circle you can make for the money. I want to see what down here looks like from up there.”
It looks like the shaved flank of a sick beast being readied for surgery. Everywhere, in all directions. If the view were televised, cutting would stop tomorrow. Back on the planet’s concealing surface, Douglas spends three days on his buddy’s couch, mute. He has no capital. No political savvy. No golden tongue. No economic sophistication or social wherewithal. All he has is a clear-cut in front of him, whether his eyes are open or closed, haunting him all the way to the horizon.
He makes some inquiries. Then he hires out his one and a half good legs to a contractor, planting seedlings back into the stripped lands. They kit him out with a shovel and a Johnny Appleseed bag filled with seedlings for which they charge him a few pennies each. And for each planted tree that’s still alive in a month, they promise to pay him twenty cents.
Douglas-fir: America’s most valuable timber tree, so, sure—why not grow a tree farm full of nothing but? Five new houses per acre. He knows he’s slinging trees for middlemen to the same fuckers who cut down the primordial gods to begin with. But he doesn’t have to vanquish the lumber industry or even get nature’s revenge. He just needs to earn a living and undo the look of those cuts, a look that tunnels into him like a beetle into sapwood.
He spends his days traversing the silent, slop-filled, sloping dead zones. He drags himself across the scattered crap on all fours, losing his footing in the impenetrable slash, hauling himself forward by his claws over the chaos of roots, sticks, branches, limbs, stumps, and trunks, fibrous and shredded, left to rot in a tangled graveyard. He masters the art of a hundred different ways to topple. He stoops, makes a little wedge in the ground, stuffs in a seedling, and closes the hole with a loving nuzzle from his boot tip. Then he does that again. And again. In starbursts and scattered nets. Up hillsides and down denuded gullies. Dozens of times an hour. Hundreds of times a day. Thousands by thousands every week until his whole throbbing thirty-four-year-old body puffs out like it’s filled with viper venom. Some days, he’d saw off his gimpy leg with a file if he had one handy.
He sleeps in tree-planter camps filled with hippies and illegals, tough, lovable people too tired at day’s end to bother much with talk. A saying comes to him as he lies down at night, stiffened with pain—words he once read to his charges in his prior life as a ranch hand. If you’re holding a sapling in your hand when the Messiah arrives, first plant the sapling and then go out and greet the Messiah. Neither he nor the horses could make much of it. Until now.
The smell of the cuts overwhelms him. Damp spice drawer. Dank wool. Rusty nails. Pickled peppers. Scents that return him to childhood. Aromas that inject him with inexplicable happiness. Smells that plunge him down to the bottom of the deepest well and hold him there for hours. Then there’s the sound, like his ears are wadded up with pillow. The snarl of saws and feller bunchers, somewhere in the distance. A great truth comes over him: Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.
Some days, dawn breaks in Arthurian mists. There are mornings when the chill threatens to kill him, noons when the heat knocks him on his semi-numbed butt. Afternoons so profligate with blue he lies on his back and stares upward until his eyes water. There come mocking and merciless rains. Rain the weight and color of lead. Shy rain, auditioning with stage fright. Rain that leaves his feet sprouting moss and lichen. There were huge, spiked skeins of interwoven wood here once. They will come again.
Sometimes he works alongside other tree slingers, some of whom speak no language he recognizes. He meets hikers who want to know where the forests of their youth have gone. The seasonal pineros come and go, and the hard cores, like him, keep on. Mostly, it’s him and the brute, blank, stripped-down rhythm of the work. Wedge, squat, insert, stand, and boot-tip seal.
They look so pitiful, his tiny Douglas-firs. Like pipe cleaners. Like props for a train set. From a distance, spread across these man-made meadows, they’re a crew cut on a