A Friend of the Earth (45 page)

My apartment wasn't much bigger than the cell I'd shared with Sandman. A sitting room with a bed and a TV, a kitchen the size of the galley on a thirty–foot sailboat, toilet and shower, a patch of dirt out back with a rusting iron chair bolted to a slab of concrete in the middle of it. I could have had more – any time I wanted I could have drawn on the money we'd invested in Earth Forever! and nobody at GE the wiser – but I didn't want more. I wanted less, much less. I wanted to live like Thoreau.

My chief recreation was Sierra. Four, five, even six days a week, I'd hike out to her tree and chat with her if she wasn't busy with interviews or her journal. Sometimes she'd come down in her harness and float there above me, the soles of her feet as black as if they'd been tarred; other times we'd chat on the cell phone, sometimes for hours, just drifting through subjects and memories in a long, unhurried dream of an afternoon or evening, her voice so intimate right there in my ear, so close, it was as if she'd come down to earth again.

We had a celebration to commemorate her third anniversary aloft – her support team, a dozen journalists, a crowd of the E.F.! rank and file. Andrea and Teo drove up, and that was all right, a kiss on the cheek, a hug, ‘You okay, Ty? Really? You know where I am if you need me,'
Andrea so beautiful and severe and Tierwater fumbling and foolish, locked into something that was going to have to play itself out to the end. I got her a cake that was meant, I think, for somebody's wedding – four tiers, layered frosting, the lonely plastic figurine of a groomless bride set on top. I was trying to tell my daughter something with that forlorn bride: it was time to come down. Time to get on with life. Go to graduate school, get married, have children, take a shower, for Christ's sake. If she got the meaning of the lone figurine, she didn't let on. She kept it, though – the figurine – kept it as if it were one of the dressed–up dolls she'd invented lives for when she was a motherless girl alone in the fortress of her room.

A week later. Forty–eight degrees, a light rain falling. Those trees, that grove, were more familiar to me than the sitting room in my apartment or the house I grew up in. There was a smell of woodsmoke on the air, the muted sounds of the forest sinking into evening, a shrouded ray of sunlight cutting a luminous band into her tree just above the lower platform – which was unoccupied, I saw, when I came up the hill and into the grove, already punching her number into the phone. It was four–fifteen. I'd just got out of work. I was calling my arboreal daughter.

Her voice came over the line, hushed and breathy, the most serene voice in the world, just as I reached the base of the tree. ‘Hi, Dad,' she whispered, that little catch of familiarity and closeness in her voice, ready to talk and open up, as glad to hear my voice as I was glad to hear hers, ‘what's up?' I was about to tell her something, an amusing little story about work and one of the loggers – timber persons – who'd come in looking for a toggle switch but kept calling it a tuggle, as in ‘You got any tuggles back there?,' when her voice erupted in my ear.

She cried out in surprise – ‘Oh!' she cried, or maybe it was ‘Oh, shit!' – because after all those years and all the sure, prehensile grip of her bare, hardened toes, she'd lost her balance. The phone came down first, a black hurtling missile that was like a fragment dislodged from the lowering black sky, and it made its own distinctive sound, a thump, yes, but a kind of mechanical squawk too, as if it were alive, as if it were some small, tree–dwelling thing that had made the slightest miscalculation in springing from one branch to another. And that was all right, everything was all right – she'd only lost her phone, I'd get her a new one, and hadn't I seen an ad in the paper just the other day and thought of her?

But then the larger form came down – much larger, a dark, streaking
ball so huge and imminent the sky could never have contained it. There was a sound – sudden, roaring, wet – and then the forest was silent.

Petunia is not a dog. She's a Patagonian fox. Above all, I've got to remember that. It seems important. It's the kind of distinction that will be vitally important in the life to come, whether it's on top of the mountain or in a cloning lab somewhere in the bowels of New Jersey. Petunia is not a dog. I seem to be repeating this to myself as we wind our way up the fractured mountain road, the hot glare of the day ahead of me, Andrea nodding asleep at my side. What I'm noticing, at the lower elevations, is how colorless the forest is. Here, where the deciduous trees should be in full leaf, I see nothing but wilt and decay, the skeletal brown stalks of the dead trees outnumbering the green a hundred to one. The chaparral on the south–facing slopes seems true, the palest of grays and milky greens, twenty shades of dun, but each time we round a bend and the high mountains heave into view, the colors don't seem right – but maybe that's only a trick of memory. Just to be here, just to be moving through the apparent world after all these years, is enough to make everything all right.

