by Ann Eriksson
We continued on until we reached a Sitka spruce we had measured at sixty-seven metres in height. Paul estimated it to be five hundred years old or more, older than the printing press, older than the Renaissance, a seedling when Christopher Columbus made his voyage to the New World. The tree was already rigged and we hunted around in the undergrowth for the parachute cord.
“What’s that?” Rainbow asked.
“Didn’t I say no questions?” At her wounded expression I explained. “It’s cord for pulling up our ropes. We never leave our expensive climbing ropes in the trees.”
“Would the squirrels eat them?”
I shushed her and sent her over to her mother, who had settled onto a log where she was already nursing Cedar, white breast showing at a gap at the edge of her sweater.
“Listen.” Rainbow jumped up and down, pack thwacking on her back.
“I don’t hear anything but you, Peanut,” Mary answered dreamily.
“Why is the ground bouncy?” The girl sank to her knees and dug her fingers into the spongy layer of moss.
Paul scanned the path of the cord up into the canopy. “Because”—he tugged on the lightweight black line—“this forest is thousands of years old and under us are layers of rotted dead trees, roots, and needles grown over with moss and lichens and ferns and other plants and baby trees and nosy children.” He gave a sharp yank and the cord ran free.
“Centuries?” Rainbow sat back on her heels. “Older than my grandpa? What’s a lichen? What’s that thing?” She pointed at a marker embedded in the base of the tree.
“SS-1-3.” Paul opened the top of the pack and pulled out the end of the climbing rope. “It’s the name of this tree. Sitka spruce, Site 1, Tree 3. See . . . markers all the way up.”
“SS-1-3?” She craned her head back to view the row of aluminum discs the size of dollar coins nailed into the thick bark at regular intervals up the trunk. “What a funny name. I like Bruce the Spruce better.”
“No talking,” I scolded. “Hand me that pack and sit.” To my surprise, Rainbow sat, laced her hands over the folds of her skirt, and watched Paul knot the ends of the parachute cord and the climbing rope together with a half-dozen clove hitches. Together Paul and I hauled the rope up through the pulley at the top of the tree and down the other side; the rope coiled out of the top of the pack like a charmed snake. While Paul anchored the leading end of the rope around another tree with a bowline, I donned my climbing gear.
“Ready.” I clipped the ascender to the rope. “Stay back from the bottom of the tree,” I warned Rainbow and Mary. “Watch for falling branches.”
“If you hear us yell ‘headache,’” Paul added. “Dive for the bushes.”
He double-checked my harness and I started up. Paul continued along the trail to the next rigged tree, the goal for the afternoon to check a dozen suspended Malaise traps for captured arthropods I would identify in the lab back at the university during the winter.
I climbed steadily, pausing once to catch my breath. I reached branches at twenty-five metres and hooked my leg over a limb. Below, Mary and Rainbow, faces upturned, appeared as diminutive as Rainbow’s two dolls. From the top of the tree they’d shrink to specks of colour through the foliage below, if visible at all. Rainbow stood and waved.
I reeled in the aerial flight-interception trap suspended on a pulley midway between two trees. The fine gossamer net— designed to intercept flying beetles and ants—was empty. The second trap five metres higher the same. The third trap yielded a handful of rove beetles and three types of spiders; one I suspected was a new species of dwarf weaver, awash and dead in the pool of alcohol. I was surprised to find a live green darner dragonfly clinging to the mesh high up in the trap. “What are you doing here?” I said. “You belong below near water.” I reached in and pressed its silvery iridescent wings together with care, struck by the solid texture of the lacy fabric, and drew it out of the trap. Its emerald green thorax shimmered in the sunlight and I turned it over to examine the garnet stripe running along the turquoise abdomen. I wondered how I appeared to the darner through its bulbous compound eyes. A grainy pattern of light and dark dots? As fascinating to the darner as the darner to me? A giant? I should have collected it, returned it to the lab, and mounted it on a board with a pin for future reference. I didn’t have the heart. I opened my fingers and the darner zipped out of my hand and headed off, darting back and forth, in the erratic way dragonflies do. I fished my field journal out of my pocket and made an entry. Unusual occurrence of Anax junius at thirty-five metres, Site 1, Tree 3, Malaise trap #3. Specimen released.
