died.  My truck died.  I went to a childhood friend's house to ask to borrow his tractor.  We had done similar things when we were kids.  He refused.  I asked the town benefactor, but his little tractor was broken down.  Nowhere could I get someone to help me skid.  I had no money to pay for help.

     The trees laid out and began to soften, then to melt.

     A second loss.

     Twice I had betrayed the forest's gifts.  I could not ask a third.

     Last night I dreamt.  At the gates of a Lesser Heaven a young girl states my argument for entry is weak.  I maintain I know and love the trees.  A voice comes from above saying, “His is the voice of authority.”

     I look and see, in diaphanous green drapery, a tall and lovely woman descending the stairs. “Let him pass,” says she.

     Despite my grievous errors, the dryads still hear and love me.

     I am thrice humbled.

trees and light

LITTLE OUTPOST NAMED SUNSET

There is a town to the West of you.
There, oddly, the sun sets early.
Smiles await you,
but for themselves there is only silence
and the shadow beneath the trees.
Saudade leans against the woodshed;
his hat pulled low, her collar well up,
occasionally regarding a tattered
hand-written letter.
Sad little town wherein all inhabitants
share a single experience: they have lost
the love of their lives.

I am Sorrow.  I am Regret.  I am Remorse.
All of that today.  Tomorrow I will smile
for the children.  I will laugh
for my friends.  Beside Lolo Creek
I will be still as a deep pool, watching
the small fish jump,
struggle atop the water
to find a way back in.

THE MERMAID'S COURAGE

     The water known as Itshehe can feed you, entertain you, kill you.  Itshehe can seduce you, beguile you, lead you into a strainer and hold you under too long.
     Itshehe is a Mermaid.
     Her exquisite anguish is one of her most definitive aspects.
     Time after time she falls in love with a sailor; a male human who must remain in the clear air of the prevailing paradigm.  Too often Itshehe will lead the Beloved too deeply into the wonderland beneath the waves and when the emergency is recognized, no one can get him back to the air in time and he dies.  Dies in the arms of Itshehe, looking into her eyes with fear, panic, trust or, most painfully, the shock of the betrayed.

"The Mermaid and the Prince" by Jo Wall.

      Itshehe withstands the collapse of dreams, the dread of knowing that never again will the face of the handsome sailor be reflected in her own, feeling the tearing apart of fiber after fiber of the threads that bind two hearts together.   These things often kill a human lover.   The lights will go out.  The will to take the next step would chill and fade.  Finally the shipwrecked heart might forget the next beat.
     Knowing the Beloved believes, at the moment of dying, that the Lover has committed betrayal, and being just guilty enough to overlook the mutually neglectful nature of their self-betrayal, brings a pain to the Mermaid akin to Death itself.
     It is at this point that Itshehe, and all the Merfolk, bear up a rare brand of courage and dare, dare in the face of excruciating pain, dare in the face of repetition, dare to love again.
     There are rare occasions -- Mama Oceania be praised -- when the Beloved, that hapless human sailor, discovers his cloaked Dolphin or Sylkie nature and the two live together forever in the Marine Gardens.  Perhaps this is the hope-spring from which that extraordinary courage arises.
     Itshehe is all those things.

PISSING BLOOD

     One morning at school in the fourth grade I ate an entire red crayon.  It wasn't all that good.  I examined the texture of wax and the art of shaving a bit of crayon with my teeth until the crayon was gone.   Later that afternoon while many of my classmates ran through the boys lavatory between classes I amazed myself and some of my friends by pissing red.

     "Hey look guys!   I can piss red!"   I took a shot at the likely explanation, "All you have to do is eat a crayon and you pee that color."   Then I ran to the next class or recess.

     That night I got so sick I hardly dared to move.

     I could not climb into my top bunk.  My mother brought me into her bed and I laid out unmoving like fresh kill.  If someone sat on the side of the bed I could feel pain as intense as a kick to my testicles.  It was an organ pain, deep in my abdomen.  The sitter would jump up in alarm at my gasp and the bed would level and after a long minutes the pain would subside.  Even as a child I knew that I had seriously injured myself.

     I am a bit foggy about the time at this point.  Did my mother take me to the doctor that evening?   Did she take me the next morning?  How does this relate to lying on the bed like a hot mummy?

     I do remember the doctor's visit.   He had no answers beyond "Keep him still until he recovers."  That would be two or three days; a long time when you're nine.

     I remember a nurse who had a few moments alone with me at the doctor's office.  I cannot remember her face and I don't believe I ever knew her name, but she was quite concerned about me.   She whispered to me, "Honey, don't push so hard when you poop."

     I knew she was wrong, but I will love her forever for her caring and her attempt at talking sense to me where both my mother and the doctor were baffled.  From this experience I learned that Mom would do the right thing, that doctors just do the best they can but are fallible or don't ask the right questions, and that nurses can really care and would advise behind a doctor's back.

     I think that lesson, at nine years old, fathered my doubts about purely western medicine.

     I also learned that although crayons are non-toxic, wax is impossible to digest and can mechanically, or is it chemically?, put blood-letting stress on your internals.

AUTUMN'S BREATH

I plan on saying this once, then denying it henceforth: I actually appreciate autumn.

Autumn's breath is cool and damp.  It's harvest time.  Mother Nature has hardened her smile; has been around plucking many innocent souls of fallen flora and fauna and dropping them into Her berry bucket.  The ravens follow her.  Death slumps against the door jamb, in the shadows, watching me like he knows something with certainty.  The ravens follow him.  Cats go feral and inexplicably electric.   In the highlands, huckleberry bushes show signs of being picked over; in the lowlands, the elderberry and huckleberry bushes have given their best.  The garden looks like it has a history of spousal abuse and fermentation.  People are sweating in harvest kitchens.  Sharp-eyed men survey the forest, looking for the standing dead, armed with tuned chainsaws, tough gloves, an axe and a good pickup.  Elk and deer turn their ears, anxious about the first rifle shot of the season.  The ravens follow the hunters.  The ravens lead the hunters.  The bear turns from his foraging and gleaning and assays his chance at the apple tree.  Colors.  Wet.  Quiet.  Waiting.  Death lights a cigarette in the dark doorway.