The North Coast times-eagle., January 01, 1996, Page 2, Image 2

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CHRISTOPHE VORLET
CLEARCUT FEELINGS
* M Ȇi .U Ut .L Ul .........
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BY R. LOUIS RICHARDS
They had at times stood stark still, listening long to the
greatest of silences. At others, they leaned back and danced
as dervishes with the spray of life's waters through their bows,
assisting each other’s balance against hurricane and gale. They
had known the screams of lions and eagles and the chatters of
squirrels and songbirds. They arose in a world where death had
always come in the time best suited to life and its relations. Now,
it seems, a general death has come to this forest and the famil­
ies of its wld community. It has arrived out of time as its naked
self, wth no life about it at all.
I watched this clearcutting proceed, sitting concealed in
a natural blind at the edge of some trees. Trees that are, as
evidenced by colored ribbons and spray painted marks, soon to
be another scene of destruction. Over a few short weeks I have
watched since that morning when I was alerted by the foreign
sound of vtfiistles, signaling the movements of the yarder's long
cables. I came up here to find this war, this sad battlefield.
Helmeted and red suspendered soldiers used weapons that fired
and refired the same chromium razor bullets on continuous
revolving chains. The fallen victims were strangled and dragged
away by a noose. Yellow and orange metal beasts seemed to
dine on the larger body parts within the broken circle.
For now the industry will shift its focus to other ridges
and canyons. A seemingly absolute and final silence has fallen
loudly wth the departure of truck and yarder tower. As I walk out
into the freshly killed landscape the pungent smell of sap,
almost overpowering, mingles with and covers the damp aroma
of the ripped open surface soils. The Douglas firs smell stronger
than the cedars, spruces and hemlocks. All are trying by the
power of that ancient intelligence to seal off their terminal
injuries.
Big leaf and vine maples will crystallize their sugars at
the point of severance and try to grow back from the roots come
Spring Prolific alders, sprouting from millions of seeds, together
with the tenacious maples and countless dozens of varieties of
shrubs, fems, flowers and berries will proclaim their regenerative
Breakfast & Lunch
( losed Mon. &. I ties.
,
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V.
life force, only to be poisoned back to a grotesque and slow
living death by a rain of hormonal disrupters sprayed down from
venomous helicopters.With birds, bugs and "weed trees" absent,
one engineered and cloned variety of tree, one variety for vtfiich
the industry projects a profitable future market, wll be substitut­
ed for the genocided diversity.
The familiar odor of the Douglas firs has transported me
back to a Christmas tree lot on a December comer of my child­
hood. I remember creeping through a sawed off pygmy forest.
The sacrificial young firs were trucked in and resurrected upon
wooden crosses along the boulevard just a block away from my
family's stuccoed box of a home in L A 's suburbs. I was a 7 year
old wild man crawling, knees and elbows, ducking below the
branches and avoiding giant alien invaders, known as such by
their habit of walking upright. I stand here nowand identify as a
returned forest dweller, ironically reincarnated in Smogville. I
never felt at home until I found a real forest. Now it gets ever
harder to find one.
After three weeks of opaque gray, the sky this day is
showng that depth of blue that only comes here from the far
north with wnteris dense arctic air masses. November has
brought, once again, a drenching to the western slope of the
Cascades. The place where I stand was wholly unprepared to
accept the rain. Rain that in other years would have been readily
welcomed. An ethereal ghost forest stands upon a congregation
of empty weeping stumps. Amid dissevered branches, trampled
fems, piles of sawdust and ripped up duff the scents of fir, cedar
and spruce are strong. Far too strong.
Like the image of the severed "phantom leaf" of Kirilian
photography, the great old trees are holding on to their auric
fields. Organized life currents and static electricity invisibly des­
cribe missing trunks, limbs and needles. Energetic impulses
above me in the static air strain to pull missing sap where it can
no longer flow
This community of trees with its fems and fungi, sala­
manders and birds, squirrels and bears has been surprised by a
sudden, sweeping and unnatural change. Even at this height of
trauma it desperately strives to heal itself. The primal instinct
inherent in each living organism seeks to maintain the energetic
patterns of its material form. But the single marketable portion of
some central and essential life forms within this diverse system
have been removed, trucked away to a muddy sorting yard in a
noisy valley below.
I could hear little but the roar of the churning chocolate
stream as I made my way up the damp canyon. The scene up
here in the cut is eerily silent except for my frequent falling down
in the slippery mud and the springy web of slash. I arrived just
before the big yarder machine was pulled away from its small
circle of bare ground within a large square of newly opened sky.
I hid and watched, hearing the loud cracking exhaust of the
diesel tractor as the telescoped tower slowly began to move.
Left on the puddled muddy landing are fragments of cables,
some pop and tobacco cans, leaked or spilled black and red oils,
a cracked blue plastic bucket and a few empty oil bottles.
