Treehab

by Bob Smith

  “Did she really say that?”

  “Yes. My grandmother had me laughing all the time. She was a country club lady with a blue-collar mouth. They had an apartment that overlooked Goat Island.”

  Goat Island separates the American Falls from Horseshoe Falls.

  “I spent five days in Niagara Falls and botanized on Goat Island,” said Henry.

  “I never knew until recently that you spent time there. It was like learning Shakespeare went to my high school. Goat Island is a state park that felt like my grandparents’ backyard. When I was ten, I would visit them and walk over there. I loved the rushing rapids and calm rabbits. They nibbled the grass and seemed oblivious to the tourists. I also saw my first trilliums in the woods there.”

  Henry said, “I saw trilliums there, too.”

  “When I read that, it thrilled me, and it also gave me hope: knowing that a wildflower could survive for over a hundred and fifty years in what’s now an urban park.”

  The islands above the falls and the Niagara Gorge are the home of many rare plants, including old-growth red and white cedars. It’s an example of the strange durability of nature in ugly fraternal-twin cities— Niagara Falls, New York, and Niagara Falls, Ontario.

  Henry added, “Goat Island is so close to the falls. It seems to be deciding whether to jump or not.”

  “Actually Henry, I have a comedian friend whose sister killed herself at the falls. When my friend talked about it, every word sounded as if it was written in an excruciating font.”

  I explained to Henry about my sister Carol’s suicide. She shot herself. I was the only family member who lived near her and sat in the hospital waiting room all night while she was kept on life support. Bandaged bullet holes on both sides of her head. Carol had called me three times that day and I tried to get her to come to my house and have dinner with my dear friend Elvira Kurt. She’s a brilliant comedian and I knew she would make Carol laugh. Elvira was staying with me. When the Los Angeles’s sheriff ’s office told me the news, I buckled over as if the Grim Reaper had tripped me with his scythe. Elvira offered to cancel her stand-up job the next day. I wouldn’t let her bag it since getting a good paying stand-up gig is like seeing a bald eagle or a hummingbird. It might happen again, but you can never predict it. After finishing my story, I said, “Even talking about that is hard.”

  Henry patted my shoulder. “That sounds excruciating. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

  “It was worse than my diagnosis of ALS,” I said. “The death of a beloved brother or sister creates a leaky faucet of tears that can never be fixed. It will aggravate and unsettle you for your entire life.”

  “That’s life—being gnawed by a bear while you’re enjoying the birds and the bees.”

  Thoreau’s often wrongly depicted as a stern New England crank or oddball, but one story about him reveals how he loved his friends and family with the same passion that he loved nature. When Henry was twenty-five, his brother John, two years older, cut a finger on his left hand while stropping his razor. John was infected with the tetanus bacterium and eleven days later died of lockjaw in Henry’s arms. Eleven days after his brother’s death, Henry developed the symptoms of lock-jaw, a psychosomatic reaction to the loss of his closest friend. As someone whose beloved sister committed suicide, I loved Thoreau even more after reading that heartrending story.

  He evidently didn’t want to talk about his brother’s death. Henry continued to gaze out at the pond, and in the long-established masculine manner of eluding the enemy—an emotion—changed the subject.

  “Let’s take a walk,” suggested Henry. “We’ll hike around the pond. I love trails that circumscribe ponds. It gives you a sense of accomplishment without wearing you out.”

  “Who doesn’t enjoy a lazy hike?”

  “Just make sure your epitaph isn’t ‘Here lies a lazy hiker.’”

  “Henry, is our life a hike?”

  “I think it is. We pick our companions. We’re bothered by gnats but enjoy flowers. We’re bit by mosquitoes, but love also reminds us our blood is flowing.”

  “You can pick the wrong trail or get lost.”

  “Or you can change directions and pick the right path.”

  “You can scurry like a chipmunk or slink like a snake.”

  Henry gave me a facetious glance. “Or fuck like a bunny.”

  I laughed.

  Henry said, “There are times you’ll feel alone on the trail even when surrounded by friends and family.”

  “Like when you get a grim diagnosis.”

  “But you’re not alone,” said Henry. “We live in a one-room hut called a head. It seems like we live in a wilderness, but we all live at Walden Pond. It seems isolated, but loving companions are just beyond the dark forest of feelings. Once we understand that you have to be hospitable and invite friends and lovers to visit our cabins,” Henry pointed to his noggin, “we feel less alone.”

  “My forest of feelings right now is that I’ll die, and the people I love— Michael, Maddie, and Xander and the rest of my family and friends— will be left without forests, prairies, or tundra. The earth will be a parking lot, filled with gas-guzzling hearses because we were too stupid to understand that climate change will mean we can’t grow enough food to feed ourselves.”

  “Bob, you can be lackadaisical or do something to help Mother Nature. Not stopping stupidity means we’re not an intelligent species. It’s telling that Neanderthals were more ecological than we are. They didn’t kill the last wooly mammoths. We did.”

  “I know. On Wrangel Island in the arctic four thousand years ago.”

  “Imagine if mammoths still walked the earth.”

