mood. “People! You’re amazing. What a turnout. Thank you all! Ready for a walk in the woods?”
A cheer erupts, and the parade lurches down a gravel path toward the fresh skid road. Douglas falls into step, Mimi alongside. They weave into the colorful crowd waving rainbow banners and shouting outrageous epithets. In the festive atmosphere, under so blue a sky, walking arm in arm with strangers up the slight grade, Mimi sees. For her entire life, unwittingly, she has complied with her parents’ first shared principle: Make no noise in this world. She, Carmen, Amelia—all three Ma girls. Don’t stand out; you have no right. No one owes you a thing. Keep small, vote mainstream, and nod like it all makes sense. Yet here she is, asking for trouble. Acting like what she does might matter.
They walk shoulder to shoulder across the skid road, ten abreast, more rows deep than she can count. They sing tunes that Mimi last sang in summer camp in Northern Illinois, songs of jingly childhood. “This Land Is Your Land.” “If I Had a Hammer.” Douggie smiles and hums along in a toneless bass. Between songs, a cheerleader with a megaphone, walking sideways near the front of the pack, stirs up some call-and-response. Clear-cuts cost too much! Save our last stands!
Righteousness makes Mimi nuts. She has always been allergic to people with conviction. But more than she hates conviction, she hates sneaky power. She has learned things about this mountainside that sicken her. A wealthy logging outfit, backed by a pro-industry Forest Circus, is exploiting the power vacuum prior to a big court decision by rushing through an illegal grab of mixed conifers that have been growing for centuries before the idea of ownership came to these parts. She’s ready to try anything to slow the theft down. Even righteousness.
They hike through dense spruce for the length of three choruses. Trunks slice the sunlight into shards. Godfingers, she and her sisters used to call those slanted beams. Trees she can’t name shoot up all around, wrapped in vines, or tumbling to the ground like barricades—so much life in so many flavors she wants to strip down and scamper. The understory is shot through with saplings she could encircle with her fist, broomsticks that may have bidden their time for a hundred years. But the canopy is carried by trunks that several arm-linked protesters still could not hug.
Vistas open up through the green crenellations. Mimi tugs Doug’s sleeve and points. To the northeast, down ravines and up slopes too steep to walk, a pincushion of health rolls over the hills. Fog wraps the tops of the firs the way it did on the day the first European ships sniffed out harbors on this coast. But through another gap to the south, lunar devastation runs up the mountainside—slash doused with diesel and burnt until even the fungus is dead, then drowned with herbicide so nothing will grow again but this company’s monocrop row plantations in a short cycle that, she has learned, will last only a few more rounds, at most, before the soil is dead. From on high, it feels as if even the trees spreading across these slopes are at war. Patches of lush green march against patches of muddy vomit, all the way to the horizon. And the people assembled here: ignorant armies going up against each other as they have forever, for reasons hidden from even the most vehement. When will it be enough? Now, if you can believe this chanting, laughing crowd on its way to convince the road crew at the end of these wheel ruts. Now: the second-best of times.
The road narrows and the emerald forest thickens. Monster trunks dwarf and disorient Mimi. Moss grows up and over everything in thick blankets. Even the ferns reach to her breasts. The man beside her knows the names of trees, but Mimi is too proud to ask for IDs. Despite a decade of living in this state, despite repeated attempts to master the field guides and dichotomous keys, she can’t tell a limber from a sugar pine, let alone a Port Orford from an incense cedar. Silver, white, red, and grand firs are all a frilly blur. And the swarming understory—impossible. Salal, somehow, she knows. Oxalis and trillium. But the rest is a tossed salad of inscrutable foliage, creeping up to trailside, ready to grab her ankles.
Douglas points off to the left of the road. “Look!” In the middle of the blue-green