oracle circle is...

Prologue

Life game, waterslides, wormhole

 

 

I’m on the topside of the slide at the threshold of revelation. Making an inventory of everything I see. Mineral deposits in the sink, loud graffiti on the walls, a urinal cake air-freshener gives off the chemical scent of flowers. Halogen track lights throw a harsh glare off white tiles and vanity mirror. There’s one fogged-up window opposite the door, a small toilet stall tucked in the corner and three tubes where urinals should be.

There’s a game we play in there its name incommunicable on the other side. It keeps us coming back to find it, clay figurines hidden in that other equivalent state. swimming up from that to bright beta waves, the currents are warmer and the conscious mind basks in the light of the sun coming through the blinds, eyelids.

I come and go as I please, but never stay in either place for long. Thinking… the pill or the fluid? The pill and the fluid, the pill and the fluid together drop down my throat like a waterslide into unknown depths of unconsciousness.

Waterslides in a high school washroom, a janitor rushes in. Tries to stop me. He wants me to pay a toll, but I have no way of even conceiving of money in this place, much less carrying it. Everything I’ve tried to carry has disappeared or been transformed into something else. I put my hand in my pocket. Feel the small, hard shapes of coins shrink, fizzle into non-existence like seltzer tablets. The janitor’s blue dickies metamorphose into form fitting policeman’s blues. He reaches out to grab me. I give him the slip—slide through one of the tubes. Darkness, running water, I flow with the sound surface green, yellow blurred on the surface breeching into the forest canopy, the ground slipping by. I’m running with the creek down the mountain. I’m not sure if I’m along side or in it. It isn’t very deep or wide so I can’t be more than a few inches tall. We flow through a culvert and into a network of caves walled up behind concrete at the back of the house I grew up in. the creek flows on towards the lake leaving me here a heap of clothes covering cold clammy skin a container for organ, meat and bone. The dry earth of the basement and it’s converted caves carries the signature of the water that carved them. Walls stained through with mineral deposits. The tunnels are accessible from the basement where the slope of the mountain rises under the back portion of the house. with no foundation, just floor boards laid over the naked earth. The bathtub has been pulled out into the middle of the floor on the cold concrete floor black plastic ABS pipes filled with webs, eggs, desiccated bodies of insects.

(lake and the mountain dam enclosed by fence, dam stream that goes into reservoir, pool and into lake)

 

The house has been stripped in anticipation of reconditioning by the new owners, but work has been prematurely halted. The walls and attic are framed in a view of the entire structure from anywhere on the second floor. The attic has been converted into a loft.

 

Wake up. Wake up. Wake to the world. And the tragedy that befalls me is my folly. I want to wake up in a different locus of time, as a youth glowing with potential. Fifteen years old, but I’d settle for seven. Aligned with some emotionally significant place in time that would be suitable as a departure point. (Light blue book Jan. ’09 near back) This is the knot. What keeps the legacy alive. Everything connects here. The stream, a thin vein flows towards the heart—center of the mandala—what the valley looks like from the air flying over land from the east. One feels disconnected without this experience of elevation, of going to other places, where things come from, where they go, how their made, the beginning, middle and end, etymologies, the object of a game. A thing cannot be completed without this in mind and in so many cases we proceed without it, but in terms of our lives, the object is not clear. Instead we might be lucky enough to feel purpose as well as doubt. A reminder that within every moment there is a totality consisting of a beginning, middle and end. A series of recombinating now’s, intercellular memories that precipitate consciousness into a bodily sensation.

The roof sags beneath clods of moss made heavier by the breasts of low-lying clouds. Insulation tumbles out in soggy wet clumps.

Branches from an adjacent maple reach through window maws, poised to lift the house up into the boughs. In a futile effort to take up residence someone has moved in furniture. Designer lamps, a chesterfield and wooden tables are visible through second story windows.

