Sweet Creek

by Lee Lynch

  “You make me feel like some little kid when you shush me like that, R.”

  “I don’t make you feel anything. Own your emotions.”

  Katie started to protest, but stopped herself. She’d always been the trailblazer. First in her family to go to college, first woman news anchor for one station, first Latina for two others. Here, R was the leader. That was okay—following was cool. She had things to learn, but did R have to be so dismissive?

  They turned onto an even rougher logging road. Deep furrows of half-dried mud ripped into the earth by heavy trucks and equipment made walking more difficult.

  R stabbed her staff into the muddy ground. “Rapists. If you could have seen the land a few years ago you’d feel sick. That was all green. Now look at it. This violation is slightly above Dawn Farm. When the rains come, the topsoil will be washed from their gardens, the cabins may flood, and their spring—they may have to drink bottled water. We’re building a cabin for a chemically sensitive woman over there. She is one of the creatures who’ve had their immune systems compromised by the male greed that’s destroying the earth. Men are impervious to the wreckage they leave behind.”

  Katie realized then that R hadn’t been showing her the rainbow, but the stripped hillside across the way. “Oh, gak. Is that a clear-cut? You’re right, it’s sickening. Why didn’t they bomb it and save themselves the trouble? Why is this total logging allowed? I feel like doing an expose for national TV—from a feminist perspective.” Immediately she saw herself in front of the cameras, earnestly clear-cutting forests of viewer ignorance. Awards would come; she’d thank R as she accepted.

  “Women birth life. Boys destroy it.”

  “Testosterone—Can Our Forests Survive It?”

  R’s smile was teasing. “Do I smell one of your sound bites?”

  She examined R for a sign that she was making fun of her. “You think I live and breathe stories. I was trying to be succinct and, like, lose the chattiness.” Did she really think in headlines? “I can’t win with you.”

  “Are we competing?”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. Sometimes R could be so discouraging. She was like a sniper who knew exactly how to aim at Katie’s shakiest points. “You’re always doing Ms. Rita Right,” she told her, “full of brilliant insights and incisive comments.”

  R whirled on her, lifting her staff. Katie fought back the specter of terror so far inside her she was barely conscious of it, so her fear seemed out of proportion. Against the backdrop of heavy equipment tracks, uprooted brush and tree stumps from two to over three feet across, R spread her green poncho like wings. Her hood fell back into an aura that spotlighted that pale, serene face now handsomely flushed from the hike.

  “Kate,” R proclaimed, “I’m passionate about you, your enthusiasm, your energy, your millennial vision.” She enfolded Katie in her arms. “And I’m a crone who loves her forest solitude.”

  “You told me it’s healthy to let my inner child speak!” She’d never heard herself whine the way she did around R. “Now you think you’ve created a monster. Tell me to shut up, R, okay?”

  R pressed her closer. The heat of anger re-formed to a cloud of excitement. My beloved, she sang to herself. She thought their explosive lust would flare here in the midst of the delicate hanging lichen and the hundreds of small mushrooms thrusting up through the earth all around them. She wished she could offload these emotions and the confusion they created in her.

  Gunshots burst into the quiet.

  “Mira!” Katie cried.

  R moved quickly away from her, waving her arms and shouting, “Hello! Hello!”

  A deer, two fawns whose spots had not completely faded, a stag, then a younger stag bounded from the woods to their right and stopped short at the sight of them, ears twitching, eyes staring.

  “Run!” cried R, waving her arms and lunging toward them.

  The deer leapt the road and vaulted over dense brush toward the steep mountainside above them. R seemed to grow taller and broader. Her reddened face turned toward the sound of snapping twigs. Katie’s fear blossomed again, and again she shoved it back down with a vicious caution.

  From their right came a man, rifle balanced casually under one arm, and behind him a boy, knees bent as he walked, his own rifle clutched Rambo-style as if he expected an enemy to leap at him.

  “I was afraid you were going to shoot us,” said R in her tightest disapproving tone.

  “I hope you ladies will think about wearing brighter clothing.”

