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