The foundation is cracked by the roots of two huge trees on either side of the structure and the stream whose network of waterways have caved in large portions of the yard. The house teeters at the edge of non-existence as if the ground might open up and swallow it. piles of concrete and wood at the edge of a hole. No picture or written word remains, but the memory and the story told by those who have been there. A vacant house is a bad omen. The legacy it the only trace of our existence. The deteriorating house, the yard plotted with sink holes  the curse designates it off limits deep trenches around the perimeter tresspassers not permitted. The deed is now in someone else’s name, its spirit is non negotiable the psychosis cannot be . but the house in uninhabitable and work has been held up by beaurocratic red tape and zoning bylaws. The foundation is the only thing up to code and wasn’t inspected while we did the work; new work always has to be inspected.

We had designed the place to respond only to us. Our work would not benefit any other. The place it is now cannot be reinhabited until it is demolished and rebuilt again. no one can capture to the level of intensity and psychosis that characterized that house. There are no contemporaries and no one is willing to go to such lengths the occupants would leave as if spooked by ghosts and forfeit all investments in the place.

 

Awake, a wave.

The static buzz of clock radio alarm rouses me from sleep. I scan the room for the source and remember there is no stereo or radio of any sort. I am picking up the signal through the fillings in my teeth. I pace through the house searching for a place without reception. The signal goes in and out, patching into different frequencies, but its hard to find a place with absolutely no signal at all. I keep thinking I don’t want to be here I want to be in my rented basement suite in Victoria, in the quiet secluded cul de sac on Bisley Place at the base of Mt. Doug.

I lie here a lump beneath the sheets weighted by the millions still asleep under peak theta waves. My body seems so heavy after such an active dream waking to a prone body, healthy, but tired resolved to another day pacing within the narrow confines of self, within the perfectly equalized chemical constitution of my body so it feels as if I don’t have one at all unless I am tired, sick, drunk, stoned or in pain then I wish I was myself again comfortable in my body. I’ve got to go to work soon, but I have to get all this down first, while its still fresh and seems meaningful. A dream might seem like a lot of unsubstantiated symbols, the incomprehensible movements of a cat or woman, unnerving at times. Instilling a sickening guilt as if I’m too dull to understand. The feeling lingers for the better part of the day disappearing only after a cup of tea, but returns after the effects of the caffeine have worn off approaching evening with no prospects except the task that lays ahead unfinished and mounting. Keeping track of progress, the slow voyage. Catching sleep between the swells and every day keeping a vigil for land while the continents move farther apart.

Usually the mariner can be reassured that he is the only one moving, closer and closer to land, but for me; an island of a man I cannot be so sure. The land moves, but not as swift as I. It takes a long time for me to reach my destination, but when I do I’ll never leave again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I watch old family movies on super 8 in the destroyed room

camera shifting, moving about the rubble

solastalgia in condemned homes so we cannot move out away on

confined ghosts

 

you’ve lost things, you lost your way, it connects here (dance, dance dance, pt 12 6:35)

 

 

            “parting with friends is sadness, a place is only a place,” Frank Herbert, DUNE

 

“In dreams come responsibility, our responsibility comes with the power to imagine. Where there’s no power to imagine no responsibility can arise.” --William Butler Yeats

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part 1

 

One of the first things I remember my mother telling me is never eat anything if you don’t know what it is, which in addition to the mysterious plants in the hedgerows also included many of the foods within the inner aisles of the grocery store. For generations all females in my family have been gatherers or otherwise experts in the preparation and employment of plants; some to heal, some to eat and some attract power from a spiritual source. As soon as my sisters and I were old enough to walk and talk we were instructed with particular respect to the plants that should be avoided; the ‘Janus’ plants, solanaceae, mandrake, henbane, foxglove, hemlock, valerian, and wormwood; anthropomorphic beings with two faces that point to health in one direction and to death in the other. But the subject of poisons was yet too specialized for children so after the obligatory tutorial on poisonous plants she showed us the ones we could eat and encouraged us to do so. Their taste inspired names on our tongues leaving a trail of identifiable species like breadcrumbs so if we ever got lost we could munch our way back.

