A Quality of Light

Even in the crunch of summer drought, there is a quality of light in the well-watered valleys and forested mountains of the Oregon Coast Range that softens everything. Midday sun shatters and falls between needled boughs of Douglas-fir. Shards of sunlight are smoothed by broad leaves of salal, Oregon hazelnut, and vine maple. Exuberant vegetation imposes itself on the light in more subtle ways. Pores of needle and leaf exhale oxygen and water, and the humidity becomes is a velvety haze across the distances. Even in summer I can feel airborne water impinging on my pores, breathe evergreen growth and needle rot into the dark spaces of my lungs. This internal accumulation of light and water is subliminal. It gathers me in and gentles the hard edges of my brain.

Forgiveness lives here. So does indecision. I hadn’t planned to go to the Johnny Gunter house last Memorial Day weekend. There, every day is Memorial Day, a remembrance of my ancestors who settled on Upper Smith River on 160 acres of Oregon and California Railroad land stolen previously from the Yoncalla Kalapuya. My new project is replacing the rotten bathroom floor. In reality, I was replacing my replacement. As with most of my carpentry projects, the first try is always the “planning” phase. Then I tear it out and do the actual work on the second attempt. In this case, the various joints in the floor looked as though a seismic event had occurred. I put my cordless torque driver in reverse, pulled up all the screws, removed the boards, re-leveled the joists and cross-pieces, and reinstalled the flooring. This took most of the day. I’ve come to accept this grossly inefficient approach to building things. It might even be construed as endearing, provided you don’t have to witness firsthand the flailing and multitude of F-bombs that accompany these “learning experiences.”

Afternoon light transited into evening, carrying the laughter of a barred owl from the forest to the west. Swainson’s thrushes called, their upwardly bending weep forming a sonic hook that reached toward summer, followed by a spiraling of song that dissipated the afternoon sunshine. I became compelled to celebrate Memorial Day by driving ten miles downriver to the Gunter Cemetery where my great-grandfather James, great-grandmother Sarah, and several of their twelve children are interred.

Celebration isn’t necessarily a prelude to happiness. As the pickup and I meandered toward Upper Smith River Road toward the setting sun, darkness began to impinge itself into the canyons of my brain. I know too much. Just west of Haney Creek lies a gravel pullout on the left. A flagless pole stood rusting in the evening sky, naked next to Half Moon traversing the southern ridge like a white maiden in early pregnancy. The cemetery is tiny, perhaps thirty feet square. The fence my family rebuilt on a Memorial Weekend nearly three decades ago is holding its own. A few years after we finished that project, the surrounding forest was clearcut. Now the land is healing again. Third-growth forest presses against the rusty woven wire like a dark animal ready to reclaim what belonged to it from the beginning. A golden chinquapin tree now occupies the southwest corner of the plot, with evergreen daggers for leaves and bark mottled gray and white like a Pacific Ocean storm. A tubular orange honeysuckle flower graced the ground, and I lifted its vine onto the fence, hoping that Rufous Hummingbird would swing by for a sip in the morning.

Wild iris decorated the spaces between rectangular grave markers with feathers of lavender and white. Cecil, the poet of the Gunter children, was the first to arrive. He drowned in 1915 at the age of 21 while swimming in the Umpqua River. Brassy spruce boughs are engraved on either side of his marker. Here are Victor, Paul, and Francis, all World War I veterans honored with tiny American flags. Marion, the firstborn, did not go to war. My great-grandfather James and great-grandmother Sarah lie next to one another in the northeast corner. She died in her sleep in 1922, probably of a stroke. James landed next to her fourteen years later, also by way of a stroke.

Evening pressed in. I brushed the needles off my great-grandparents’ marker. My wedding ring made a hollow-boned rattle across the brass engraving. Contempt loomed over and into me from the dimming ridges. A quality of light. I spoke to James from my mind. You were a tyrant in your early years. You beat Sarah. You beat the older boys to the point that they sometimes had stay with another family upriver until the storms passed. You beat your daughter, my grandmother, for not clearing the table after the noon meal. She told my mom that her winter coat saved her. While the physical trauma of those beatings wasn’t lasting, the emotional scarring has been transmitted through the generations, surfacing as self-loathing camouflaged as anger. Grammy shielded herself with imperiousness until her brain softened with dementia. Mom did her best to cover her own inherited feelings of inadequacy and tried to free her four sons from the shadow of this heritage. She mostly succeeded. Yet stains have a way of seeping through. Stains always seep through. They can be difficult to remove.

I know too much. So I squatted alone over my great-grandfather’s hollow bones at dusk and tried to embrace the trauma that lives on almost ninety years after his death and wanted to cry but couldn’t and began to ask him the unanswerable. What part of your anger was handed down to you, unasked for? What part was the culture of the day? What part was the testosterone-driven pioneer workaholic who expected everyone around him, especially his wife and children, to rise to his lofty expectations? What part of me should continue to hold your bones in contempt? What part should be grateful that you came to this valley and unwittingly spawned a fourth-generation Gunter who now deploys dubious carpentry skills to steward the last physical presence of our family on Upper Smith River into an uncertain future? So many parts. So much to reconcile.

I know just enough to heal. There is only one overarching principle capable of knitting the fractured landscape of my heritage–forgiveness. Not that saccharine-sweet, codependent, blubbering nonsense that says that what someone did is somehow okay or that makes excuses for their behavior. For me, true forgiveness is recognizing that crouching in contempt over a long-dead box of bones is an act of futility that changes nothing in the living world. Yet that ineffectual anger is the first step in a process of letting go, the only viable path forward. One day, one hour, one breath at a time. I wish I were the person who wakes up on the other side of oppression, having miraculously forgiven and become free. I am not. Although I know that forgiveness is the key, the lock that it turns is rusty and slow. For me, true forgiveness is a piece of dry rot removed, a new hand-milled 2 x 4 put in its place, then put in its place again. It is a house rebuilt one painstaking board at a time. It is my life project.

Overcome by fatigue, I let myself out of the cemetery gate. Light had left the valley. The last Swainson’s thrush weeped into the relentless tide of nightfall. Ten headlight-strewn miles still separated me from the house built by Johnny Gunter, the favorite son of James. It is the place that feels like part of the answer. The question is only now becoming clear.