Infant spring in the heart of the Coast Range. Darkness seeps in around the fraying edges of the day. Low overcast hangs from needled ridges like the teeth of a soft-mouthed dog. There is no Moon or Stars or lavender sunset. A breeze gentling off the north ridge breathes its last. On quiet evenings like this, I press my ear hard against the chest of the mountains, listening for a heartbeat. A faint chorus of frogs from the valley floor mingles with the soft rush of water retreating from a rainstorm several days back.
My body aches. I spent the day milling siding boards from a Douglas-fir a friend and I fell at the upper edge of the meadow. It wasn’t a large tree; perhaps 18 inches in diameter. But it rose straight up for 100 feet. Two black seeping spots of rot seemed to signal it was time for the fir to become wood for rehabilitating the aged house. The horizontal mill blade sang through the sweet turpentine pungency of the green log, spitting a drift of fine sawdust to the left. After squaring the log, I stared at the red heart of the tree wrapped in fifty concentric rings of its former life then struggled a bit with the prospect of reducing the beam to three-quarter-inch boards. But the house needs siding, not beams. In the afternoon, a barred owl laughed from the old forest above the meadow, telltale repeats of “who cooks for you?”, the last note bending downward in tone and intensity the way an old vine maple bows under its load of winter wet moss. I knew the owl was looking for a mate. But from somewhere in the moist canyons of my brain, I thought he was laughing at me, laughing like a Buddhist monk at my trifling efforts to hang onto this house for another generation, hang on in the impermanence of this rain-soaked world where the living become so quickly subsumed into the cycling of death and decay.
This week my father would have been 92. He would have loved this project; the do-it-yourself logging and making of lumber and makeshift carpentry. He left with a heart I admired, skills I will never have. He would have done a better job falling this tree that now rests in state on the rails of the mill. When I was sawing into the back cut, I left too much wood on the uphill side of the hinge and pulled the rapidly falling fir to the right of the chosen path downward. Not a disaster. Just not perfect. Ultimately, Dad wasn’t able to move forward with rebuilding this house that his own father helped my great uncle build. His expectations for the project were too high. The passing of a life necessarily leaves a gaping hole in the forest of the living. When someone leaves us to join the larger cycles of the universe, we grieve the loss of things we can never know, never become. Yet this is the way it must be. Otherwise, where lies that one-and-only contribution to the world, that unique bubble of consciousness that for a short time persists in an otherwise entropic universe?
Soon I’ll be leaving these wet and gentle mountains for a month in the sandstone and grit of the Grand Canyon, carried by big water and adrenaline down the Colorado River. “They” say I will emerge from the canyon changed. This scares the shit out of me. Here in the last quarter of my life, I am just getting comfortable with my place in the world. But an attentive life is a river after all, always pressing out around the edges, adjusting course, leaving our unique erosional trace in the world. Somewhere along the heave and froth of the Colorado, I’ll celebrate the third year since Dad’s passing. And in that deep incision through the Kaibab Plateau, I’ll place my hand on Vishnu schists 1.8 billion years old, a bit younger than the beginning of all life. I’ll be feeling for the pulse of the earth.
For now, darkness wings in on soft feathers. Two great-horned owls join in soft conversation high on the ridge. A patter of unannounced rain tickles the porch roof. For now, I hold my ear to the chest of these soaking mountains, to the breast of my father, listening for a heartbeat. The monk owl is laughing.
Peace to you and yours. I’ll see you in month.
Thanks for this, for the phone conversation, catching up, sharing laughs. Our fathers left in different ways and at different times, but we both are trying to restore what they didn't and couldn't, you that place on Smith River and me the expansion of a family that almost died out with him. This! "When someone leaves us to join the larger cycles of the universe, we grieve the loss of things we can never know, never become." I love you and your writing with a passion. Off we go on our concurrent adventures. Don't come back too changed. xo