 

CHAPTER 1

 

We drive west of town along the graded gravel road behind the mill. The wind fairly blows across the lake raising white peaks. the sheer side of the mountain rises dramatically out of eroded banks made treacherous by clearcut logging. Rivers spring up over night cleaving trenches with no roots to absorb the water. The rumble of logging trucks sometimes brings a volley of dirt down over the road forcing traffic around the opposite side of the lake. I lean into my sister’s shoulder as if to brace myself against falling debris. I am always relieved when we pass this part of the road so I can resume staring out over the water.

The road follows the contours of the lake at its head. A wooden sign in the shape of a hand reads ‘Heather’ campsite. We pass it and merge onto a narrower, less traveled road that takes us farther west to Kissinger Lake. More of a pond than a lake, linked to the much larger Cowichan by a languid stream that only runs only in the winter. The surrounding land is flat and accessible. Cupped in the lacustrine valley.

Mother lets out an alarmed gasp and stops the car. A wide trough is dug out of the road. She gripes, “What the… This wasn’t here before.”

We get out and walk to the edge of the trough. It has just recently been dug out with backhoe and must be six or seven feet deep and the same across.

“This is crown land,” she exclaims. “They have no right to sell it off and not let the residents in.” She lets out a sigh, “Oh well, we’ll just have to walk around.”

We retrieve our daypacks from the car and walk a ways into the forest retaking the road on the other side of the trench. The townsite emerges at the end of the lane boxed in by evergreens and opening into grasslands. A peculiar patchwork of stunted, desiccated-looking plants grow on either side of the road. Mother steps into one of the patches and kicks out a clod of dirt with her boot heel exposing pitted concrete below.

“The roots don’t go down far enough. That’s why the plants won’t grow. It would take eighty years for this much soil to accumulate.” Mother points to a plant along the perimeter of the rectangular plot. “Wild turnip. You see how it’s taller than the other ones. That’s the edge of the building. the gardens went wild After they abandoned the town.” She walks over and gently dislodges the plant from the ground placing the rootball in her knapsack.

We follow her farther into the field. She stops and points to a tall plant with an expansive cluster of white flowers arranged in an umbrella formation, “Giant hogweed. That’s bad. It’s invasive so it has no natural enemies. It just grows and grows and grows crowding out all the other plants.”

She pulls on a pair of leather gloves, tugs her straw hat down over her eyes and leans in under the foliage.

She’s careful not to let any part of it touch her as she tears it out of the ground by the thick stalk. “Stand back,” she yells as she tosses it aside. “That one doesn’t deserve a funeral. We’re the stewards of nature and this is one of her enemies. They aren’t good to eat and the sap is poisonous. It gives you an awful rash that blisters in the sun. It looks like cow parsnip, but you can tell the difference because the cow parsnip is smaller with narrower leaves. A lot of these plants have twins, one good and one bad,” she pauses in deliberation, spotting another of the hogweed a few feet away and then another, multiplying as if ten pop up for every one that is destroyed.

A sudden updraft throws a drift of seeds into the air propelled by the tao of their feathery down. The wind catches the loose strands of Rose’s hair and throws them in front of the sun. In the summer her hair goes a shade lighter to match the straw-strawberry blonde of our mothers making the two appear as time-lapsed versions of each other.

B resembles our father with thick dark hair and brows. She has a sharp pointy nose that keeps her sunglasses from sliding down the bridge. I bear a closer resemblance to our mother than to our father making us a family of three blondes and two brunettes.

Our clothes are soon covered with burrs and seeds of plants whose ingenious hooks are designed to hitch a ride on the fur or body coverings of passing animals. Ensuring the progeny will journey far enough to establish themselves elsewhere. The worst are the ones that end up in our shoes and socks. We pause several times to pick them out.