My radio crackled and Paul’s voice cut in and out.
I stopped climbing, retrieved the hand-held from my pocket, and depressed the transmitter button. “What?”
“I think you better come down.”
“I’ve hardly started.”
“Come down,” he answered and the radio cut out.
I looped a bite of rope through my descending equipment—a loop of metal called a whale’s tail—tested my weight on the line, then unclipped the ascenders so I hung freely from the descender. The procedure took concentration and care, the transfer from ascenders to descender a vulnerable time for a climber, the danger of tying in to the wrong side of the rope an easy but potentially fatal mistake. I let the rope run slowly through my gloved fingers and the whale’s tail, and dropped from my perch, the sensation the closest to what I imagined flying might be like, except I was on my way down to earth rather than up to sky. I had the ability to stop myself at will with a simple twist of the rope against the descender, but I loved the freedom of the long, smooth glide and rappelled to the base of the tree in one continuous slide. Mary and Cedar were asleep on Mary’s sweater. Rainbow stood next to Paul, our spare climbing harness dangling from her slender hips.
“Can I try?” she asked the moment my feet touched the ground.
“No way.” I unbuckled my own harness. “Too dangerous. And you should have a helmet on.”
“I like climbing trees. Kids like climbing trees. You do.”
“This is not the same. This is work, not playing, and it’s climbing a rope. Not for kids.”
“But you’re a—”
“No, I’m not.” I unclipped from the rope and shrugged my gear off in a heap. “What’s up?” I said to Paul, who was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read, hands slack at his sides as if he didn’t know what to do with them. “Paul?”
He tilted his head in the direction of the trail and said, “Rainbow, stay with your mom.”
I followed behind, alarmed at his uncharacteristic gravity. A dead body? One of our trees fallen in a storm? He led me upslope past four of our study trees and stopped at the base of Tree 7, our oldest, a redcedar, five metres in diameter, the crown split into three leaders that reached for the sky like a candelabra.
I sucked in my breath. “What the hell,” I said, astonished to see a violent blue cross of spray paint marking the trunk. A blue timber tag on a tree meant cut me down . . . and soon. “We’re still within park boundaries, aren’t we?”
Paul spread his hand over the centre of the mark; the tails of the X extended beyond his fingers like arrows of blue light. “Yes. And besides, there’s the buffer. They shouldn’t be logging anywhere near here.”
I sat on a nearby log. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from Paul’s hand and the threatening slash of paint beneath.
5
I steered my car along the rough gravel road in a light drizzle, avoiding potholes and on the watch for deer. On either side of the road, tall trees towered overhead.
A loaded logging truck careened out of a side road and I slammed on the brakes. The truck roared on ahead, mud and rock chips from the sodden roadbed spitting up behind its wheels onto the windshield, adding another pockmark to my already pitted view of the world. My anxiety rose again at the size of the giants piled on the truck bed—three enormous logs filled the truck to capacity—as they hurtled down the road
from the upper valley, an area not slated for logging for years, an area planned for possible expansion of the park. An area where the sound of chain saws should be as rare as a marbled murrelet on the ground.
The car left old forest and entered clear-cut. I winced at the flat glare of light under overcast skies and the kilometres of stumps and splintered wood, streambeds clogged with debris, the ground ripped and heaved from the weight and churn of heavy machinery and the impact of hundred-tonne giants crashing to the ground. They couldn’t do this to Otter Creek. Parks were sacrosanct. Moonscape, bomb site, ground zero, every cliché of devastation travelled through my mind. I understood the need for logging on the island; after all, as an academic I used more than my share of paper. I knew the industry supplied jobs for small rural communities. I accepted the concept of sharing the forest land among loggers, scientists, and hikers. But leave the big trees alone. Especially my big trees.
