The Book of Yaak (24 page)

The deciduous leaves seem to rot easier—seem, in their broadness, to trap and retain moisture more readily between themselves and the soil—and because of this, the soil is rich, thick and black. This is a young valley, just-sprung-up yesterday from the glacier's retreat; the trees, because of the Pacific Northwest weather systems, are huge, but the soil is thin: you cut the trees once, and they won't come back like they were before. Not until a new bedding of soil forms. Which—if the trees are left alone—might take a few thousand years.

This is the richest soil I've seen in the valley. The healthiest. Perhaps the way this side of the mountain faces the west-approaching storms causes it to catch more moisture: causes it to even create its own moisture. Perhaps the west-setting sun, warmer than the rising sun, has over time more thoroughly weathered and disintegrated the rock—dissolving it like geological fertilizer, to add to the mystery of the forest below. Perhaps....

It is a healing mountain.

Yellow warblers and yellow tanagers fly past like creatures escaped from a lifetime of imprisonment, singing and swooping. The needles of the coniferous trees do not break down and return to the earth as easily, as quickly, as do the leaves of the deciduous trees. There's a beetle that helps chew up the waxy coating on some of these coniferous needles, however, thereby enabling the rotting process to get started, where otherwise it would not. They're vital to the process of soil formation, these chewing bugs—vital to the forest, vital to the sky, to life. They're one of the rare leaf-eating insects in the forest. I remember a friend telling me how most insects in this forest were predators—that they ate each other—because there were so many billions of them that if they ate plant matter, they would quickly strip the entire forest bare.

As we are now doing. But that is another story, and is secondary to the story of immediate life—though it is not secondary to the longer view of things.

It's like looking through binoculars, or a telescope; like looking through them backwards, where everything's tiny, and then looking through them frontwards, where everything — even the moon—is huge.

What this trip today is about is to just try and look at things the way they are.

An attempt to make a walk without a thought of tomorrow.

I make this hike when people are well, too; the beauty of these woods—these untouched woods—has plenty to offer me when all is well. It's not a place I come to only in times of the sickness of friends. But it—the walk, and the woods—takes on, or seems to imbue—as with the pulse of a breathing thing—even more meaning, and deliver more understanding, when experienced in the context of illness, the context of sorrow.

The woods provide.

Going down through the lush dripping understory, trying to pick a path, and barely able to see ahead through the chill fog-clouds, might be akin to your present grasp of things. Everything on this walk reminds me of and amplifies your condition. I want to tell you about it all. Though I have made this transect on numerous occasions, no one path is ever the same as the one before it, and this time I discover one of the most amazing larch trees I've ever seen.

It's not amazing in size, and especially not for a larch; some in these woods are almost like redwoods—three-and four-hundred-year-old trees large enough to drive a car through. What's amazing about this one—it's about fifty years old, is my guess—only five or six years older than you — is that it metamorphosed into three separate trees. It's not at all uncommon for a larch to have twin trunks, but I've never noticed one before that has three trunks.

More amazing still, these three trunks, each as thick as a man's waist, spiral around each other as they rise vertically toward the canopy, so far above. They coil not so much like a great tree trunk, but like a vine, or DNA; like a corkscrew, like serpents around a staff.

Ordinarily such an unusual tree would not survive in the chaos of the forest—or what we call chaos, but which is of course a constantly changing state of unrelenting order and complexity, unrelenting grace.

Ordinarily, a tree like this one—so out of the mold for a classic larch—would have been pruned by insects, lightning, ice storm, or wind. It would not have been allowed to channel that energy—frivolous energy—all that sunlight, all that photosynthesis!—into such a seemingly whimsical and most decidedly unlarchlike design.

But I looked at what surrounded it, and 1 saw how it had survived.

Trees of different species formed a circle around it—fir, aspen, lodgepole, even cedar. Their brandies, as it was growing, must have helped to shelter and stabilize it, hold it up, as though they were friends, or at the very least—and in the sense of the word that 1 think we must turn to the woods to relearn—like community.