Mother disregards the noisome seeds and continues moving swiftly through the field. She pauses before an unremarkable plant, 2 feet high with large, arrow-shaped leaves and tiny green-orange seeds growing at the end of a long leafless stalk.

“Good King Henry,” she blurts out the name and after a brief pause gives us a summary of its background and usefulness. This one got its name from a weed known as Bad King Henry. Both plants had like a million names, but the Good King Henry was the most confusing. With names like Lincolnshire spinach, English mercury, goosefoot, allgood and so on. The names, she said came from the different countries in Europe. Each country had its own name for the plant and a separate history. Some claiming it was the embodiment of a spirit that hung around the house doing chores in exchange for milk. She gives us each a leaf to try. It’s bitter like spinach, but not bad.

“Enough for now,” she says. “Let’s find some yummy berries.”

We each carry a four-liter pail for collecting berries. Three quarters of our yield is blackberries all readily available within arms reach of the gravel road like a fruit stand. Some are the little red translucent Huckleberries that adorn short scrub bushes. It can take hours to get enough of them for just one pie. Others, bramble and salmon berry are only found in small quantities and are usually eaten on the spot.

Rose lags behind. She’s the youngest and gets distracted when tired. Mother carries her a ways and puts her down to show us the next set of plants, licorice and mallow from which black licorice and Marshmallows used to be made. Mallow has small pink flowers and a soft, gooey root.  She had forbid us from eating candy citing sugar as a poison. If we wanted candy we had to sneak it behind her back. Of course as soon as she tells us about the marshmallows we plead with her to make us some.

“Mallow is just a thickener, it doesn’t taste like anything. Licorice on the other hand is very sweet, fifty times sweeter than sugar.” She pulls the plant free of the ground. Cuts off the root and scrapes the dirt away revealing a dull yellow interior. It’s intensely sweet at first with a strong licorice flavour, but once the flavours gone all that’s left are tough fibers. She says it takes pounds of root to make an ounce of licorice. It has to be boiled down and strained several times until it becomes a thick tarry substance. Then once it’s cool it can be cut and shaped. The best part she says is its medicinal properties. Unlike other sweets it alleviates thirst instead of making you thirsty. It boosts endurance and vitality. It can be used for constipation, digestion, coughs and chest pains and it’s especially good for girls because it contains a hormone like estrogen.

“What’s that?” says B.

“Estrogen is a hormone that makes women feel like women, plants have them too.”

This was before ‘sex talk’ so my sisters were curious, “Is it a girl plant?” says B.

“Its spirit is female and therefore it assists the female who uses it.”

“Does it have a spirit like ours?”

“No one knows, but we treat them like they might, just in case. We don’t want to upset the spirits and give ourselves bad karma. That’s why we thank them whenever we pick them and always use a sharp knife. They like it. It makes them grow faster. It isn’t good to pull the plant out of the ground unless it’s a weed or we use the roots for something.”

“Do plants feel pain?”

“They are responsive to sound, touch and emotional vibrations so in a way, I think they can.”

She goes on calling out the names of plants like people on the street. I look around to see if it might be someone we know… Melissa, Angellica, Hellebore, Marjoram, Rosemary, Nettle. But I’ve never heard of anybody named Hellebore or Nettle.

“The names are just names,” she says. “The easiest way to tell them apart is by the floral patterns, the flowers that reveal their character,” or in other words their usefulness to humans. There seems to be a whole ‘nother language when it comes to plants and just when we think we have it all figured out she starts using their Latin names.

“I like them better the other way,” I say.

To which she replies, “its the only logical way to keep track. Plants have been on earth a lot longer than animals and there are a lot more of them. Every species belongs to a genus and every genus to a family and every family to an order and so on and they all have names.”

“Blah, it’s all gibberish to me.”

