In the Wilderness - Kim Barnes [99]
I hardly noticed the clearcuts behind the stingy buffer of trees left standing along the road. The logging didn’t surprise me. I expected to see raw stumpage and slash piles, the knee-deep gouges left by skidders. This was part of the life there, the sound of saws as familiar as the wind through the trees. But this wasn’t the forest. The trees could fall but the forest would somehow remain, always out there, always removed and separate from what we called timber.
I turned onto the dirt road that paralleled Reeds Creek, my old Chevy chattering across ruts, working my way back to where I knew the branches shaded the deeper holes and fat trout wallowed in silt. The hollow lay just across the meadow, hidden behind the thick grove of pine. Already the sun had crested and begun its slide behind the mountain, and I knew the house would be dark and cool.
The creek seemed changed, shallower and muddier (had it ever been the strong clear flow I remembered?), and as I wound my way back, the water thickened. Within a mile the current was dead, dammed by a mass of slash.
I stared at the mound of roots and limbs, at the bulldozed wad of dirt and stumps. Fingers of water had found their way through, following the curve of branches, seeping between rock and wood. Behind the mound the ground was scraped and pitted. A sheen of oil slicked the stagnant pools.
“No, not here,” I whispered. “Please, not here.” I stepped slowly from the car. Insects skimmed the surface of the water, yet the water remained still—there were no fish to rise.
It was as though I had been hit, as though I could taste the blood in my mouth. I reached into the backseat, loaded my rifle and shot. A small explosion of dust erupted from the slash. I shot again, then emptied the .22 as fast as I could pump. I pulled all the ammunition I had from my pockets, reloaded and shot again, pulled the maps and Kleenex from the glove compartment until I found the last box and aimed and shot until my ears rang.
I hated it. I hated the dozer that made it, the man who pushed it there, the company the man worked for. No one was innocent. I slumped against the car and cried. Something had broken—whatever thread it was that tied me to my life there. The water that had fed me, cooled me, cleansed me had been choked off, turned to sludge.
Alone in the woods, the air and sun still unchanged, the throaty trill of a meadowlark reached me, and I felt an overwhelming sadness—not just because of the creek, but because of the flood of memories and feelings that swept over me. It was as though seeing the creek this way had released all the emotions I had tamped down and buried since we left the house in the hollow.
What I mourned was the loss of myself: that girl who had fished long into the warm summer afternoons, who had believed in a world held solid by family and the encircling presence of trees. I wanted it all back: the red shack; my brother still a comrade who would accompany me into the darkest glens; my mother in her apron, bent over pies, listening for the dieseling idle of my father’s pickup; my father bringing in the cedar-scented air, a man for whom the world had made itself simple.
I knelt and gathered the dirt in my hands. It sifted through my fingers like powder. The land had been scavenged, scraped, then burned to sterile ash. I knew nothing could ever grow there—not in my lifetime, not until the wind and rain had covered the scar with sediment deep enough to nurture the seeds that might fall from the few remaining pines.
I left the creek, following the dirt road back to pavement. I would not go to the hollow that day; I could not bear what I might see. Instead, I drove the road slowly back toward Pierce, past the bunk buildings of the Clearwater Timber Protection Association, past the wide curve in the creek where I had been baptized. Then Cardiff, where the parsonage with its creosote-stained siding squatted silent and cold, even though the sun shone brilliantly off its tin roof.
This time I stopped.