  “It’s not,” pronounced R, “hunting season.”

  The father laughed at her. “I’m showing my boy the ropes. Don’t make a federal case of it.”

  “Look, Dad! Scat!”

  “That’s my man. They broke this way.” With a smirk he tipped his hat. “Have a nice walk”—he paused a second too long—“ladies.”

  The rain was really letting loose now. Katie’s suede-brimmed cap kept raindrops off her glasses, but the knees of her jeans were like iced gel packs. She was cold right down to her soul as she watched those men jog away. “I’ve interviewed murderers who felt less evil than that man.”

  “Men take life for pleasure.”

  Katie shivered. “Can’t you stop them from killing on your land?”

  “This is Forest Service Land. We’re walking a logging road.”

  “And the Forest Service doesn’t care?”

  “Care? These agencies will sometimes pay a bounty to men who keep certain animal populations down.”

  Gunshots rang out again. Katie had been less upset in sniper and hostage situations with SWAT teams deployed all around her. She aimed her anger at R. “But you said it’s out of season. We can get Sheriff Sweet out here. We can do something!”

  “That sheriff is probably married to a hunter. She won’t stop it. We can and do circle. We ask the Goddess to protect the land and our furred, finned, and feathered neighbors.”

  “That’s not going to fix anything, R. Look at the Kyoto Agreement that wacko in the White House reneged on this month. The environment is big-time news. The peaceful nature-lovers, the crashing dozers, the fawn-murderers. News is education.”

  “Kate, women’s spirit is so much more powerful than journalism. Publicity would martyr the land. The boys would at most compromise, and then the creatures would have lost ground because of our interference. That’s always the way.”

  “So this is one of the compromises you live with here. There’s a price for serenity, isn’t there? I’ll tell the story of women on the land, women who thought they’d find sanctuary from violence in the peace of the forest, but instead are disturbed and endangered by weekend warriors hunting for terminal fun.”

  R said, “There you go again, writing copy instead of talking about how you feel, filtering your emotions through chatter. You said you’d come to escape your media circus.” She turned away and walked uphill.

  The guns were silent now, but so was the forest wildlife. In her head Katie answered R, no longer sure enough of herself to speak aloud. Yes, she’d come seeking clarity, serenity, the company of peaceful women. She wanted to belong here. Yet there was no way she could turn off the excitement that bubbled as she trod this sodden, somehow sacred trail. She wanted to burst into song with “His Eye is on the Sparrow,” that Lauryn Hill/Tanya Blount gospel song from Sister Act II. Had R even seen Sister Act? Instead a bird broke the silence, its call like Woody Woodpecker’s—was there really a Woody Woodpecker bird? “What was that?”

  “The bird? They’re called pileated woodpeckers, gorgeous, prehistoric-looking creatures.”

  “Wow.” Katie decided not to mention the cartoon character to R. And squelch the Sister Act song, she told herself. Instead, she offered, “Growing up, Mom and I talked about almost everything. There weren’t enough minutes in the day to say it all.”

  “Ah! You’re looking for another mother. Did you have a fallingout?”

  “Never! We’re okay, Mom and me. She loved that
stupid chihuahua in the ads. She used to say, ‘We didn’t need no steenkin man.’ She didn’t marry until last year. Her feet were wearing out, so she took the best offer. She loved her catering business, said she always felt like she was going out to a party, not working, and she earned more tips than you can imagine, enough to buy our trailer and send me to college. Her customers were always proposing to her. Bob was her insurance agent for over twenty years and getting ready to retire. He can’t believe she finally married him, and he treats her like his own personal movie star. She can’t believe she landed a nice guy with a great house and enough money in the bank that they’re traveling all the time. Before Bob—BB, we say—I was back there once a month to see her.”

  They hurried through an open space where the roadside dropped steeply to one side and was sheer cliff on the other. There were only scraggly scrub oaks and manzanita bushes here, exposing them to the rain.

  “Look!” R cried, and Katie saw the huge woodpecker and heard its beak drumming at a dead tree.

  “That’s fantastical.”

