The other seemed to be looking me over. “Folk music, eh?” He didn’t say anything more. “We’re not really into politics.” The men were headed the opposite direction. I left cordially, having mostly told the truth. Still, I felt like Peter after denying Jesus for the third time. 7' got to know Cathleen at the Broadbent gathering. She, in turn, introduced me to the Coast Redwoods. To pass the entrance sign to Jedediah Smith Redwoods State Park, just south of the Oregon border, is to enter another world, a holy place. Mammoth towers rose from an otherwise normal forest, columns fifteen feet across, so tall I couldn’t see the tops. The car became small, a toy; and we became ants. Celestial rays sifted through the forest canopy. We each hugged a Redwood in awkward homage. Actually my arms were spread eagle, my face buried in a furrow of thick soft bark. Thoughts of the history that came and went since the reign of Charlemagne passed through my mind. I listened to the silence. Two months later someone obligingly asked, “What do you see in a tree?” The words Tree Perspective came from my lips, like they’d always been there. A tree is fundamentally rooted. No joke. It knows its place, and knows it well. It knows time as a continuum. It stands where it stands up to a hundred human lifetimes. The urgent events of today are rarely noticed by the tree. Street crime. El Salvador. Dinnpr tonight. Another romance. Stuff that happens too slow to excite headlines or hormones can mean life or death to the tree. Dutch Elm disease. The Pine beetle. Acid rain. Toxic waste. Tree Perspective? Tree Time? Tree Think? What about Galactic Perspective or Insect Time? Or People Think? Try this: each is part of the other. Trees simply offer insight into the human condition. K , We have our region’s grand, natural, and inspiring old growth on one hand. We have the frontier lifestyle, economic growth and corporate profits on the other. Conflicting values. The balance shifts slowly over time, Tree Time. The spiritual value of each tree grows as fewer and fewer remain. One day we will agree to stop cutting old growth, just as we have done with the Redwoods. Lt earning the name of a tree symbolized a bond formed through intimacy. I studied the shape and density of crowns. I counted and twisted needles. I caressed bark. V T^ruth sayers inspire reverence. Thus my Labor Day 1987 visit to Cathleen’s home in the Siskiyou Mountains was particularly troublesome. This was the time of the BIG forest fires. The Canyon Creek fire burned along I-5 as my boy and I drove south. It was a surface fire for the moment. Plodding. A single truck guarded the freeway firebreak. Flames across two wide draws methodically licked life from the forest. I wanted to stop, but I felt like a voyeur, witnessing something very grotesque. Saigon in 1972 must have felt like Cave Junction. The sun never rose. The sky just glowed, an orange mask on the face of God. The smell of death hung in the air. Scuttlebutt said the Forest Service didn’t let volunteers fight the local fire. Cathleen told me their smoke jumpers were pulled out a few years ago to save money. Mark, my forest mentor years before, ambivalent about saving old growth told me, “In a climax forest, the trees are waiting to burn.” That very weekend Cave Junction held their annual Labor Day celebration, complete with logger contest and parade. Everyone gathered around Pioneer Park as loggers competed in the single buck (one-man tree saw), the double buck, the hot saw (a Maserati of a chain saw), tree climbing and the axe throw. Muscle-clad young men vied with gray-whiskered elders to split the “silver bullet,” a can of Coors beer imbedded in the bulls eye. My first Sugar Pine was cut into three giant logs stretching between wheels of a logger trailer. It was pulled by a freshly waxed Peterbilt in the parade. The biggest of all Pines, which drops the biggest of all cones, makes good cabinets in Wisconsin. Cave Junction is one of those places where loggers and latter-day hippies coCathleen is a Willow in winter, flexible in the extreme but dormant, recovering from that last relationship. My mother is a Palo Verde, the gentle shade tree of the Arizona desert. MUSIC MILLENNIUM EAST PORTLAND NW PORTLAND 32nd & E. Burnside 231-8926 NW 23rd & Johnson 248-0163 PHARMACY FOUNTAIN 2334 W BURNSIDE 32 Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988
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