Ironically, PCF’s regional field office had been built in the heart of a mature forest. The yard, an expanse of cracked pavement, was empty, loggers no longer housed in the drab green and white trailers that lined the edge of the clearing, but driven into the cut blocks each day from town in a company crummy. A pick-up sat outside the management office.
“Faye.” Roger Payne rattled down the wooden steps, a wide smile on his boyish ruddy face, hand extended. “Chasing bugs again?” Roger, a transplanted New Zealander, lived in Duncan, the closest town, his wife pregnant, their third baby due in November. The day we met, he, like most people, appeared embarrassed and uncomfortable beneath a polite veneer, but over the time spent mapping out our buffer site together we’d become friendly. “What brings you all the way out here?”
“Did you get my email?”
“Haven’t checked yet today.”
“We found timber marks on one of our study trees inside the park boundary. Any idea why?”
“In the park?” His surprise seemed genuine.
“Yes. Our oldest tree. A seventy-metre cedar.”
He took off his cap and scratched the top of his head.
“There’s a woman at our camp who says she’s here for a protest.” I watched him for a failure to meet my eyes, the clearing of his throat. “And one of your trucks just about ran me off the road on my way out here, loaded, coming out of the upper valley. You weren’t going to log in there until the park issue was resolved.”
“Oh that.” He laughed and I heard it—the catch—the microscopic hesitation in his response. He folded his cap in half and flapped it in and out of his palm. “We’re taking a few loads out above the canyon. Keeping the guys working. We have a permit. Nothing to worry about.”
“I respect your right to log, but my study relies on intact stands of old-growth at least five hundred metres from disturbance. We agreed on my long-term plots and the buffer. I can’t lose those trees. Will you find out about the tag and let me know what’s going on?”
“You bet.” He shoved the offending hat into the back pocket of his jeans.
“I’d appreciate that,” I answered, but his words didn’t ease the knot that had formed in my stomach at the sight of the timber marking. “Soon.”
“Sure, but don’t worry your head over it. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
I wanted to believe him, he’d always been one of the nice guys in the company. I turned to go, then caught myself. I’d forgotten my manners. “How’s your family?”
“You should see Pam,” he said with a broad grin. “She’s a house. I think it must be triplets.”
On my way back to camp and halfway through the clear-cut, I pulled over to allow another oncoming logging truck loaded with old-growth cedar logs to pass. I brooded over Roger’s twitchy reaction to my questions. A few loads? Were they taking them all out in a day? High grading the best and the biggest trees? I stepped on the gas and steered the car through a puddle. Mud and water sprayed up from the wheels onto the rear window, obscuring the view of the clear-cut behind.
• • •
Over dinner—chicken and vegetable stew minus the chicken—we learned a few facts about Mary. She was on her own, for one.
“No, I don’t have a husband. Or a boyfriend,” she explained with temerity and no apparent discomfort about the lack of a father for her children. “A woman has all a child needs.”
“What do you do for money?” I asked, skeptical about her sincerity.
“I don’t believe in money,” she said, polishing off a second plate of our stew. “We go to the food bank and live in a room in a group house for a work trade. Rainbow and I clean the house once a week and keep the veggie garden, don’t we, honey?”
“I’m home-schooled,” Rainbow crowed, hopping on one foot on a stump. “Want to hear me count to a hundred? One two skip a few ninety-nine a hundred,” she chanted in time with each hop.
Mary’s idealism reminded me of my mother, forever a cause on the go. Grace had dragged my brothers and me around from protest to protest for most of my childhood: the annual peace march, the anti-nukes campaign—save the seals, save the oceans, save everything. When Grace campaigned to send money for starving children in Africa, we had eaten porridge three meals a day for a week. “It’s more than they have, and without a nice home. No complaining.” She’d cajole me and my brothers into donating our allowance to charity: Vietnamese boat people, rebels in Guatemala, flood victims in Bangladesh, and when word of an impending energy crisis reached her ears, she turned off the heat and, while we sat around the living room in our winter coats, explained how contributing to the oil-hungry western war machine was a sin. My father, Mel, disappeared during these times, taking refuge in his office at the community college where he taught math, working late in warm comfort with the cafeteria down the hall and a coffee machine outside his office door. I don’t recall Mel ever standing up to my mother. I don’t recall him ever standing up to or for anything. Including his daughter. When I would run home in tears from school, distraught at the teasing, he’d turn away, his reaction hidden behind thick glasses, and I would dry my face and pat him on the knee. “Don’t worry, Dad, I’ll figure it out.”