  “You must miss your mother,” R said, once again under the evergreens, trilliums dense on either side of the path.

  “Truth? It’s kind of freeing. I love seeing Mom, but it was hard to take that much time from work.”

  “Did she like your little friend Jeep?”

  Katie laughed, remembering how her mother had hugged Jeep, then pronounced her too young a catch and told Katie she’d have to throw her back. And she had been right. Jeep had all those rough edges and made love with the excessive passion of a kid. “Mom thought she was cute as a button.” A tumultuous button that rolled every which way and threatened to pull everything it was tied to into some vast chasm of lost buttons. Katie couldn’t afford the distraction and had done what Mom said, thrown her back.

  “Will I meet your mother?”

  She felt a rush of hope that R might be serious enough to want to meet her Mom. She could see herself with R years from now, like Chick and Donny, having little traditions with each other’s families. “If she comes up this way. Unless you want to come to California with me for the holidays. I promised I would always be there for Christmas.”

  “The thought of leaving this sanctuary during the most patriarchal and commercial season isn’t appealing. I would be interested in knowing what she thought of me. Not cute as a button, I suspect.”

  “You called that right. And you’d totally hate hearing us chatter together. There’s always so much to catch up on. Now I get the scoop on Bob’s kids, their mother, and all his relations, while I’m trying to tell Mom the behind-the-scenes details that never get on TV.”

  She stopped while R bent to examine a cluster of mushrooms before slipping them into a small mesh sack. “Wow, R, look at the size of that pine cone! This whole forest is prehistoric. I need to send one of these down to Mom. She’ll never believe me otherwise. I expect to find giant woodpecker eggs next.” Her mother was a little like Jeep, careening dangerously over her edges and onto Katie’s. But Katie could handle her—a shut door, a warning word was all it took to stamp out her hot spots. “I suppose,” she went on, “it’s why I became a newscaster. In my job I can chatter to the world. But I need breaks from it, slow quiet times, women like you. I can do this, R, be in the stories I write.”

  R said nothing, but turned and led the way deeper through the ancient pine, cedar, and hemlock trees. She thinks I’m crazy, thought Katie. Does she have a clue what I’m talking about?

  She tripped on a broken root, its end jutting into the air like a tough, defiant reminder that it had once lived deep under the floor of the forest. She caught herself before she fell, but the loss of balance left her breathing more quickly. As if I could ignore a story like this. It had all the elements: a range of people, cute animals, conflict, politics, moral issues. The strutting family man and his child versus the rebel women and Bambi. She forgot the damp, her chill. R was a disappearing beacon ahead. She’d buy a camera of her own; she still had enough in savings and had had her eye on a Sony mini-DV cam for a while. She’d film this commanding woman, her lover, striding with her staff. She’d interview the men who hunted and who fed their children by stripping the land of trees that were irreplaceable in their lifetimes. She’d show the deer running, the women drumming for life.

  Priority numero uno—she’d find a way to make R listen to her.

  Chapter Eight

  Bulldagger

  Donny left her pickup about three-quarters of a mile from the main road. She strapped on her leather tool belt and folded a pair of work gloves under it, then started walking uphill the rest of the way to Dawn Farm.

  It had rained all week, but today you wouldn’t know it, she was thinking as she took a deep breath of the piney air and passed from cool shadows into pools of light that lifted a thin steamy mist from the muddy road. This felt like the first day of spring, although that had come a couple of weeks back. It was time to start going for walks again with Chick. They loved to walk over the wooden bridge in the park and watch the creek splash along the rocks. This would be a good time to hike to the waterfalls, too, when there was still plenty of runoff from the snows on Blackberry Mountain. The sound of boots jogging heavily toward her cut short her dreaming. Harold and Joe appeared around a bend.

  “Hey, gentlemen,” called Donny, “did I miss all the action? My truck had indigestion. As usual.”

  Big Harold, a massive muscled man in the logging drag of high-water jeans, red suspenders, and dirt-smudged white thermal jersey, leaned over to hold Loopy’s muddy paws away from his jeans. In a nasal whine he said, “I won’t work with those women one more minute!”

