Falling From Grace (29 page)

Squirrel winced and upended his beer into his mouth.

“What was jail like for the rest of you?” Grace said.

“A lot of the inmates and the corrections officers resented us,” Jen said. “Damn greenies, they called us. We weren't serious-enough criminals. One of the corrections officers told me I wouldn't last long, but it got better. I worked in the kitchen.” She giggled. “I was in a co-ed facility and a couple of the inmates sent me love-letters.”

“Things weren't easy for me and Chuck,” Billy's quiet voice came from the back of the room. “Too many angry men in jail. Marcel protected us.”

“A lot of forestry workers are coming forward, Billy,” Terry said. “We're talking with the unions. They see jobs disappearing to company downsizing, raw log exports. Things are going to change.”

“I hope so.” Billy smiled and turned to the woman at his elbow. “I'd like you all to meet my mother, MaryAnne.”

The tiny woman, her friendly, round face softly wrinkled, circulated around the room and shook each hand. “You turned my boy into a tree-hugger,” she said. “Thank you.”

“What are you going to do, Billy?” Terry asked. “No logging operation will take you now.”

Sue sighed, but Billy answered graciously. “I'm enrolled in a woodworking program for native youth.”

His mother beamed. “The valley,” she said, “was
eehmiis
, a precious place. The forest gives us gifts of bark and roots for baskets, woods for canoes and houses, food and medicines. Many of us have forgotten the importance of these places.” She patted her son's arm. “Thank you for trying to save it. All of you. We need to work together.”

Eehmiis
. A perfect word to describe the forest, I thought. I'd better remember it. I was about to ask MaryAnne how the word was spelled when Terry broke the impromptu moment of silence for the loss of the upper valley. “I heard they kicked you out of school, Chris.”

Sue pounded her forehead with her fist, turned and walked away, muttering to herself.

Chris laughed at her retreat. “I withdrew. I missed too much time. But I'm going back this term. I'm thinking of switching to environmental law.”

“Fine choice,” Mr. Kimori said from the couch where he was showing Rainbow how to make a paper boat.

“What about you, Mr. Kimori?” Jen asked. “What did you do for a whole month at home?”

“I tended my forest,” he answered.

“Your forest?”

He stood up. “Come, all of you,” he said. “I will show you.” He led us through a tiny immaculate kitchen and slid open a door at the back of the house. I followed along, curious. We stepped across the threshold into the thick humidity of a greenhouse, the air heavy with the smells of fertilizer and flowers. Water trickled from a bamboo fountain in a clay basin in the corner. “My
tokonoma
,” he said. A dozen or more miniature trees grew in pots around the glass room, their trunks and branches twisted and gnarled into a variety of shapes, upright and symmetrical or windswept and angled low to the ground.

“How lovely,” Grace exclaimed. “A bonsai garden.”

“They're dwarf trees, aren't they?” Terry said.

“A bonsai is not a genetic dwarf,” Mr. Kimori explained. “If not contained and pruned, these would attain the height of a normal tree.”

“Isn't it mean to the tree?” Rainbow eyed a spruce no more than thirty centimetres high.

“Ah, dear Rainbow, you are kind to other species.” He placed his hand on her head. “But bonsai techniques are no more cruel than other horticultural practices. These trees will grow old and happy. We call them heaven and earth in one container. The centre of each pot is where heaven and earth meet and nothing must occupy this space. Notice”—he pointed one by one to three potted trees nearby—“the trunks are set off centre.”

“Don't they grow up?” Rainbow asked.

“I teach them to stay small. But they grow old, old as Big Mama. This tree is one hundred and twelve years old.” He gestured to a tree no taller than his knee. He picked up a pair of pruning shears from a tray and snipped off the tip of a branch. “
Shin-zen-bi
. The bonsai is a symbol of truth, goodness and beauty. Please, walk through and meet them. They are my children.”

