Pen on the Paper

I recently attended a writing workshop facilitated by Jenna Butler and sponsored by the Spring Creek Project. For many years their Shoutpouch Creek Cabin has been a formative place for me. Here is where writer Charles Goodrich taught me the artistry of detailed description using the work of Clemmens Starck. Here is where I first learned of the late Brian Doyle’s Mink River, and still hold a debt of gratitude for his writing that I can’t acknowledge without crying. Here is where artist Emily Poole and I watched Covid roll in as we began working on a collection of salamander essays. Four years later, Emily and I have just signed a book contract with Mountaineers Books. Shotpouch Creek Cabin is where I have attended many workshops, and where I have struggled with timed free-writing exercises. But Jenna had the magic. Keep your pen on the paper. When you lift your pen, monkey mind kicks in. I hate rules, especially rules about writing. But I’m also a kinesthetic writer, and this worked for me.

A week later and Winter is breathing her last on this precarious edge of the North American Plate. The pummel of rain has finally ceased for a bit, and the dark arms of Cailleach, goddess of winter, are relinquishing their hold. After weeks of wet weather and nagging life circumstances, I was nearly desperate to find my way back into the Coast Range. The path was a little tortuous, but certainly not tortured. I took the longer but faster freeway route for a beer date with a friend in Cottage Grove. We sat outside where I could squint into the long rays of Sun dropping away over the ridge. By nightfall I was at my poet friend Martha’s. Sun was down and I was grateful to sit beside a crackling fire her neighbor had lit. I shared the sad news of a fellow poet’s imminent passing. Darkness bloomed with a crescent Moon sweeping southwest above the ridge. Orion stood nearby, belted and tall. We found ways to laugh like we did in the old days when Jerry was here laughing with us.

A clear night in March is also cold. The Johnny Gunter house has no heat beyond a jade Jotul woodstove in the front room. Although I soon had the stove roaring, the house was chilled down to its rough-cut bones. The stove never caught up. I fell asleep in a nearby easy chair. On waking, I stuffed the stove with a big piece of firewood and retreated into a heavy sleeping bag in the bedroom. To sleep in the silence of winter in these rain-softened mountains is a gift.

Although the first logging truck went by at 4:30 a.m., sleep eventually rediscovered me. When I woke again, Sun was shouldering away the mist hanging on the ridges. Like the shapes of snowflakes, mist clings to these mountains in infinitely different ways. It tendrils and tatters, shrouds and steams, layers and laps, breathes and blankets. It caresses needled boughs with its soft and battered fingers. Mist moistens the nitrogen-fixing cling of lungwort and tree beard lichen. It constantly transforms itself and everything it touches. How could we aspire to more?

I like to think that my work here is transformative rather than laborious, even though at the end of the day an aging body wonders if the change was really worth it. Today I’ll finish pruning exuberant summer growth off the apple tree by the garden. I’m never physically ready for this work until I’ve finished trimming the last tree on the place. This winter I’m behind, and this is the first tree of the season. Aging means taking the process more slowly. It also means that I won’t finish all the trees this year. Oh well.

Late in the morning, taking a break and hiking to the spring that waters the house seemed like a better idea than continuing to heft loppers and a pole pruner. There are benefits to having a gravity-fed do-it-yourself water supply. It also requires regular maintenance, and I hadn’t visited the spring since the ice storm last January. The storm had spotty outcomes in the Coast Range. Some of the ridges were apocalyptic, with 50% or more of the trees either tipped over or broken. But my little enclave around the Johnny Gunter house was largely untouched. Not a single branch was broken.

My sense of protection changed when I entered the old forest surrounding the spring. Apparently, there was just enough elevation gain and the big trees were just tall enough that ice could accumulate to damaging levels. None of the trees were down. But big trees have big branches, and many of them had broken free to fall from a great height onto the forest floor. At the outflow where water blinks into daylight, the little brick impoundment I made to corral the seep into a two-gallon pool was broken. A branch larger in diameter than my forearm had scattered the bricks and crushed an old roof covering the water source. Human endeavors are erased quickly here, and you wouldn’t know that this last vestige of a springhouse existed except for these few bricks and rusty fragments of metal roofing that occasionally surface out of the ferns and moss. Now water is running through the vegetation growing over what is left of the roof.

Another fragment of the branch was speared into the soft bottom of the collection pool just downstream. I know the density of big Douglas-fir branches, the tight squeeze of their growth rings, the heaviness of that wood. I know the density of my arms, and they suddenly felt weak and small. Hell, all of me felt small. I stood there and imagined the ice-borne hurl and crash of big branches, knowing that their mass and velocity would have killed me instantly. I pulled away the broken wood and chucked it into the narrow channel of water burbling downhill out of the pool. Woody debris and flowing water need one another.

Back at the house, I sautéed last summer’s onions for a quesadilla lunch wishing I could tell you what any of this means. Heading for the front door with my plate of onion and cheese quesadillas, I passed the two boxes of ashes sitting behind a picture of Dad and Mom taken on their 50th wedding anniversary. Their birthdays are in March and April. I still haven’t finished placing them into the living cycles of this place, even though the mist would approve of this transformation. Last month the deed to the Johnny Gunter place was finally transferred to me. Maybe I’m still clinging to the last of Mom and Dad’s physical presence in this house. Or maybe I’m waiting. For the first lady slippers to bloom so that Mom can be with them. For the Douglas-firs to burst with bright spring needle growth so that Dad can be with them. Whatever the reason, I’m waiting. And I still can’t tell you what any of this means. I’m just trying to keep my pen on the paper.

Here’s a draft of an unnamed poem from my free-writing with Jenna Butler. It’s changed some since then, but in that moment I did keep my pen on the paper.

Hurrying away creek

breaks across bright stones,

broken bones of mountains.

Breath of sound, taste of clarity

on eardrums, filling neurons

overflowing into synapses.

My brain a vessel carrying

creek music into restless nights

stalked by broken bones

of circadian genes,

ruthless blessing of inheritance,

perhaps not broken but chosen

for protection of my clan

sleeping deeply in

predatory darkness.

Soft pummel of remembered

turbulence whispers of sleep,

then runs away into the darkening

sea of time, leaving

my brain salt thirsty for

liquid sound.

There remains only this:

to plant my feet in

soft spring earth, brush past

acrid nettle, buttery druids of

skunk cabbage,

trillium unfurling

like fresh cotton diapers.

To stand on sandstone cobbles,

      to return

            to return

                  to return.