We moved to Cota Street when I was nine. Cota kids were born of immigrants and nomads and peasants. There was never royal blood. The families were not written about in important books with hard covers. The struggles reached their steadfast fingers through each generation with precision. Every family was touched.
Sometimes, I thought my own immigrant nomad ancestors weren’t really troubled. I imagined them relaxed and flexible—solving problems tenaciously. Good and faithful friends. Fighting and asking questions and making love long into the night. Sometimes, I thought of my great-great-uncles shouting curse words to the wet night sky and laughing. They must have known before me that nothing lasts forever. Not even the new buildings, massive trees, or frequent beatings. I imagined them searching for the wild lands and the wild things. I knew they understood, even as their deaths loomed closer, that someday they would rise again.
As I got older, the steelhead runs were not what they used to be. The big fish were near extinction. Natural resources dwindled down to the barest of bones. The forests that had once seemed to never end were shorn and overwhelmed. Corporations declared bankruptcy. Sold off their excess land. They finished with their liquidations and the mountainsides were left naked. Mini malls and developments popped up out of nowhere. The purple flowers were crowded out by introduced weeds. The butterflies flew away and did not come back.
I watched carefully as timberland became ritzy bedroom communities. The Esworthys, who bought our property after the bank foreclosed on my father, didn’t know anything different. They paid me and Colin to tend the stretch of fertilized turf they installed in front of their house. I watched Mr. Esworthy fight private battles with nature using herbicides and clippers. The stream started to look strange.
Distant grocery stores with organic produce from other countries took the place of Mother’s backyard garden. Her vegetables went to seed.
The Esworthys stayed on the highway that drove through town. They said they had no reason to visit the city of David. They swam in Wynoochee Lake, took pictures of moss-covered big-leaf maples, fished in the Hamma Hamma River, and gambled on the Squaxin Island reservation. Their wilderness was recreation. It was small and consumable. They conquered it with backpacks and hiking shoes. They had never seen an old-growth forest. Or been stalked by a wild thing.
The Esworthys smiled at my father’s ragged shirt and work boots as if they were a funny costume he put on for them. His clothes were out-of-date. From an era long ago. He had worked hard for no reason. The state now had a capitol building and a college, and the timber money had been invested in enterprises we could never touch. My father, and other men like him, were no longer needed. They had little to show for the generations of missing body parts and hard labor.
The Esworthys owned our land now. They would not sell it back to us. A five-bedroom house was erected for the childless couple. It was their second home. They went to the salmon ceremony in August with cameras. Mrs. Esworthy chatted excitedly with Colin and me about the plans to pave the roads to several wilderness areas. She would soon be able to drive her commuter car all the way to the tops of mountains.
Colin and I looked at each other in alarm. I pushed my dirt-rimmed fingernails down into the soil and didn’t answer. I knew the men who once owned the lumber companies had put on their expensive suits. And flown away in silver jets. The rain came in autumn like always.
The forests remained clear-cut. Bald hills turned to soupy messes that slid. The silt flowed into the rivers. Entire families of salmon died. Tributaries lost the ability to sustain life. Tourists held their noses against the smell of rotting fish carcasses. Grocery stores in small towns put up signs that read NO MORE CREDIT. Fishing rights that reservations had fought so hard for were almost useless. Their guns stayed in their holsters. It was hard to make a living from fishing anymore.
Downtown, the tidewater mill wasn’t as busy as it used to be. The mill workers stood around and shook their heads at the loss. Heavy fog hid the town. The angry prisoners deep inside had been forced into silence for more than a century. The Wobblies had been killed and imprisoned eighty years ago.
My father told my mother that he would try to “work harder,” that it was just a “bad time.” My mother planted a garden on Cota Street. My father tried to believe his boss paid him what he was worth. He was anxious. He wore his work boots through to the floor.
My brother and I stood beside him as he picketed in the parking lot of the mill where he had worked for fifteen years. We were out of school for the summer. I fished for sea-run cutthroat trout in Goldsborough Creek with a homemade fishing pole. My father’s workmates did not grow angry and throw fists in the air. They held their signs in a deep, reserved silence. The price of lumber declined. Manufacturing moved overseas. Somewhere inside of them the workers wanted to believe the owners had hearts—that fairness would overcome. But the men with the money were long gone. Large tracts of land lay abandoned and muddy. The picket lines were futile. The damage was done. Greed won out. And the land could no longer support us.
Students from the state college poured salt in open wounds. They spit on our father’s work trucks and protested a century too late. They didn’t see the difference between loggers and the multimillion-dollar corporations. Thousands of men and women were out of work. The students didn’t understand. They didn’t know the children who waited in cabins without electricity and trailers without toilets. They didn’t see the rotten vegetables of food bank food on scarred wooden tables or the long drives into town in rusty, rickety vehicles. They fought to protect the northern spotted owl, and old-growth timber that was mostly, already gone—that accounted for little of the logging companies’ profits. Their parents paid their bills. They used the big words they learned in classrooms. I furiously wondered how they could think they were so much better than us.