“You’re going on nine years old. It’s time you learned some new and useful things.”

So instead of daisy it’s Bellis perennis and what used to be a plain old dandelion is now Taraxacum officinale and they both belong to the Asteraceae family. It’s confusing and doesn’t make me feel older. Instead it makes me feel younger and small like looking in the dictionary at all the thousands of words I don’t know the meaning of. I wonder aloud how the natives were able to tell them apart.

“They knew more about plants a thousand years ago than we do now. It is only through their trial and error that we know now which food is good to eat and which isn’t.”

We’d been walking for hours. Rose’s mouth is smeared with rings of red, green, and purple from the days foraging. Mother assessed our berry yield, “Ok. That’s enough,” she says, “let’s go.”

The drive home is always palpably longer. We sate our appetites with the berries and leaves of dandelions, good king henry and chickweed. I sit in the window seat facing the lake. White caps peak on the water like merangue.

There’s still plenty of light after dinner so we hike up into the mountain to play our game. The three of us pretend that we are explorers wandering through a foreign land that when we first moved to town was quite the truth, although now we do it for fun. When we started we would stumble across some novelty, a peculiar rock, tree, creek or landmark and claim it as our own. B kept a record of them all and drew them in on a map. Our infatuation with a spot would last anywhere from an hour to a month. After which we’d abandon it in favour of another. I’d always carry my compass and a knife and we’d each have a bell tied around our necks to ward off dangerous animals. We never got lost, but the prospect kept us primed for adventure. We’d usually set out in the morning or early afternoon. Our journey always began at mother’s house where we packed our water and food insisting that we pay for the provisions with coloured paper, monopoly money or old cards we used like credit cards. Mother had to go along as part of the game accepting the money and playing the role of shopkeeper. We usually hiked up the mountain ascending by the dam road that branched off a residential street behind the school. We could hear the dam long before it came into view; the source of municipal water fed by a mountain spring. The runoff from the dam gathered in a pool. The pool trickled into a creek and the creek ran through a culvert in the road and down the mountain. On the other side the road forked like a shoelace untied one end looping up behind the dam, the other terminating at the treeline where it became a trail. The trail led to Christopher Rock at the summit where it was stamped out amoungst the various landings and crags. We built a shack in a thicket nailing boards between four trees that served as posts. The roof was slanted to one side covered with tarpaper and shingles. I had always wanted to stay the night, but the girls didn’t like the idea of being in the mountain after the sun went down and I didn’t have the courage to do it on my own. The idea first came in the form of a recurrent dream in which a wizard, living somewhere on the mountain would appear at the edge of the school field. I could always sense his presence before I saw him lingering in the dark maw of the forest along the old road lined with boulders like the bottom row of teeth. I never actually saw him I just had an image of an old man with white beard, pointy hat and navy robe. He was always accompanied by a pack of wild animals part cat, part human that would come down in the evening to drink. As soon as I got the picture of him in my head he would disappear leaving me with an overwhelming compulsion to follow with no pretext to my safety or when I would be coming back. I knew that if I went I’d turn into one of those animals, that the animals were people that had been transformed under the wizard’s spell. I didn’t want it to happen to me so I just watched from the edge of the field, unable to move until I felt the mouth of darkness close and the safety of night enfold me under the stars and lights of the school and surrounding houses. Sometimes in the dream I would sleep on the field and wake up all covered in dew.

We make it as far as the dam before the sun dips below the tops of the trees. Only the branches hanging farthest from the forest still hold the light. The myriad shades of green blur into one. Then become dark as if the shiny knives of daylight had been removed, leaving gaping holes spouting cold air.

The pump hums in its shack. Water falls steadily, trickling through the culvert and over stones. We sit on the bank listening to the creek whisper in its own rhythm and syntax.

The shrill of our mother’s voice breaks the trance. She’d hiked up after us when it started to get dark. I call back, but my voice isn’t loud or urgent enough to reach her. She continues to call. We jog toward the sound and meet her part way up the road.