I wandered through the rows of stunted azaleas, a Japanese maple, pines, larches, junipers, and a crabapple with delicate pink flowers hanging from the sculpted branches. Each an exquisite work of art. Shaped and tended with love and care. Mr. Kimori's family.

Outside a window, a handful of bonsai conifers grew like a gathering of stunted old men around a neatly raked gravel rectangle. A single wooden bench sat against the wood and bamboo fence behind which the walls of the neighbouring apartment building soared upward. Peaceful but sad. I wondered how Mr. Kimori's trees got enough sun. I ran my finger along the trunk of an indoor cedar; the trunk tapered from crown to base.

“It is
bunjin
style. Comic.” Mr. Kimori walked up behind me.

“It's exquisite.”

“An old Japanese text says to appreciate and find pleasure in curiously curved and stunted trees is to love deformity.”

I swung my head around and stared into his face, his pupils large and penetrating. My cheeks burned at his insinuation. I might have expected these words from Terry, who was unable to open his mouth without blurting out an insensitive comment, but Mr. Kimori?
Love deformity?

“You . . . you think I'm deformed?” I stammered.

He placed his hand on my shoulder, the weight a warm ballast. “No, Faye, I speak of Paul.” He handed me an ironed and folded handkerchief from his pocket. “Cry, it's about time. A tree loses a branch. It does not die or give up, but continues to grow and flourish, perhaps in another direction, but fully alive.”

I brushed a sudden flood of tears from my cheeks. “He's a lot better.”

“Yes, he is,” Mr. Kimori agreed. “But he is not the only one who needs to heal. Buddha teaches us the individual is an illusion, a single conifer is a whole forest. Aren't the roots of one tree intertwined with all the others nearby and all fed by a net of underground fungi?”

I blew my nose. “Mycorrhizae.”

“There, you see. Are we not all a single community?”

28

I paced
the house, slept poorly, the time for the delivery growing nearer, a Caesarean section scheduled for the spring equinox, March 21, the baby's head too large for my narrow hips. Grace urged me to prepare the baby's room. “You need to nest.”

“I'm not a bird,” I argued and left the layette shopping to my mother and Rainbow, who talked incessantly about the upcoming event. I craved the outdoors and walked whenever I could. I missed my fieldwork, unsure when I'd be able to resume my research. At the beginning of March, after a sleepless night thinking about mites, I suggested an overnight trip to Otter Valley. Paul refused.

“You're too pregnant,” he pleaded. “It's too early in the year.”

“Pregnant but not sick.” I yearned for big trees and the smell of moss, the rough texture of lichen on my fingers. “And when has a little weather stopped us?”

“We can do a day trip up to Cathedral Grove,” Grace, who was visiting for the weekend, suggested.

“I was counting on Otter Creek,” I said. “Who knows when we'll get out there again.”

“Terry says the logging's pretty bad,” Paul cautioned.

“I want to see for myself,” I insisted. “Who can believe Terry? Besides, the park's still there.”

“What if you go into labour?” Grace said.

“It's only an hour to the Duncan hospital,” I argued. “Besides, the delivery isn't scheduled for three more weeks. The doctor told me to keep active.”

“Can the baby be borned in Rainbow's Hollow?” Rainbow piped up from the table where she sewed baby clothes out of scraps with a darning needle, a preoccupation for the past weeks, along with lobbying to put the baby's bed in her room.

“Thanks, Rainbow,” I said. “I needed an ally.” I didn't mention I intended to search the area for clues about Paul's assailant. “Humour me, the rest of you. What better place for nesting?” When I declared I'd go alone if necessary, Paul relented. Grace threw up her hands. “Stubborn,” she muttered, but set about packing enough food for a week.

