Entanglement

Coffee is the most important meal of my day. While it brews, I fire the woodstove with scraps from the rehabilitation of the Johnny Gunter place, pour out a cup, and add some half-and-half that has miraculously survived in the little refrigerator in the kitchen. My coffee and journal wander out to the porch with me, where we listen to the steady drum on the rusty corrugated roof.

Yesterday was clear-eyed and warm, and I managed to finish sealing off the eves on the north wall. Each piece of rough-cut lumber was trimmed to size on a screeching table saw, fixed in place by WHAPs from a pneumatic nail gun. Even using the wonders of electricity and air-driven technology, it was slow going. This project has taught me a new level of patience, a dogged repetition that seems to transcend the downstream drift of time. The afternoon vanished, evening swept in, and the relentless, reaching, hopeful grass still needed mowing. This new storm was announced just before bedtime by a gauzy quarter moon, barely visible as it rocked through thin overcast toward the old trees on the western ridge.

Now clouds hang heavy and low, obscuring a patchwork of clearcuts, second growth, and Old Ones watching over the valley. Quiet attentiveness is broken by the insistent toot of a high-lead whistle somewhere down-canyon, a new clearcut in the making. Translucent needles of rain fall with frigid verticality onto the freshly mown meadow. I search the sodden air with my nostrils. Even the cut grass stretching out before me is keeping to itself, sullen after an unwanted haircut, hunkered under yet another cold spring storm. Conifer boughs quiver on an occasional breeze. A few misty drops find their way under the porch roof and onto my journal paper. They glisten for a moment before I wipe them away, but not before the hydrogen and oxygen in a few molecules of Pacific Ocean water merge with black ink and trees refined into acid-free paper. 

A sip of coffee makes the blank tree-stare of journal pages less daunting. The house project contains within it a thread of family history. Last week I spent untold obsessive hours on the computer trying to recover the story of James O. Gunter, my great-grandfather, who was the first family presence in Upper Smith River Valley. By sheer perseverance, some luck, and the mostly-mysterious wonders of the Internet, I found the headstones of his parents, my great-great-grandparents, in a small cemetery in Butler, Missouri. Mary Darrow-Gunter died in 1882 at age 55, and her husband John followed in 1883 at age 66.

Headstone of Mary Darrow-Gunter, Double Fork Cemetery, Butler, MO.

James was their eldest son and had lived at home on the family farm in St. Joseph, Illinois until at least 1880. In 1885, shortly after his parents death, he married Ina Sarah Craig. That same year James left his new wife in Sedalia, Missouri, and traveled by foot and train to Oregon with his newly minted brother-in-law, John Craig. James was welcomed into Portland by kidnappers who imprisoned him in the hold of a merchant ship bound for the Pacific Ocean. He somehow escaped the ship before it hit the open ocean. Back in Portland, he rejoined John for the trip south to Drain, Oregon. Soon after James and John arrived in Drain, various family members trained out from the Midwest, including Ina Sarah.

James was slow-talking, generous, and a workaholic. He was often sleepy, which could have been narcolepsy or simple exhaustion from carving out a frontier life and keeping his family fed. At times he was a tyrant to his wife and children.

James Osborn and Ina Sarah Gunter with Marion, Osborn, and Victor, ca. 1900

He had very little money, and once told my grandmother that he aspired to become a doctor "but poverty kept me from it.”  Yet on July 1, 1887, he swung a 400.00 loan from the Union Trust Company of New York to buy 160 acres of Oregon and California Railroad land ten miles downstream from my vantage point on this porch. Seven years later, he founded a post office. Gunter is still on a highway map, but all that remains are remains. James, Ina Sarah, and five of their twelve offspring are buried in a small cemetery just down the road from the home place. Their ninth child was my great-uncle Johnny, who built the house I’m now rebuilding.

My mind drifts on the murmur of rain. I imagine James pausing on the trail at Windy Gap, about five miles east of the Johnny Gunter place. He and his horse are following the trail into Upper Smith River. The horse is loaded with supplies, sweaty and blowing from the climb out of Pass Creek. James is determined, hopeful, and a little afraid. But he is driven by the vision of a rare piece of flat valley floor covered in silty soil washed from ridges by water following the edict of gravity over millennia, a gift of disintegration from the slowly dying mountains combined with one of the sweetest land deals in the west. This morning I’m hoping that all his emotions were somehow swirling together into a fierce joy.

Through the haze of my mind's eye, I see the big trees at Windy Gap looking on. Old Ones record horse and human breath in their wood, register in their roots the soft clump of hooves and feet on the accumulated duff. At some point the forest must have realized what was coming. But trees can’t run. An inescapable irony is that the crash of giants falling to cross-cut saws was the means to my presence this morning, sheltered from incessant rain by a house that is the last Gunter place in the valley. Keeping it standing for another generation is my version of hope, an ode to joy.

Our collective lives are supported on the surface by an entanglement of roots, deep and searching. Someday my ashes will return as small repayment on the debt my family and I owe to the remaining forest.