  “You’re known for your essay on civil disobedience, but you weren’t a pacifist,” I said. “You understood that sometimes you have to fight for justice. You defended John Brown by writing that it was okay to kill evil people.”

  Henry nodded. “I wrote, ‘It was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order to rescue the slave. I agree with him . . . I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable.’”

  “You memorized it,” I said, thinking he must have an ego bigger than God’s.

  “No, I didn’t,” said Henry. “After writers die, every word they published is embedded in their memories. Depending on your writing skills that’s either heaven or hell.”

  “Your other quote that proves you weren’t a pacifist was about the pyramids.”

  “Yes,” he said, “I wasn’t a pacifist. ‘As for the pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to drown in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.’”

  “We have a bunch of ambitious boobies denying climate change; they’re trying to turn the entire earth into a tomb for every species.”

  “Slavery wouldn’t have ended without the deaths of six hundred thousand young Americans.”

  This wasn’t the first time I thought we might have to kill people to save polar bears.

  “We have heads of corporations who behave like plantation owners,” I said. “They think they own their employees.”

  “Taking a man’s life for murdering a species seems like justice to me. History has a few examples where we had to kill. If the ancient Greeks hadn’t fought the Persians, democracy might be a forgotten story. If the British hadn’t fought alone against the Nazis, swastikas might be waving over millions of more corpses. Now we’re fighting to defend our planet.”

  I said, “I want my children to fall asleep to ‘happily ever after,’ not some story about selfish billionaire pigs who inspire every spider on earth to spin webs that say ‘Kill them now!’”

  “E. B. White would love that,” said Henry.

  “A literary allusion
isn’t going to save our planet,” I said. “During the 1930s, the last surviving ivory-billed woodpeckers lived in the Singer tract of old-growth in Louisiana. The logging company was offered two hundred thousand dollars not to cut down the trees. The company president James F. Griswold said, “We are just money-grubbers. We are not concerned, as are you folks, with ethical considerations.” They logged the trees killing the last ivorybills. I’ve seen films of ivorybills and even in black and white their beauty radiates. Who is that selfish?”

  “I hope his eternal afterlife is Promethean. He should be bound to rock and every day an ivorybill pecks out his liver.”

  I burst out laughing and said, “That’s perfect!

  Henry laughed too.

  We both thought about the imminent war to save our planet.

  “What are we going to do?” asked Henry. “Our friend Mother Nature needs our help right now. She’s fighting for her life too.”

  It was a natural comparison. The three of us faced life-threatening conditions. Henry had tuberculosis, I had ALS, and she has to deal with a bunch of greedy people.

  “It’s a Greek tragedy,” said Henry. “We’re murdering our mother.”

  “A comedy might prevent this tragedy. A new Lysistrata where trophy wives stop fucking billionaires until they end global warming.”

  “Inhuman people are afflicted with the curse of Narcissus,” said Henry. “They don’t care about anyone else because they only love themselves. While they’re staring at their reflections in ponds, we should drown the boobies.”

  “How is it that some people lack empathy?” I asked. “I guess we’re lucky. We’re writers with life-threatening illnesses. We can imagine other people’s lives. I don’t want my last words to be “That’s mine!”

  “It is a bedeviling question that still haunts me,” said Henry. “The one lesson my life has taught me is that every heartbeat is a nudge to express love.”

  “These evil climate change deniers believe they have the right to shoot and kill intruders in their mansions.”

  “Well, the earth is our home,” said Henry. “We have a right to defend it.”

  “We need a Birnam Wood of Ents!”

  “Yes, we do!”

  Henry stepped behind a maple tree. I followed—but he was gone. I looked around. A white-breasted nuthatch skittered down the bark of an oak moving like a feathered mouse. The faint scent of pine branch armpits filled the air. The body odor of plants is usually pleasant, which is probably why no rose has ever stopped to sniff a human. The trees were dappled with adorable freckles of light reflected from the water.

  It was a shock to see that Henry had departed, but I didn’t feel abandoned or alone. He had given me reasons to fight for our world. Henry’s not a ghost. His books have made him a true friend to me and the entire planet. As long as children, ducklings, and hotties swim at Walden Pond, Henry lives.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank all of my friends for their advice, patience, and enthusiasm: John Bateman, Fred Blair, Chloe Brushwood-Rose, Maggie Cadman, Michael Carroll, Pierre Cousseillant, Judy Gold, Jackie Haught, Elvira Kurt, Idris Larry, Cori Lee, David McConnell, Keith McDermott, Tim Miller, Kevin Pinzone, Patrick Ryan, Eddie Sarfaty, Chris Shirley, Court Stroud, Don Weise, Kathleen Warnock, and Brad Williams.

  My sincere gratitude goes to my editor, Raphael Kadushin, and to Sheila Leary, Carla Marolt, Sheila McMahon, Adam Mehring, Amber Rose, and the rest of the wonderful staff at the University of Wisconsin Press.

  To my agent and friend, Rob Weisbach, my deepest appreciation for all that he’s done to make this book a reality.

  I’m forever in debt to my fellow writer Chris Bram for being so generous with his time and talent.

  And, I cannot express how important the love, support, and encouragement of my partner, Michael Zam, has been to me throughout this entire project.

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