Of course, there are the inevitable condos. And traffic. This was once a snaking two–lane country road cut through national forest lands, sparsely populated, little–traveled. Now I'm crawling along at fifteen miles an hour in a chain of cars and trucks welded into the flanks of the mountain as far as I can see, and I'm not breathing cooling drafts of alpine air either – wind–whipped exhaust, that's about it. Where thirty–five years ago there were granite bluffs and domes, now there is stucco and glass and artificial wood, condos banked up atop one another like the Anasazi cliff–dwellings, eyes of glass, teeth of steps and railings, the pumping hearts of air–conditioning units, thousands of them, and no human face in sight. Am I complaining? No. I haven't got the right.

Andrea sleeps on, her old lady's double chin vibrating through a series of soft, ratcheting old lady's snores. Petunia, quiedy stinking, is licking up a puddle of her own vomit in the space between three cases of fine wine and an ice chest crammed with immemorial beef. I'm whispering to myself, jabbering away about nothing, a kind of litany I began devising in prison as a way of bearing witness to what we've lost on this continent alone – bonytail chub, Okaloosa darter, desert pupfish, spot–tailed earless lizard, crested caracara, piping plover, the Key deer, the kit fox, the
Appalachian monkeyface pearly mussel – but I can't keep it up. I'm depressing myself. The top of the mountain looms ahead. Joy. Redemption. The wellspring of a new life. I switch on the radio, hoping for anything, for ‘Ride Your Pony,' but all I get is a very angry man speaking in what I take to be Farsi – or maybe it's Finnish – and a station out of Fresno devoted entirely to techno–country. Right. I switch off the radio and start muttering again – just to entertain myself, you understand.

The traffic begins to thin out at five thousand feet, where the narcoleptic community of Camp Orson has been transformed into Orsonville, a booming mid–mountain burg of mobile homes, mini–malls, condos, video stores and take–out pizza
(Try Our Catfish Fillet/Pepperoni Special!)
. I keep my young–old eyes on the road, maneuvering around monster trucks, dune buggies and jacked–up 4x4s, and then we're on the final stretch of the road to Big Timber. The road is a good deal rougher here, washouts every hundred yards, the severed trunks of toppled trees like bad dentition along both shoulders, the fallen–rock zone extended indefinitely. But the Olfputt – one hundred and twelve thousand dollars' worth of Mac's money made concrete – is humming along, indestructible on its road–warrior tires. There are only two cars ahead of us now and they both turn off at Upper Orsonville, and whether this is a good sign or bad I can't tell. I have a sneaking suspicion that it's bad – nobody wants to go any farther because the road is so buckled and blasted and there's no there there once you arrive – but it's too late to turn back now. And on the positive side, the temperature has dropped to just over a hundred.

Half an hour later, Andrea wakes with a snort as we creep into Big Timber, where the Big Timber Bar and Mountain Top Lodge still stands – ramshackle, in need of paint and a new roof maybe, and with a dead whitebark pine in the fifty–ton range canted at a forty–five–degree angle over the windows of the restaurant, but there still and to all appearances not much changed since we first stepped through its doors as the Drinkwaters all those years ago. But what has changed, and no amount of footage on the nightly news could have prepared us for it, is the forest. It's gone. Or not gone, exactly, but fallen – all of it, trees atop trees, trees bent at the elbows, snapped at the base, uprooted and flung a hundred yards by the violence of the winds. All the pines – the sugar, the yellow, the Jeffrey, the ponderosa – and all the cedars and the redwoods and aspens and everything else lie jumbled like Pick–up–Sticks. Mount Saint Helens, that's what it looks like. Mount Saint Helens after the blast.

Andrea lets out a low whistle and Petunia's ears shoot up, alert. ‘I knew it was going to be bad,' she says, and leaves the thought for me to finish.

