Ethics, Values, & Sustainability
Environmental Strategy & Sustainability
Systems Thinking & Sustainable Businesses
Last Updated 01/14/2006
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Four miles up a logging road, in the southern Washington Coast Range, there used to be an unexceptional stand of ancient spruce and hemlock. On all sides of this stand were enormous clearcuts—skidder-scarred, slash-burned and replanted in the late sixties with the two-foot-tall mono-crop the U.S Forest Service and other less dishonest logging companies like to call “trees.” Across the road just to the south was a thousand-foot-high, two-mile-long ridge, also clearcut, and replanted in 1971. My big brother, Everett, and his fellow Wahkiakum County Work Camp cons—Vietnam draft-resisters and illegal aliens, most of them—replanted this vast ridge. And just a few days into their four months’ labor on it. Everett learned that our father was too riddled with cancer to travel anymore. The only chance Everett had of seeing Papa again would be by escaping from the camp and sneaking home.
It took our father many months to die. Everett spent every one of those months replanting the two-mile long ridge. So it was on that ridge that he waged the war between his longing to see Papa, and his promise not to see him. And all day, every day, that remnant stand of ancient trees stood across the valley, doing whatever it is that very old trees do.
They weren’t much to look at as you passed by, down on the road. Just two or so hundred acres of shaggy trees in a sort of bowl on the side of a mountain. Trees whose bark was marked, moreover, with the pink plastic tape and orange foresters’ graffiti that so gaudily announce impending doom. But on bright, clear days, when there were no clouds anywhere, a little patch of mist would gather over the bowl, just above the treetops. And the same bowl shape sheltered the stand from gales blowing in off the Pacific, preventing the trees from becoming storm-topped, letting them grow unusually tall. So, however humble they looked from the road, and however doomed, they were an untouched patch of intact creativity—a patch of what the world chooses to be where man has no say in the matter. And something about that manlessness called to Everett, beckoned to him as he slaved on his ruined ridge. But he had not been free to enter the grove, or to try to hear what it might by saying…
It made no sense really. They were just trees, and maybe a tiny creek slipping down through moss and deadwood. His urge to explore the stand should have been nothing compared with his inability to see and touch his wife or baby son; nothing compared with his inability to be seen and touched by his dying father. Yet with so many vast freedoms missing, so many huge hurts, one hurt Everett could not tolerate was his inability to drop his tree-planting tools, hike over into the grove and spend a half hour or so just seeing what was there to see.
So on the day he was paroled—ten months after leaving that ridge, and more than a year after losing his father—Everett shocked us all by making us swear over the phone not to surprise him, not to spy on him, not to celebrate his release with him in any way. “Let me come to you,” he said. “I can’t explain. It’s just a feeling. But please. Let me be.”
Early in the morning on the first anniversary of the day her family survived, the mother woke. At first she thought it was the birds. In the trees near the cabin, their songs in the early twilight were too sharp, more a sound of intrusion or alarm than the peace she and Cal had rented for two weeks on this New Hampshire lake. She had never liked to wake early, and on most days of her adult life she woke before she was ready, and needed coffee and a cigarette at once.
But in this early morning, in the gray beginning of light, she was awake and alert as though in evening, when her body was most vibrant, when she and Cal drank two martinis, sometimes three, and she told him of the birds and animals she had seen that day (pheasants lived on their Massachusetts land; foxes stalked them; and there were birds in the trees and at her feeder and pecking on the earth below it), and whom she had seen and what she had heard, and the questions and answers or attempts at them she had stored up in silent monologues with herself. Much of the time these were dialogues with Cal, though she was alone in the house or on their land or cross-country skiing on the meadow across the road or walking long and fast in trails through woods.
Cal would often interrupt her, smiling, watching her, and ask: “What did I say to that?” To her wondering whether families and America were worse now than when she and Cal were children, or even when their own daughter and son were children, or if all this horror of children beaten or raped at home, or kidnapped for pornographic pictures and movies, was nothing new at all, and only the reporting of it in newspapers and magazines and television was new. It seems the media only focuses on reporting the bad things that are happening in this world. Maybe they want us to live in constant fear.
Early in the morning on the first anniversary of the day her family survived, the mother woke.
Because Kenneth Girard loved his parents and his sister and because he could not tell them why he went to the woods, his first moments there were always uncomfortable ones, as if he had left the house to commit a sin. But he was thirteen and he could not say that he was going to sit on a hill and wait for the silence and trees and sky to close in on him, wait until they all became a part of him and thought and memory ceased and voices began. He could only say that he was going for a walk and, since there was so much more to say, he felt cowardly and deceitful and more lonely than before.
Kenneth looked up at the trees, which were darker green now. While he had been watching his mind, the earth, too, had become darker, shadowed, with patches of late sun on the grass and brown fallen pine needles. He stood up, then looked down at the creek, and across it, at the hill on the other side. He was hungry, and he turned and walked back through the woods.
Then he remembered that his mother and father were going to a party in town that night and he would be alone with Connie. He liked being alone with, but, even more, he liked being alone with his sister. She was nearly seventeen; her skin was fair, her cheeks colored, and she had long black hair that came down to her shoulders; on the right side of her face, a wave of it reached the corner of her eye. She was the most beautiful girl he knew. She was also the only person with whom, for his entire life, he had been nearly perfectly at ease. He could be silent with her or he could say whatever occurred to him and he never had to think about it first to assure himself that it was not foolish or; worse, uninteresting.
Leaving the woods, he climbed the last gentle slope and entered the house. Standing in the bathroom, he looked into the mirror. He suddenly felt as if he had told a lie. His skin was fair, as Connie’s was, and he had color in his cheeks; but his hair, carefully parted and combed, was more brown than black. He believed Connie thought he was exactly like her, that he was talkative and well liked. But she never saw him with his classmates. He felt that he was deceiving her.
Another thing that was different about the mission was that there were many white people there. The Whites on the mission were a special kind of white person, special in the way that my grandmother had explained to me, for they were holy. They had come not to take but to give. They were about God’s business here in darkest Africa. They had given up the comforts and security of their own homes to come and lighten our darkness. It was a big sacrifice that the missionaries made. It was a sacrifice that made us grateful to them, a sacrifice that made them superior not only to us but to those other Whites as well who were here for adventure and to help themselves to our emeralds. The missionaries’ self-denial and brotherly love did not go unrewarded. We treated them like minor deities. With the self-sustained dignity that came naturally to white people in those days, they accepted this improving disguise.
Today there are fewer white people on the mission. They are called expatriates, not missionaries, and can be seen living in unpainted brick houses. But they are deified in the same way as the missionaries were because they are white so that their coming is still an honour. I am told that whether you are called an expatriate or a missionary depends on how and by whom you were recruited. Although the distinction was told to me by a reliable source, it does not stick in my mind since I have not observed it myself in my dealings with these people. I often ask myself why they come, giving up the comforts and security of their more advanced homes. This brings us back to matters of brotherly love, contribution and lightening of diverse darknesses.
At the time though—and you must remember that I was very young then, very young and correct in my desire to admire and defer to all the superior people I found at the mission—at that time I liked the missionaries. In particular, I liked the young ones. Most of the missionaries’ children did not speak English at all until they learned it at school, just as we did and in the same classroom as we did, because their parents sent them to school at the mission with the rest of us. I often wondered how they would manage when they went back home and had to stop behaving like Africans.
Another thing that was different about the mission was that there were many white people there.
Story 25