• • •

Other than
a faint trail to the latrine, the camp appeared washed clean by the winter rains, the events of the past summer a collective delusion. Patches of old snow scattered the sheltered hollows and new pools had formed where a freshly fallen hemlock spanned the creek. The drive in along the logging road had proven a nightmare. The last kilometres to the trailhead crossed clear-cut that ran from the upper valley to the road and as far as the river, a narrow riparian buffer the sole protection for the creekside soil. Winter had claimed many of the edge trees as windfall, the tributary streams clogged with debris, and in places the bank slumped into the channel. Root ends emerged from the ground like half-buried fingers. Kilometres of naked stumps and ravaged ground extended all the way from the intersection with the lake road to the park boundary. Clumps of scrubby trees had been left standing, a practice industry called variable retention logging, the survivors intended to act as a source of seed. But the rejects were never the best specimens, poor sources of quality genetic material, the exercise masking the high-grading of the best and the biggest. To the soaring hawk overhead, the park must have appeared an isolated island of green in the middle of a black churning sea.

Rainbow skipped ahead up the trail, flopped on her stomach on the natural bridge, and peered into the creek pools. Paul, Grace, and I rested on the former kitchen stumps and surveyed the remains of the camp: a plastic pole, bits of blue tarp, and a rusted pot, already silting over with needles and forest litter.

“Nature reclaims her own,” Paul commented.

“Not the clear-cuts, though. They'll take generations,” Grace added soberly.

“If they let them get that old,” I concluded.

“I see frogs. And baby fishes,” Rainbow called from the stream, a veil of hair fallen over her face.

“Should we set up camp?” Grace asked.

“I want to see the damage first,” I said.

Remnants of yellow tape still flagged the trail in to the study site and we travelled it like a band of refugees. Paul favoured his bad leg on the rough ground, and I, the human beach ball, required help over all obstacles, big or small.

We passed the entwined lovers, the interior forest brighter than I recalled. Through the trees rose an abrupt wall of sunlight, the buffer zone gone, the rainforest severed at the park boundary. Hearts heavy, we made our way through our former old-growth study site. The loggers had punched across the park boundary to remove four of our biggest trees. SS-1-3 was a stump.

“How can they get away with this?” Grace fumed.

“They were charged with trespass and fined,” I said. I'd read the news article to Paul over breakfast a few days ago. Roger Payne, the company forester, was quoted as saying the fallers had read their maps wrong. He offered an apology from the company for the loss of the park trees.

“A slap on the wrist. And they'll appeal,” Paul said. “A fine will be a fraction of the value of a single tree.”

I couldn't begin to place value on the loss of our long-term study site.

We stepped out of the trees into the buffer zone, reeling from the intensity of light and the carnage. I thought of the framed colour digital photo hanging on the wall in my office, a photo of space. Not outer space, but empty space. The forest space between branches, between needles, from the top of the tallest tree to the forest floor. The space where dragonflies hover, spiders build their webs, marbled murrelets race, seedlings sprout, pollen floats. Where rain falls, wind blows and sunlight creeps. Paul had constructed the photo a year ago while suspended between two hemlock trees on a traverse line, a series of horizontal ropes and pulleys rigged from tree to tree to allow climbers to move like sloths through the canopy without having to descend to the forest floor. Dangling in mid-air, he lowered a hand-held digital laser range finder from the upper canopy a metre at a time to the ground, recording measurements at each stop. When translated to a computer, the resulting electronic image of laser beams rebounding from matter resembled a Christmas tree ornament or a ship from another galaxy. What would a laser image of this place we called Otter Creek show today? A uniform bar of light? A flat line on a heart monitor? Not much left but space, the rest a memory.

We picked our way through the jumble of branches, splintered wood, and torn earth. I kept my head lowered, studying the ground, hunting for clues. Which stump marked the murrelet tree? Was the carcass of a chick trampled under the debris, or had it fledged before the cutting? Which piece of ripped and ravaged ground marked the patch of earth where Paul's hemlock had grown? Did his blood still stain the useless fingers of root? Impossible to tell in the chaos. My hopes fell. Would Paul's assailant remain a mystery forever? Not a single green plant grew in the injured land.