An Intensity of Shadows
February sunshine. An intensity of shadows cross-hatched the gray snake road twisting into the Coast Range. After a winter of daylight diffused by cloud cover, the sharp-edged silhouettes of thimbleberry canes, conifers, and bare-branched alders had me flinching a bit. We were in the midst of a midwinter drought. Although the coastal Northwest typically gets a February respite from the incessant rain, this break began earlier and is lasting longer. For a week or so, I enjoyed Sun’s unmasked face. Now I’ve started to squirm. Predicting the weather based on cultural memory has become a quaint relic, a benchmark of what once was. We who prided ourselves on knowing the seasonal cycles and their attendant ebb and flow of birdsong, wildflower bloom, planting, and harvest must now unclench our weary hands and let the new age of climate disruption begin. Our weather has become a shadow of itself.
The drought has been good for working on the Johnny Gunter house. When I arrived, the temperature on the front porch was cresting 60 degrees. I skipped firing up the woodstove, and instead threw open some windows and went to work outside. I had a homemade concoction of borax and boric acid to spray on the wall for powder post beetles. I was anxious to get the first row of tarpaper up because it would cover a host of infirmities created by my learn-as-you-go carpentry. Despite the cosmetic deficiencies, the wall is structurally sound and set to outlive me.
The black tarpaper is its own shadow of the future. I’ve made a modicum of peace with the real possibility that drought-driven wildfires in the surrounding forest will someday consume this house. I’d rather its last gasp be a plume of wood and tarpaper than wood and plastic house wrap. I planned to spend the night, so even though the afternoons are now stretching themselves toward spring, I’ve decided to let the wallboards dry and put the tarpaper on tomorrow.
On the front porch, evening Sun penciled long shadows onto the meadow, and the temperature plummeted toward forty. A robin chirruped an urgency from the bare orchard to my right, perhaps driven by the end of a winter day. My internal shadows are not so well defined. They are more like swaths of pencil shading, the kind we made as kids when the lead was sharpened to a long point and swirled sideways across the paper. I squinted into the sagging sun, trying to sharpen up the edges of these ever-changing silhouettes. Trying to better understand exactly what it is that blocks the light. My structural integrity depends on this introspection.
One shadow came clearly into focus. It was the dark spaces in my family. Generations of deep familial anger seem to be an outcome of rural poverty, a withering of spirit beneath the shaming glare of classism. The tools for casting light onto these scars, these lingering wound shadows, were not commonly available to earlier generations. Most people did what they could: worked hard, raised their kids in the best way they knew, managed their families. But I’ve watched as the specter of memory loss opened cavernous holes of self-loathing, an outcome of a life-long fight for dignity. Tragically, this self-hate comes in those final humbling years when everyone needs to have built up a healthy lifelong account of self-respect.
The shadows of my family have been cast onto me. So has their light. Those negative spaces have produced an internal landscape of contrasts. I am laughter and glower, hilarious and angry, rainstorm and sunbake, sunrise and sunset, rainforest and desert, running and easy chairs, chainsaws and tree whispers. I make my Powerpoint shows with black text on a white background. Although most of the time I revel in these juxtapositions, the intensity can sometimes be overwhelming. Sometimes I need to turn away, unable to gaze further into the realm of darkness. To be overwhelmed by night is to lose the light, and therefore the contrasts.
I lit the woodstove and the small house was soon engulfed by an exhalation of heat. My bed was warm, too. A fly came to life in the midwinter warmth, a buzzing search for freedom from beneath the lampshade on the nightstand. Strange dreams woke me at 3 a.m. Beyond the bedroom window, Moon was a weary three-quarters full, slumping toward the western ridge. Moon shadows cast long across the frosty meadow. The stars waited their turn, ready to dial up their intensity when she disappeared. Moon lowered herself through a notch in the firs. Two sentinel stars remained motionless above the tree gap, keeping a steadfast watch over her slow drift toward the horizon. Just before she left, she bent her head against the branches of the Old Ones. At first I was transfixed, then had to avert my eyes. I felt as though she was dying. Finally, a diffuse wee-hours sense of exhaustion draped itself loosely across my chest, a portent of sleep.
Soon I’ll leave for a two-week sojourn to Baja, a land stark with contrasts. In the meantime, may your shadows be etched in an intensity of light.