Life is

They cut down all the trees behind my house, their big machines crunching and growling ceaselessly for two days. The old man who lived there died last year. The hermit, we called him. From the street you couldn’t see the house, and his yard, directly behind ours, was a dark, mysterious woods. He’d lived there almost 60 years, and in that time a forest grew up around him.

At night, a skunk and a family of raccoons would emerge, over and under the fence, for their nightly prowl. My boys slept on the porch all summer last year to escape the stuffy heat of their upstairs bedroom, and they’d stay up late watching for the skunk to skitter across our patio on his rounds.

We are new here, less than a year, still feeling the rhythms of the place and still learning our neighbors. The old man died last fall, and a pleasant fellow named Bob bought the place, cheap, with plans to fix it up and rent it out or let one of his grown kids live in it. We didn’t know any of this, but we knew things were changing because of the sounds. Voices, movements… Then a few weeks ago Bob had a yard sale, so my son and I walked over. You could see the house now. Brush and trees cleared away from the front of it to reveal a gouged and mud-slicked yard and a little old house that seemed vulnerable and naked in the daylight.

We learned that the old man had been a landscape artist, and we came home with some of his drawings. We talked to Bob about his plans and his work, and about the old man whom Bob had not known in life but for whom he had developed a great deal of respect and affection as he sifted through the belongings he’d left behind. We walked through the house, a tiny place almost as decayed as the land was overgrown. “Hoarder,” people say, when you have too much stuff and it starts to moulder into the edges and create narrow paths in your home. You could say that here. And yet you could also see how a life was lived here, a quiet life muffled by papers, books, bushes, trees… a life that stopped trying to struggle against nature’s encroachment, fighting back the weeds, the dust, the raccoons. I wonder what things he thought about here, the old man.

But now it’s Bob’s house and he’s doing what normal people would think to do. He’s sweeping out the cobwebs, excavating the corners, clearing the overgrowth, and cutting down the saplings. He wants to save the house, though all advise him to tear it down. He wants to keep as many trees as he can. But still, Bob is cleaning things up.

And now you can stand in the street and see all the way back to the backyard fence, and beyond to the houses behind. There’s nothing mysterious here, just a normal little housing lot. The naked little home, blinking in the light, surrounded by mud and tire tracks, where once an enchanted forest breathed.

I am reminded of this.

The drive from Seattle down through Portland, and then westward to the Oregon coast. I’ve driven that route a number of times since moving to Washington in 2009. Portland has a certain feeling. It’s old fighting with new… there is a churning energy there and a magnetism. But that’s beside the point. Driving westward out of Portland, we enter the forest, and it is deep in every sense. Our car is tiny, dwarfed by evergreens that stretch out in every direction but for the ribbon of road cutting through. We are a hermit crab on the seabed and the trees are the kelp, swaying up above. There is a fullness in the quiet, the long slow breaths of beings on a different timescale. Life upon life upon life, lived as it has been before us and will be after. And an invitation to a mystery that is not hidden in the forest- it is the forest. The sheer magnitude of life held by these silent giants standing together. We can drive for hours enveloped in this world, as the trees whisper their invitation…

And then we round a corner and light hits our eyes. A hill ahead is different, then another and another- and all around us are scenes of devastation. The ground is green and brown and bare, with huge muddy tire tracks. The trees are gone, but for cracks, splinters; their jagged trunks stabbing impotently upward into the empty air. Miles of this. The shock of it takes our breath. The gentle creatures that stood together defenseless- felled en masse. The limbs that held owl, bat, squirrel and insect, the trunks that sheltered mouse, snake, bobcat, and deer- all gone. Chewed up by metal beasts indifferent to life.

The quiet here is sharper, a ringing like tinnitus. Our car is huge. The crab is exposed crawling out of the kelp bed.

This is what is left when you take away the life. This is the old man’s yard. This is Oregon, stripped naked, shredded and killed. This is Spain’s olive orchards, hacked down for solar panels. This is Germany’s old growth forests torn down for wind turbines.

Life is, because life is. The tree, the skunk, the bird, the human child, the old man. It’s all important because it IS. Take it away and see what’s left. This is a grave yard.

More begins soon, threatening 2.5 million acres of forest in Oregon. This will be a great tragedy if it comes to pass. BLM is practically begging the public to stop this. Please leave a comment here by clicking “participate now”: https://eplanning.blm.gov/Project-Home/