Ringing the abandoned landing is a broken circle of a
mound It is crudely penetrated from up-slope by the dead end
of a now useless coarsely rocked road. The mound is built up
from tens of thousands of discarded limbs and treetops in a
tangled heap The yarder tower's guys and holds, thick steel
ropes, yesterday were released from six huge stumps and
coiled, each on its own spool. The last forced utility demanded
of these six great entities was to facilitate the destruction of their
neighbors and kin. These patient giants not long before had
stood in random ranks as they had for over five hundred peace­
ful years
It is four days later Again I am standing here amid the
post-sylvan debris. The opened soils that had smelled of a living
dampness have quickly dried to a hard dustiness that rises in my
footsteps. With four clear days, and the nights of freeze-drying
chill, the roots of the disappeared trees, in a futile effort to
quench the thirst of their phantom bodies, have sucked all
moisture from the land's surface. The misty fogs that have hung
above in the community of crowns each Fall morning for a
thousand years have vanished into the blue vacuum.
I have purposely stayed away for three days. After fast­
ing and imbibing teas brewed from local shamanic botanicals I
have drummed, danced, prayed and dreamed of this place for
four nights. It has come up in my visions, projected in silver-
green against a deep bottom of the ocean blue-black. I saw
again great trees standing as if still alive in the silvery shades of
self effulgent light. What was most peculiar in my dreamscape
was thai I could clearly hear the voices of the these trees.
That they could regain and display their structure and
form seemed at first wonderful. But then the hearing of the
voices opened to me an empathy of torment. What I heard was
akin to the moans, sobs and wails of mothers come to retrieve
the bodies of their good children from a bloody field of battle.
Now, as I walk this scene in waking daylight my dreamsounds
come back too real.
I ascend a steep ridge toward the largest stump ? the
clearcut. It was the giant tree I had known as the biggest .or
miles. Taking on a temporary distance from the reality of my
feelings I have decided to go up and count its annual rings. For
a few moments I forcefully detach from my emotions. I enter the
quantified mind set of commerce where trees are but logs. I try
to think about board feet and how many houses that one trunk
could make, the body of that single incredible big tree. Instead,
what I see is a man behind glass high above a city adding fig­
ures in a column.
I decidedly reject that mentality which has become
strange to me. How could I forget my time sitting with my back
pressed against this familiar friend? Not for even two minutes
can this be done. This tree, my loved and respected intimate,
was murdered and its massive middle has unceremoniously
been hauled away Its topmost tip that each year has bom ten
thousand flying seeds now lays almost a football field's length
above me up this ridge.
I can only climb atop the great stump from the uphill
side. The downslope drop is all of twelve feet. Standing on its
edge, I survey the expanse of denuded landscape. I see a half
mile by half mile square of terminated natural progress. I try to
numb out again. No use. I lay down on my back, arms thrown
back above my head. My feet and hands are inside the six inch
thick bark line perimeter. How long had this gentle giant waited
for such a violent end? I again resolve to count the rings.
Rolling over and rising up to my hands and knees I
begin to push my index finger out from the center dot, counting
each concentric circle. "At least five years," I'm thinking, "to
reach the elevation of the stump. Six, seven, eight, nine, ten..."
The rings start out quite wide. This tree probably grew up in a
bum started by a pre-Columbian lightning strike. Standing as it
had on the south face of this promontory ridge it would have had
a head start of maybe fifteen years of rank growth before the
maple and alder began getting most of the Summer light,
narrowing the annual rings. As the rings in the twenties begin
to thin down I look ahead of my finger across so many hundreds
of years I have yet to tally and my eyes fill with tears. I can no
longer see to count.
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‘-1'
I look up from on all fours at the blurry nightmare of this
damaged world. My grief is heavy upon me.ln sad hopelessness
I lay my forehead at the center of the concentric unbroken
circles where my beloved tree's natural being was terminated.
At once I feel the sensation of falling. Eyes tightly closed, my
visual sense is of diving headfirst into the dark Earth. All is now
seen in the same luminous silver light of my nights of dream
visions. I see myself passing through giant roots tied securely to
fractures in the rock. Salamanders, grubs and worms sense my
presence and telepathically acknowledge my passing. I see
them glowing within iridescing rainbow auras. I tumble through
layers of basalt and sandstone. I feel my breathing light and
easy and my lungs fill with something so much finer than air. I
sense I am being wordlessly informed by coupling with an intelli­
gence coming into me through my own heart center.
An expansive and timeless feeling in my chest occupies
the whole focus of my sensory experience. A knowing arises
from within me in a language that this is "only the singularity of
the joy which is life." I laugh inside because the words that form
seem the single greatest attainment of understatement. My
thinking mind tries to intrude upon the experience but this is
entirely too vast. Irrelevant thoughts can only surrender and
dissipate before the magnitude of the feelings.
My focus begins to shift, to expand, and I see Earth as
a translucent planetary bubble. I know instinctively and immedi­
ately of every kindred spirit and where around an entire planet
they endure. I see how many we are. So many pulsating lights,
connected by loving threads in the oneness of our intention. A
voice congeals out of the fluid totality of my sensations. A voice
both male and female resonates with a rhythmic flickering of the
silver glow in all the living centers, saying clearly, 'Take heart.
Don't give up. Defend my Earth "
With a feeling of sudden shock I jerk my head up to
see the full moon rising in twilight over the clearcut. I'll spend
this cold night here on the stump, warmed from within. I feel
strengthened in a way I cannot fully grasp That my life will
never be the same is all I can ascertain.
R. Louis Richards (aka The 99th Monkey) lives along
the Columbia River near Naselle, Washington. His last article in
the NCTE, Reality Chex, appeared in the December 1995 issue.
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