There was no way to look at the tree and not think of you, and of all the other things that mattered.

I guess I'm not a hard-core pagan yet—and may never be. I still like to stop at the edges of realism, and not travel too far over into the world of the symbolic. I still sometimes cannot help but hold on to the notion that what we see and understand is all there is: that we have run out of mystery. I know in my heart that's wrong, but still, nearly forty years old, I have trouble shaking that stone wall certainty, the milieu in which I've grown up—the idea that we've got it all figured out. "It" being everything.

If I believed—if I dared to believe—more deeply in the power of symbolism, and the immeasurable, unknowable power of myth and ritual, perhaps 1 would have climbed that DNA-twisted tree and sawed or chopped down one, or two, or all of the spiraling trunks—a strange effort, two thousand miles away, to bend back the spirals of your own DNA—to make them change course; to divert the path of destiny, the genetic markers laid out in your beginning cast-of-dice, charting in advance, so long ago, the path of your flesh.

Or perhaps not: perhaps even if I believed, or knew, that a tree in Yaak could be connected to a man in Texas, I would have left it alone, as I did; believing, as 1 do, that there can be just as much power, or more power, in restraint as there can be in the desire to shape, manipulate, alter and impose.

I walked on.

There were mushrooms everywhere and of every color dazzling the eyes, and vibrant lichens, on the wet boulders: lichens that were hundreds, even thousands of years old. The undergrowth of
vaccinium
—huckleberry bushes—already had their swollen green berries on them, just waiting to turn purple in August, to transfer their chlorophyll to straight high-octane sugar; waiting to be eaten, in August and September, by the birds drifting southward, and by the bears drifting back up to the high north slopes, as they prepared to crawl down into the earth for their deep winter's sleep.

It all reminded me of you. The bears—your life. The bull elk—your son. The birdsong—your heart, our hearts, all hearts, hoping. The sound of the spring creeks trickling down the steep walls of the mossy, forested mountains—your life, again, and all lives.

Sometimes they build roads into the virgin forests up here under the pretense of getting into trees—lodgepole pine, usually—that have been infested with mountain pine beetles, for which lodgepole is a host. It's an intricate, highly evolved cycle about which entire books have been written. Basically, though, pine beetles attack overmature lodgepoles, killing them, sometimes in large numbers, which then sets that dead or dying stand up for a fire—usually lightning-caused—the heat of which the lodgepole's cones can then use to be cracked open and reproduce.

Through the ashes of the fire, all of the forest's nutrients are returned to the soil—the flames open the seed cones for the next forest—and so it goes. The fire destroys large numbers of the beetle "epidemic," as well. The cycle of the forest rises and falls, in that manner, like piston-and-valve, or calliope music. Like the hands of a potter working clay.

What's strange about this forest is that none of its lodgepole pines—though they're mature ones, even overmature — have beetles in them. By any account, this mountain is a place of unsurpassed health, from the soil all the way up to the tips of the treetops. These lodgepoles are eighty-five years old, and without a pine beetle in sight. These lodgepoles have the genetics, and the magic, that future land-managers — though, good God, not the current crop, it seems—will be interested in.

I pick my trail downward through the thick forest toward that backside creek in the high green hanging valley. I've never been in that valley without seeing a cow moose. I don't know if it's the same moose every time or not.

I keep thinking about DNA—about the bends in it, the alterations, that can yield or summon cancer—a meltdown of the flesh. The paths that are charted for us from the beginning, versus those that are sometimes chosen for us by others: by pollutants, contaminants, carcinogens. I'd recently read a newspaper column by a timber industry lackey who was pooh-poohing the dangers of dioxin. Never mind that it's the second-deadliest carcinogen known to man, next only to plutonium (another element for which the timber spokesman had kind words). The largest emission of dioxin, he said, actually comes from the forest itself when it burns. Dioxin, he said, was something trees inflict upon us.

