1.
Handhold-to-go, spare spine,
trail buddy, measure-minder,
prod: my palm, I trust,
will not forget you – aspen-soft
and slightly soapy, as though you’d paused,
musing, en route from wood to muscle
or vice versa. Nor will my arm and shoulder
lose the slight give you gave –
a shrug or nod –
as you took my sloughed-off weight.
Now retired, four-fifths fetishized,
you lean in my kitchen,
still wearing the duct tape I applied
that time I stepped back (eyes
loving only the bird in the binoculars)
and cracked you. Renewed apologies,
although you must admit
it did improve your flex,
and now you wear that silver wrap
as sash, not bandage.
Here’s to us –
I raise my coffee cup –
here’s to the brotherhood of sticks and bones.
On a steep ascent
we made ourselves machinery,
plant and hoick, plant and hoick,
we hauled the species by its scruff,
by its gristle and thew,
up to the viewpoint.
Fording a creek you were the brace
that bore us, teetery,
over. Along a level trail
your swing-and-touch would
counterpoint the pace, now and then
pointing – a raised baton – toward some
rustle in the brush or an especially louche
lichen. Off duty, you’d lean on a trunk,
no doubt recalling an illustrious forebear –
the alpenstock, the crook,
the lever that could lift the world,
or the rod that smote the rock
to make the water flow –
while I regathered breath, reread the map,
and drank.
How we met. 1986 or ’87 it would be, and in that stretch of the Pukaskwa Trail between Willow River and Oiseau Bay. What I recall about that trip is the plainsong of warblers – yellow-rumped ones seedle seedling and black-throated green ones zoo zoo zee zoo zeeing, intercut, or pierced, by the sudden lyric reaches of white-throated sparrows. That, and, of course, my knee going out, which – as I remember it – translated that plainsong into little tone rows of crankiness. I’d been limping along with a spruce pole, which was rough and stiff and left black resin stains on my palm. Then the path crossed a stream just below a beaver dam, and there you were, ready to hand, trimmed and tidy, with your end chewed in the beaver’s classic wedge.
In one version of the story I leave the beaver a token of my appreciation, maybe a handful of trail mix or a pair of dirty socks to plug the dam. But I just took you. It’s not like there’s a dearth of aspen poplars or that beavers have gone off chewing them. And it wasn’t that I quit limping, more like the limp had someone it could talk to, someone who’d receive the weight – that slight flex – rather than just tolerating it like some stiff piece of spruce. By the time we made it back to the car and trailhead, days later, you had progressed from third to second person and we were like that, closer than what’s-his-name and Rin Tin Tin.
Now fast-forward fifteen years or so, when I’m searching for a lost logging locomotive (another story) in the bush up the slope from the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and get lost myself. Not on purpose, although you can imagine some sage or pseudo-sage recommending behaving like a wolf to find a wolf, and getting lost to find what’s missing. I had paused to sit on a log and recover my bearings when I realized I didn’t know where the path was any more than the alleged, probably mystical, logging locomotive. I thrashed about some in the salmonberry and salal, and finally found a disused logging road, which in time took me back to the highway. It was only then that I realized that my stick – my trusty, second-personned, but interestingly still unnamed stick – wasn’t with me. And do you think I could find my way back to that log? You don’t get lost, the same pseudo-sage has probably said, lostness gets you. So that was that. The end.
Except it wasn’t, as you have no doubt inferred from the fact that it’s leaning against the wall in my kitchen. My friend Jane was in the habit of hiking up there, both for the exercise and to spy on Western Forest Products, who had flagged that patch for cutting. One day she was sitting on a log to rest, and, you guessed it, there, glinting like a jewel in the underbrush, was the duct tape on my stick. True story. And, as the narrator at the end of one of E. Nesbit’s novels remarks, it’s not his fault if it works out like Dickens, life just is like books sometimes. And I say, thank Raven for that.
Back here amid the pots and pans
and precious bric-a-brac,
the Inuit soapstone loon,
the raw chunks of lava and peridotite,
and you, I think again.
How you must have grown,
one aspen in a clone of aspens,
a chorus of centuplets putting forth
your sticky buds and shedding spade-shaped leaves
in unison. Heaven,
some would say, a family tree
minus the fools, knaves, maiden aunts,
and history.
From which we saved you –
first the beaver
with her riparian enhancement plans
then me with my bum knee.
And for these gifts of difference and distance,
and the realpolitik of use,
you may curse us or bless us or both.