Paul disappeared to the dug latrine behind an upturned root wad. Mary floated off to bed with Cedar asleep in her arms and Rainbow slid across the log to sit beside me. I nursed a cup of tea and tried to ignore her.
“Would you fix Tracey?” she asked, her dirt-smudged face tilted up with anticipation.
“Who’s Tracey?”
“She.” Rainbow held up the black plastic doll.
“What’s wrong with her?”
“A bear bit her on the foot.”
I took the tiny figure in my hand. “Why do you think I can fix her?”
“You’re a doctor.”
“Not a medical doctor.”
She took the doll back. “What kind of doctor?”
“Doctor of philosophy in forest ecology. I went to school for a long time.”
“Are you a tree doctor? Can you fix trees?”
“No, I don’t fix trees, I study them.”
“You are like me.”
“I’m not a kid,” I replied.
“I know.” She slid her hand onto my knee. “But we both love trees.”
• • •
The next day Paul found two more timber markings on trees in our buffer zone. After eight hours in the canopy, we returned to camp, dirty and tired.
“Roger insisted it was a mistake?” Paul stacked samples into a waterproof bin.
“That’s what he said.” I pulled off my muddy boot and moaned with pleasure at the release.
“He’s a company man.” Paul snorted. “A peon.”
“I’ll have to drive over to talk to him again.” I sighed, another morning of sampling lost.
Paul put a pot of water on the stove for pasta. I set up my laptop—the battery freshly charged on the drive to the PCF camp—to transcribe entries from my field notebook into a database, our study too far along to risk losing data. Why would the company g
o after our study trees? It couldn’t be a mistake. They had maps. I stopped typing and pondered the growth rings on the stump. The buffer kept our study site pure, dark and quiet, light subdued, the earth muffled in deep layers of litter and decomposed organic matter. Let in more light and species would be displaced by others that preferred sunnier, drier conditions. I watched the passage of a spider across its web strung between a branch of salal and the bark of one of the large hemlocks next to me. The delicate strands shone silver-gold, illuminated by a shaft of evening sun. Would the spider survive a disruption to its simple existence, at risk from a few extra rays of sun each day, a few millimetres less rain in a year? I turned my attention back to the computer screen and typed a quote from a colleague in Washington State. Unlike people, trees give back so much and require little in return.
6
A second trip to PCF’s yard the next morning proved futile, the trailer empty, Roger’s pick-up nowhere in sight, a hand-scrawled note taped to the door. Baby on the way. Back in a few days. Rain pelted onto the windshield on the return drive to camp. The wipers slapped back and forth on high speed, the defroster on full to keep the window clear. I stopped in clear-cuts along the way three times to try calling the company regional office on my cell phone but couldn’t get a decent signal.
The rain had lifted by the time I reached the bridge. Five mud-spattered vehicles were parked at the trailhead and I squeezed my car into a narrow spot ahead of them. The number of vehicles surprised me and I hoped they belonged to hikers travelling through, the idea of more strangers depressing. I walked the trail to the edge of camp and stopped in mid-step, stunned by the transformation. Eight tents, two tarps, and a second outdoor kitchen had sprouted up in my absence, the ground littered with stacks of boxes and equipment, people everywhere.
Rainbow tripped over a log in her hurry to reach me. She scrambled to her feet, cheeks flushed, hair in her eyes. “Dr. Faye. They came, the tree-saver people came.”
I went in search of Paul. Rainbow straggled behind, chattering non-stop. We found him with Mary and Cedar, staking down the fly on a large purple and white tent.