She nods in silence as she takes Rose by the hand, “The days are getting shorter now. It can be deceiving. You think you have more light than you do.”

We stay up watching a late movie until Rose goes to bed. Then I ride home to our father’s house, roughly a kilometer down the road. He and I finish watching the movie in stereo on our much larger TV.

 

When Rose was still a baby we lived in Victoria and came up to the lake on weekends. Then our parents got divorced. Mother moved to Youbou with Rose and B and bought a small cabin on the mountainside just behind the elementary school. The yard was quickly transformed into a verdant grove of vegetation with all available space taken up by vegetables gardens, beds and mounds of tilled earth. Potted plants lined the walkways and graced every surface inside and out. The plants became so numerous that she had to clear patches of forest in the mountain to keep them. Her notoriety led to a landscaping business that flourished in all seasons. If one wanted they could design gardens to order with annuals, perennials and a coordination of flowers and vegetables that bloomed in systematic colour from Feburary through November.

Father and I would visit on weekends while our parents were still trying to work things out. He bought a house in town with an adjoining cabin for a cool 20 grand. Part savings, part loan. The house was small and the cabin was run-down, suitable only as a shop. The narrow strip of land followed the gentle slope of the mountain between two roads, Arbutus crescent on the upper slope and Youbou road on the lower. A culvert directed the flow of a stream into an underground tunnel running lengthwise through the property. During storms and the spring thaw water would slam through the culvert and splash up under piles of wood stacked against the side of the shop.

the reasons for this were two fold, first; our family had existed as an inclusive group more important than any one of its members. Neither of our parents wanted this to end. We each had a vital role to play in the lives of the others my sisters and I especially as we were the only things produced by the family that could not be divided. At least our parents wouldn’t allow us to be divided. This was a decisive choice, a moral choice. They had to make the decision to sacrifice their autonomous lives to keep the halves together. With us at the core the body could not be cleaved in two. Second, our father had been diagnosed with the degenerative disease fibromyalgia caused presumably by environmental poisoning, an accumulation of chemicals in the soft tissues. The doctor advised him to move to the country where there would be less stress.

I had already become accustomed to the mountians, trees and lakes, but one of the first things that I noticed about living there was the passing of time, which for the most part was not measured in the hours and minutes I was used to, but something called ‘valley time’ calculated by the rings on trees, seasonal flowering of plants, the perennial flow of streams, the hours between breakfast and lunch, lunch and dinner. The time it takes to stack a cord of wood, for a fire to burn down; fuel for the evening’s entertainment. We made slow, imperceptible adjustments human filters for the water and air like an acquired a taste. The locals prized this rare sense of time. As one does when he discovers the existence of another world. Coming and going as he pleases, not staying in either for long. The feedback loop of a small town keeps everybody in polite check of keeping up appearances. Moving at half the speed with twice the pleasure news from outside came like a late flu season. I witnessed it within my own generation, an almost imperceptible bi-polar shift in popular culture as it reached a critical mass. We questioned whether it was happening at all. What we knew of culture came from pop music and fashion carried on the hips and gossip glossy lips of teenage girls and movie posters in the windows of the corner store. New kids on the block brought trends, attitudes and things that up until then were alien to us.

We were the envy of the overworked city folk cringing into the nighttime of their lives with dual mortgages, teenagers, marriage on the rocks and the future an indistinguishable prickly-goo made up of the stuff of now. Every year there were more refugees from the city and the sudden, compounding influx of visitors prompted a spike in property values. The first wave of wealthy industrialists, companies and contractors infected local populations and economies like the Europeans did when they came to the new world. Turning the natives into animals, stealing, stoned, broke and desperate. Possessed out of some longing for a better life. Wanting more than the simple forest could provide. We were being invaded. They’d heard about this place and its untapped resources. Property developers bought thousands of hectares from steward forest companies in secret land deals, crown land that had been granted to the companies in the form of tree farm licenses for harvesting trees, not for resale. Telltale orange ribbons tied to branches and wooden stakes demarcated land slated for development. A patchwork of ugly baldspots began to spread over the mountainsides exposing ground that hadn’t seen direct sunlight since the end of the last ice iceage. Wind blew valuable topsoil into the air carrying microorganisms, spores, bacteria and viruses enclosed in particles of dirt like comets finding their way into the moist caverns of lungs and digestive tracts.