The investors laughed, slapped each other on the back, and made plans for their logging companies in Latin America. Union activists for indigenous people printed books of songs and poetry in resistance. They didn’t want to give up their land. But the union workers were mysteriously shot down on street corners. Old games. Old tricks. Blood soaked into the soil of Oaxaca.
The college students in Olympia eventually put down their chains and protest signs. They moved on to a new fad. They went back to their drum circles and smoked the marijuana that we sold to them—that our parents had grown to feed and clothe us in the sparse new economy. Cota kids got locked up so that college students could get stoned and travel the 101 loop on bicycles. They wore expensive clothing made from hemp. Ate vegan health bars and refused to shower.
They were very proud of their body hair and pale dreadlocks.
The remaining five hundred pairs of northern spotted owl nested in the hollowed-out cavities of old-growth, coniferous timber. They huddled close to the trunks of the Douglas fir. They blended with the bark and the shadows. The big trees were gone. Aggressive barred owls moved into the clear-cuts. A small group of stricken biologists considered the word defeat.
Unemployment rates in the logging towns jumped above state and national levels. The economy moved out. Methamphetamines moved in. Logging roads were closed to the public. Meth labs were expensive to clean up. Dealers left the waste behind when they were done. There were abandoned travel trailers and buckets of foul-smelling liquid that could kill. Workers in hazard suits cleaned it up. Rates of domestic violence rose. Families became fractured. The rain poured down relentlessly. But there were some things the water just could not wash away.
Teenagers got pregnant at alarming rates—the highest rates in the nation. But there were no immaculate conceptions in the city of David. Arguments about whose fault it was were lost in the cries of the next generation of hungry babies. The children were talked about in big-city newspaper articles as unwanted vermin. As we were raking her leaves, Mrs. Esworthy told us that kids in timber towns “breed like rabbits.” She was tired of her tax dollars going toward our welfare benefits.
Colin watched my body tense as I grew red in the face. It was more salt in more open wounds. He glared warningly. I swallowed and said nothing. I avoided her gaze. She pulled her polar fleece close around her neck. Colin told her we were finished. We walked down the long driveway with our money, stood in a bend of the road, and smoked reservation cigarettes before heading home in silence. I stared at the ground and clenched my jaw in soundless anger that betrayed nothing. It was a long walk back to town.
My father’s work boots stood by the door while he slept through the daylight. He still worked swing shift—but not at the mill. My father’s work boots stood for something that I wasn’t sure about anymore. The security leaked from them. His assurance left along with his pride. His stories were fading. Grandpa passed away from lung cancer. He had breathed in wood dust for too many years. Mother left soon after. Her garden wilted. My blood boiled with the memories of our ancestors. But the stories of the angry prisoners and the deaths of the revolutionary Wobblies were finished. Long ago, the blood had dried and hardened. It was a different color now.
In the new bedroom community, my father was no longer a man, and this hurt him. Hard work didn’t matter. He must learn to serve the picky tourists. He took retail and service jobs that didn’t pay well or offer health insurance. His strong shoulders withered. He stayed out late into the night trying to make a living. He squinted over his books in the morning. His step became shuffled. He said nothing, over and over and over again. His shame filled up the house on Cota Street. I breathed it in as I slept.
As I got older, I learned to love my father in a different way. His fleeting existence made him transitory. And because of this, perhaps, I loved Jimmy James Blood before I ever saw him. The look of his face or the sound of his voice didn’t matter. I liked what happened when the other Cota kids said his name. Their eyes got brighter, and their smiles showed bad teeth. The weariness and indignity backed off their faces. They were proud for a moment. Finally, their very existence was not a burden. A certain power clung to accounts of him. His presence offered a peculiar new feeling to Cota Street. I knew little about him. His reality eluded me. He was from Angel Road back in the hills. He dropped out of school long ago. He was not reluctant. He wore fourteen-eye oxblood boots.
I finally saw him on a summer night—those boots planted with firm arrogance on the pavement in a dying, industrial town. He stood in the parking lot of the All Night Diner. He looked me in the eye and nodded an affirmation: Yes. It is true. All of it. Of course it would be the Fighter Boy from the playground so long ago. Grown up and smirking. He remembered everything. An ocean of writhing, living blood surged between us. It enveloped the parking lot. It discolored the moon. This time the wind did not steal his words from me. Our intention lay naked and squalling in bright red newborn blood. It was dangerous and confusing. But there was no choice.
We were fighters. We were born for it . . . Jimmy James Blood had a whole crew. And a shaved head.