I'm just nodding in agreement, as stunned as if I'd been transported to Mars. It's eighty–six degrees out there, accompanied by a stiff wind, and the snow – all of it, the crushing record snow that obliterated everything the winds and the beetles and the drought couldn't reach – is gone. Do I see signs of hope? A few weeds poking through the tired soil at the end of the lot where three weather–beaten pickups sit clustered at the door to the bar, the stirring of buds like curled fingers on the branches of the arthritic aspens, and what else? A bird. A shabby, dusty mutant jay the color of ink faded into a blotter with a wisp of something clenched in its beak. ‘I need a drink,' I say.

Inside, nothing has changed: a few stumplike figures in dirty T–shirts and baseball caps hunched over the bar, knotty pine, a ratty deer's head staring out from the wall, discolored blotches on the floor where the roof has leaked and will leak again, dusty jars of pickled eggs and even dustier bottles that once held scotch, bourbon, tequila. And the screen, of course, tuned to a show called
Eggless Cooking
that features a sack–faced chef in toque and apron whisking something vaguely egglike in a deep stainless–steel bowl. If you're looking for the young or even the middle–aged here, you'll be disappointed. I see faces as seamed and rucked as the road coming up here, rheumy eyes, fallen chins, clumps of nicotine–colored hair bunched in nostrils and ears – we're among our own at last. I pull out a stool for Andrea, the only lady present, and await the slow shuffle of the bartender as he makes his way down the length of the bar to us. He's wheezing. He has a coffee mug in his hand. He draws even with us, no hint of recognition on his face, and lifts his eyebrows. ‘Scotch,' I say hopefully, ‘and for my wife, how about a vodka Gibson.'

‘Up,' she says, ‘two olives, very dry. And a glass of water. Please.'

There's a murmur of conversation from the far end of the bar, tired voices, a punchline delivered, a tired laugh. Andrea's hand seeks mine out where it rests in my lap. ‘My wife?' she says.

I like the look in her eyes. It's a look I once fell in love with, many jail terms ago. ‘What am I supposed to say – “Get one for my ex here?”'

The bartender sets down two glasses of murky
sake
and a glass of water, no ice, and I'm trying to pull the years off his face, straighten out his shoulders, erase his gut: do I know him? ‘You been here long?' I ask.

He's wearing a full beard in four different shades of gray, the kind that fans out from the cheekbones as if a stiff wind is blowing round his head.

He's bracing himself against the bar, and I read half a dozen ailments into that: tender liver, bad feet, bursitis, arthritis, hip replacement, war wounds. ‘Nineteen sixty–two,' he says, and throws a wet–eyed glance down the front of Andrea's dress.

She says, ‘What happened to all the trees? It used to be so beautiful here.'

There's a moment then, the chef on the screen nattering on about olestra and the processed pulp of the opuntia cactus, a sound of wind skirting the building, pale sun, the jay out there somewhere like a misplaced fragment of a dream, when I feel we're all plugged in, all attuned to the question and its ramifications, the three young–old men at the end of the bar, the bartender, Andrea, me. What happened, indeed. But the bartender, a wet rag flicking from hand to hand like the tongue of a lizard, breaks the spell. He shrugs, an eloquent compression of his heavy shoulders. ‘Beats the hell out of me,' he says finally.

No one has anything to add to that, and the bar is quiet a moment until one of the men at the far end mutters, ‘Oh, Christ,' and we all look up to see a new red van rolling into the lot, its tires pouring in and out of the ruts like a glistening black liquid. The van noses up to the front steps, so close it's practically kissing the rail, and the bartender lets out a low stabbing moan. ‘Shit,' he says, ‘it's Quinn.'

Quinn?
Could it be? Could it possibly be?

‘Drink up, Bob,' one of the stumpmen says, and then they're pushing back their barstools, patting their pockets for keys, groaning, wheezing, shuffling. ‘Got to be going, so long, Vince, see you later.'

I'm sitting there rapt, watching the spectacle of the tomato–red door of the van sliding back automatically and a mechanical device lowering a wheelchair from high inside it, when Andrea takes my arm. ‘We've got to be going too, Ty—I have no idea what kind of shape the cabin is going to be in—sheets, bedding, the basics. We could be in for a disappointment—and a lot of work too. And I don't feature sleeping in the car tonight, uh–uh, no way, absolutely not.' She's standing there now, right beside me, the handbag thrown over one shoulder. ‘I'm just going to use the ladies' – ‘