Hidden groves and isolated clefts of land were converted to recluses for rich urbanites, tourists and yuppie boomers who left the city under the auspices of leading a sustainable lifestyle, but brought the city with them instead. Transportation to and from the city required roads linking Tofino, Renfrew, Sooke, Jordan River and Lake Cowichan. Most of the new houses were empty. Little chunks of paradise a gas tank away at a weekend’s convenience. For us though, it was our only home and we cherished it as such. A place free from pollution, incessant lights, crime and noise where the dark was dark and sleep unbidden by sirens. (where we lived here had built a life here had scarificed everything the luxuries to be here

As soon as we moved to town we were automatically relegated to the hippie camp. They took one look at my father with his long hair, my sisters and I with our no name clothes and labeled us hippies.

As the impermanence of lifestyle and landscape finally began to tell local (factions became fanatical, exclusive banded together for support an extreme right and an extreme left emerged with no one to mediate) conservation groups amalgamated with native bands to resist the further devastation. They blocked roads at Carmanah, Walbran, Nootka Island. Chained themselves to trees in the path of oncoming logging trucks at the edge of the receding treeline forcing the rival army to work around them. The main conflict was over how much land would be allocated for provincial parks, 21 or 12. The hippies wanted 21 percent. The loggers wanted 12. The two camps coexisted in the forest like predator and prey each taking a turn as prey. The loggers would be prey to the hippies when they spiked a tree and the hippie would be prey when the loggers would all band together and beat on a hippie. The loggers always outnumbered the hippies as politicians and lobbists always outnumbered conservationists. The loggers had most of the government and industry on their side, while the hippies garnered the support of David Suzuki, Greenpeace and a few small time political players. Suzuki came to the island on several occasions to deliver speeches in the cool cathedrals of old growth cedar chastising the government and forest industry for callously forsaking nature in favour of short-term financial gain. hatred for Suzuki was endemic Amoungst the loggers, to whom forestry was sacrosanct. Anyone who warned of the potential consequences of industry were scorned and ridiculed. Intuitively they knew he was right, but they were unwilling or unable to give up their way of life. Blinded by fir trees they only saw what lay on the horizon never gazing upon the burning forests of Borneo or the Amazon.

Forest companies grossly underestimated the ability of the forest to regenerate itself. Or if they did understand, they just didn’t give a damn. Much more than a treefarm, a forest is a biological life form in and of itself, the synergistic action of millions of interdependent lifeforms, tons of biomass. Moss, detritus, fallen snags are so dense on the forest floor that nearly all seedlings send their roots into decaying wood. The process is initiated by mycorrhizae, the fungus that feeds plant roots in return for a place to live. Next nematode worms move in with exploding poison sacs that help break down the integrity of the wood. Ambrosia beetles carry fungal spores into the cavernous interior of the log and cultivate mushrooms in miniature farms that flourish in the dark. After the ‘ground work’ is laid carpenter ants and termites consume the cellulose turning the wood rust red. Even under such carefully mediated and equalized conditions two centimeters of soil may take a thousand years to accumulate. The company didn’t have a thousand years though, they had a five-year contract wherein their objective was to make as much money as they could by the easiest possible route, extracting resources and employing tens of thousands of people. Talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees. But after the trees were logged. The forest, or at least the land the forest once occupied was plain to see.

 

 

Chapter 2