  “It’s roof day, Harold. Practically every faggot and dyke in town pitched in on this project at one time or another. You can’t quit now or we’ll take away your queer union card. Loopy, off!”

  Harold put an arm around Joe’s shoulders. Shy, plump, broad-shouldered Joe wore shorts on his bowed legs year round, with a down vest so often repaired it had a patchwork pattern.

  “Donny,” Harold said, with a gay man’s mannered exasperation, “you know we’re into respecting the Mother. We don’t hunt. We don’t cut old growth. We don’t even look at riparian zones. We always replant, and only money-crazed fools clear-cut.” He scratched the stubble of red hair around his bald spot. “What is it with these women? They’re acting like I don’t know what, like we’re Georgia Pacific storm troopers.”

  Donny sighed. They were finishing a chem-free cabin for Kimama. “Is it the Spirit Ridge gals? Is R micromanaging you to death?”

  Big Harold said, “Muriel the Dawn Farmer is a major pain, but we’re used to her. I feel bad for Kimama. She may have chronic fatigue and multiple chemical sensitivity, but I’m sorry, that R has chronic harangue syndrome and she poisons my environment. R’s sidekick Turda or whatever she calls herself—”

  “Why can’t they just have names?” Joe complained in a small voice.

  “Tundra,” supplied Donny, tilting the brim of her hat to keep the sun from her face. Harold in bitch mode was as annoying as Tundra.

  “Frozen Turda,” Harold said. “Not the flavor of the week at my ice cream parlor. She acts like R is a goddess. Talk about encouraging the woman.”

  Joe shyly spoke again. He was no rocket scientist, but had a way of seeing clearly from his heart. “The women have to be nice to R even when she drives them crazy,” he said slowly, as if he were working it out for himself. “They can’t say anything to her—she’s their landlord—lady—whatever. R’s a nudzh, a total nag. The women get upset and take it out on us because we can’t fight back without being attacked for our sex.”

  He’d pulled a roach from a vest pocket and now flicked a match to life with his fingernail, lit the roach, and drew deeply. Donny shook her head no when he offered it, and Big Harold waved it away. “We graded this whole road with them, put a culvert in the washed-out creek bed, and spread rock, but today it’s civil war, baby.”

 
“How,” Big Harold ranted, “can anyone stand to have sex with such a bunch of crabby, stinky, bossy—”

  “Loopy, get off Harold! Now! I mean it!” commanded Donny. “The women aren’t like that alone with each other,” she said, surprised to find herself defending women she usually agreed were crabby, stinky, bossy dykes or worse. Chick was forever pointing out that only one of them was generally stinky, exactly two out of all of them were bossy, and the crabby one spent most of her time by herself in her house up the Elk River. “I don’t know if trying to change the world gets to people, or if you have to be kind of crazy to try and change the world in the first place. What went down?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” Big Harold said. “They insisted that to give Kimama’s cabin pure female energy they had to put the ridge pole in place themselves. Joe and I were asked to take our testosterone elsewhere.” He raised a hand. “I understand. If we didn’t have our own place we’d live at the men’s land. But why not do it before we got there? Or R could have skipped her morning rude pill.”

  Joe had swallowed the last of the roach while they talked, then knelt and took both of Loopy’s ears in his large hands, caressing and scratching behind them. These two men were a walking history of gay Waterfall Falls. Joe’s family had pioneered the little valley shortly after Cat’s had. Harold’s father had found it while wandering after World War II. Joe and Harold fell in love on the wrestling team at the district high school and started an herb farm in the 1960s, employing first the hippies who lived at land collectives and now lesbians from Dawn Farm and Spirit Ridge. The women thought $8 an hour wages from gay employers who let them play in the dirt all day was heaven. Harold and Joe had spent many long winter evenings over the store or out of town at their double-wide manufactured house, playing board games and dissing the community.

  “I’ve wanted to slap R upside the head myself a time or two,” Donny reminded them. “Chick keeps telling me it’s bad karma.”