I guess he ran out of space in his column, or in his mind, maybe, or just forgot and left out the part that forest fires release dioxin because the dioxin has settled on the needles of conifers as a result of chlorine precipitation from industrial emissions.

God, I hope you can turn this thing around.

As I get lower and lower, closer to the creek, it begins to rain again. Massive larch trees, giant burned-out skeletons, stand sentinel-like and tell the story of the 1910 forest fire, which burned, off and on, for a distance of 250 miles, from Spokane to Kalispell, and whose smoke was visible as far away as Chicago. It was this fire—redepositing all of the forest's nutrients, rather than trucking them off and putting them on a ship bound for Asia—which laid the foundation for the immense forests of this valley. Not all the trees burned—some in the valley are five hundred years, even a thousand years old—but those that did burn gave birth to an incredibly rich and blessed place. They left more behind than what they came in with.

In the valley, we talk about the 1910 fire—the magnitude of which is probably a two- or three-hundred-year event—as if it occurred back in the most ancient corner of history; and in some ways—in the scale of you and me, for instance—I guess it was.

In 1910, you wouldn't have been born yet. In 1910, perhaps even your father and mother wouldn't have been born. Your grandfather would have been a young man then, strong in the world.

So much green, everywhere, lush and dripping and wet.

The rain falls lightly on the broad leaves of false hellebore, a plant that the Indians of the British Columbia coastal tribes hold in highest esteem for medicinal purposes. You can't eat it—it'll make you sick—but the smoke from the burning green plant can heal both your body and your spirit. I snap one off above the base, leaving the roots to regenerate, and put it in my daypack to mail to you. The rain makes a pattering sound as it strikes the broad leaves all around me—I'm standing knee-deep in a helleborine garden. The sound itself—unusual for this valley—is healing. As the rain knifes through the conifers' needles it makes a steady hiss. I'm very near the creek now, muddy and wet to my waist. A ruffed grouse is drumming nearby, courting, perhaps, working toward his second clutch of the summer, following the freak blizzard only two weeks ago, which extinguished a fair number of the spring's hatchlings, the first clutch.

Life, go on, go on. Go on.

Through the forest I catch a glimpse of a faraway mountain — four, five miles upstream, in the headwaters of this secret valley. A little road was built into the edge of this roadless country, farther up in those headwaters, during World War II — it was thought that we'd need to cut more wood for building more ships—but the war ended before those trees could be reached, and the road is invisible now, completely grown over with alder and pines as big around as your thigh. Up at the headwaters, there is one smallish clearcut, up at the source of things, like a blemish, a nick or a cut one might have gotten while shaving. The rest of this green forest—despite the nick's relative tininess—seems somehow poised against it; suffering it quietly, absorbing and absolving the tiny sight of it—but not unmindful of it: not forgetting that it is there.

I'm in dark, dense timber close to the creek now. It's wet, and I slip. I hear the thunder of something large running away from me, or toward, 1 can't tell which, at first.

Away.

More 1910-charred giant larch skeletons. They were several hundred years old before they burned. That's a rule of the West, and a rule of the world: if it doesn't rot, it burns.

It if dies, it's born again—as long as there's a soil base for it to return to. Orange mulch or gray-black ash, it makes no difference; it lives and dies in its home and then lives again. Even when the soil is washed away, it is not the end of things, because then the sun and frost and snow and rain begin to work on the exposed bedrock, crumbling it and kneading and pulverizing it through the millennia to make soil again.

It's good soil, here, in this back-side valley. I'll send you some. It feels good to be standing on it. There are a lot of stories buried within it. It supports so much life.

Over on one of the other mountains earlier this summer—up on one of the burned mountains, scorched black in places from last autumn's fires—the bluebirds and flickers were swarming in search of all the remaining insects. The birds' songs were beautiful in that black landscape of birth, and the bluebirds were flying chips of color and song. It all has to rot or burn, and there's only so much in the bank. Forgive me if I keep repeating the obvious: it just seems like such a revelation to me that in the end it is all the same, and that it is really the part leading up to either of those two ends that makes life so sweet for us.