Roots, Again

We had a poetry group in India, called "And Thus I Have Word." One of our "assignments" was to write about home, but, although I tried desperately, I couldn't write anything more than scattered notes about Oregon, or family, or trees. Yesterday I discovered these notes. And yesterday, although I should have been working on my comps, I compiled them into a semi-coherent expression of home.

Here it is:

I remember my father speaking to me as he steered winter-studded truck tires along Lorane Highway, through the gloam. Douglas fir silhouettes serrated a silver sky and my dad nodded to his daughter over a vanilla latté, casually explaining that a Doug fir skyline at sunset is what it means to be home.

Before that white pickup truck there was a white Chevrolet, a behemoth of a carryall piloted by my plaid-clad forester grandfather with thick-rimmed glasses and an intimate knowledge of trees. Before that… there are vague allusions to the Potomac and the British Empire, but nothing I really know.

My mother’s dad was a forester too, and with sylvan synchronicity my grandfathers took their families eastward by rail in 1964. After riding the Empire Builder backwards with their forester fathers my parents fell in love, even though they were too young.

What follows is a story of a marriage sundered in New England blizzards, of a strange succession of stumps over roots, and of a retreat back to what was left of the forest so a lost growing daughter could perceive both laughter and tears in Pacific rainstorms. Listening for tree-speech, she would hear Ken Kesey’s cuckoos sing eulogies for silenced animistic whispers and other forgotten truths. Her grandfathers’ great notions became ashes, and she gave them back to the Cascades.

And now. Sometimes I curse myself for moving east again. In college I’m learning about religion, about how early evangelists felled the sacred forests of Europe and then stuck sweet-smelling effigies in pots to celebrate the birth of a saviour. I think westward, to a Christmas tree farm in Skapoose, where I was conceived. I recall my mother’s father; how it took him over a decade to write his dissertation. I like to imagine him hunched over his typewriter, struggling to find the right words to talk about trees.