At least they died of smoke and age and not some awful, active form
of suicide. To keep sight of the forest for love of the suffering trees;
to damp the black or bitter ashes; not to surrender one’s humanity
to callousness or grief: this is the hard part. There was much hardness
in their lives but no bitterness so terrible that what remained
seemed not worth having, no fatal poison in their pure American
wellspring. Where did they find such faith? How could America
retain its luster in eyes familiar with exile and war, the informal
inequalities of the factory floor? Why do the bleached remains
of Montana farms assume the character of barren cottonwood trees,
equal testament to the harshness of the local winter and the hardiness
of the will to endure, what Hollywood likes to call “the human
spirit,” though why confine such a universal instinct to humanity?
Why believe it’s we alone who suffer? How can the native American
ash and alder and Sitka spruce not possess some inkling of the harsh
truth when serpentine logging roads and clear-cut scars form
the totem shapes of grizzly paws on slopes bereft of trees,
when of the great, fog-shouldered forest so little still remains?
Or does it? In Broadway stalls I’ve seen their work remaindered,
cut-rate and still unsold, disregarded by the very people
they spent their lives extolling, and yet there is more in their poetry
than the ghost of the trees killed for paper. There is more to America
than wastefulness and greed and abuse, which are merely forms
of our inherent human weakness, manifestations of the hardship
we suffer when forced to choose for ourselves. Freedom is a hard
row to hoe, our cross to bear, individually and with whatever remnant
of communal will remains to us, whatever common vision yet informs
our deepest dreams and beliefs, the solitary will or the deeply human
dream of community, this central paradox, so typically American,
between the good of the wood and the rights of individual trees.
For me, they loom like redwoods or Douglas fir, the last big trees
of the endangered forest. The timbre of their voices, their wounded hearts
still large enough for sugar beets and four-door Buicks, all things American,
all things of simple dignity. Alone or gathered at the river, what remains
is the democratic song, their rich, vernacular empathy with the people,
a common thread of praise. Jim and Dick, in keeping with this form
I carve your informal names in a Western red cedar, totem-pole tree
of the original Americans, because it is sacred and strong of heart.
What thou lovest well remains distinctly, triumphantly human.