a few pictures on their way to Old Faithful or Glacier or someplace worth noticing.
He sits at the wobbly kitchen table and picks up the treasure he keeps next to the fused-solid saltshaker. It turned up last fall, a dark brown bottle half buried near the mine’s headframe. What’s left of the faded label shows a few Chinese characters, creatures from the planet’s early oceans. The bottle is a mystery—what it says, what it contained. It belonged to one of the many Chinese laborers who worked in the mine and ran the laundry. He squints at the characters and whispers, “What they do?” His friend taught him the phrase—he can’t remember where or when. It had to do with China and her father. It made her laugh every time he said it. He tried to say it often.
He sets the bottle down and starts his morning ritual: the scripture he’s writing for his new religion of abject humility. Since mid-November, he has been at work on a Manifesto of Failure. Yellow legal-paper pages scribbled in ballpoint pile up where the table meets the wall. They hold the story of how he became a traitor to his species. He names no names except the forest ones. But it’s all there: How the scales fell from his eyes. How awareness turned to anger. How he came across some like-minded people and heard the trees speak. He writes what they’d hoped to do and how they tried to do it. He says where they went wrong and why. Passion everywhere, and bursting with details, but without much structure. His words just branch and bud and branch again. It keeps him busy. It beats cabin fever, though some days not by much.
Today he rereads yesterday’s effort—two pages about what it meant to watch his Mimi get her eyes swabbed with fire. Then he takes up the Bic and pushes it in furrows across the page. It’s like he’s slinging trees again, up and down the contours of a hillside. Problem is, while he’s on the general subject of Failure, he can’t help probing the nearby, related topic of What the Fuck Went Wrong with Mankind.
The pen moves; the ideas form, as if by spirit hand. Something shines out, a truth so self-evident that the words dictate themselves. We’re cashing in a billion years of planetary savings bonds and blowing it on assorted bling. And what Douglas Pavlicek wants to know is why this is so easy to see when you’re by yourself in a cabin on a hillside, and almost impossible to believe once you step out of the house and join several billion folks doubling down on the status quo.
He stops to build the fire back up. He finds more forage—peanut butter on crackers and a potato cooked right on the burning pine logs. Then it’s time to walk to town and make sure the ghosts are behaving themselves. He layers up and straps on the secondhand snowshoes. The big webbed feet—his winter adaptation—transform him into a hybrid creature, half man, half upright giant hare. Out in the drifts, pegging down the mountain to the husk of town, he postholes anyway, a dozen times or more.
Not a lot of action on Main Street. He checks the tilting buildings, their display cases and exhibits, for any signs of unwelcome nests, gnaw marks, or denning. It’s all make-work. Truth is, his Crow Nation boss gives him winter use of the cabin because it costs the BLM nothing, and Douggie invents the inspection routine to earn the freebie. From the upper balcony of the hotel, he calls out, “This place is dead.” The ed bangs around the Garnet Range two or three times before giving up. He climbs back up the long way, along the ridge, to get an extra half a mile of exercise and look out over the gorge. When a day is as clear as today, he can see the distant stands of larch miles away. Conifers that shed in winter.
He pads along, feeling with the snowshoes where the path should be. A slog around the first S, and the valley unfolds below. Down the sharp escarpment spreads a carpet of trees so thick it’s impossible to believe that the world is, in fact, frayed to the point of snapping. Mounds of sculpted powder weigh down the heavy limbs into skirts that drag on the ground. The purple, upright cones of the firs have disintegrated into seed. But clusters of cones hang in