progress just a tiny bit. Then I learn that all I’m doing is giving the bastards credits to cut down more and older trees. I’m sorry, but seeing stupidity up close in that city park put me over the edge. Simple as that.”
“Have you ever been to jail before?”
“Tough question. Yes and no.”
The court deliberates. The defendant obstructed a job being done by a private tree-cutting company on city orders in the dead of night. He took no pokes at the crew. No destruction of property. The judge gives Douglas a seven-day suspended sentence, plus a two-hundred-dollar fine or three days of labor, planting Oregon ashes for the city arborist. Douglas chooses the planting. When he rushes from the courtroom back to the motel, his truck has already been towed. The henchmen want three hundred bucks to return it. He asks them to hold the truck until he rakes the money together. He’s got some silver dollars buried here and there.
He busts his hump for the city, planting trees for a week—days longer than his obligatory service requires. “Why?” the arborist asks. “When you don’t have to?”
“The ash is a noble tree.” Resilient as all get-out. Stuff of tool handles and baseball bats. Douglas loves those compound, pinnate leaves, how they feather the light and make life feel softer than it is. Loves the tapered, sailboat seeds. He likes the idea of planting a few ashes, before doing that only thing that anyone really has to do.
The harder the man works, the guiltier the arborist feels. “Not the city’s finest hour, what happened in that park.” It’s a small concession, but for a man on the city payroll, it’s almost incendiary.
“Shit straight. Cover of darkness. Days before a town hall hearing people were planning.”
“Life’s a blood sport,” the arborist says. “Like nature.”
“Humans don’t know shit about nature. Or democracy. You ever think the crazies might be right?”
“Depends. Which crazies?”
“Green crazies. Bunch of them were helping plant a cut, down in the Siuslaw. I met some others at a protest in the Umpqua. They’re coming out of the woodwork all over Oregon.”
“Kids and druggies. Why do they all take after Rasputin?”
“Hey!” Douggie says. “Rasputin had a look.” He hopes the arborist won’t turn him in for sedition.
HE DOESN’T LEAVE PORTLAND right away. He heads back to the public library, to read up on guerrilla forestry. His old librarian friend there continues to be more than helpful. The man seems to have a little thing for Douggie, despite his aroma. Or maybe because. Some people get off on loam. A news story of an action near the Salmon-Huckleberry Wilderness gets his attention—an outfit training people how to blockade logging roads. All Douglas needs to do is get his truck out of hock. First, though, he must perform a little guerrilla action of his own. He’s not sure of the legality of returning to the scene of his crime. Another act of civil disobedience could very possibly land him back in jail. The part of Douglas that likes to gaze on the Earth from way up high, like he did when he was a loadmaster, almost hopes it does.
Rage builds as he nears the park. It’s not quite midday. His shoulders, neck, and bum leg feel it again—thrown to the ground by thugs pulling one over on the general populace. Rage doesn’t puff him up, though. Just the opposite. It stoops him over and sucker-punches his solar plexus until, by the time he’s in the grove, he’s shuffling.
The first of the fresh stumps still oozes resin. He drops down alongside it on the ground and pulls out a fine-line Magic Marker and his driver’s license, to use as a straight edge. He holds both to the sawn wood like he’s doing surgery, and counts backward. The years roll away under his fingers—their floods and droughts, their cold spells and scorched seasons all written into the varying rings. When the countdown reaches 1975, he makes a fine black X and pens in that date. Then he peels back another twenty-five years, makes another X on a ray just a little bit counterclockwise from the first, and labels it 1950.
The work goes on, in quarter-century increments, until he reaches the still center. He doesn’t know how old this city is, but the tree was clearly a sturdy sapling before any white people came near this spot. When Douglas pens in the closest year he can count with accuracy, he travels back out to the rim,