I was on the road the other day... sometimes seems like I'm on the road most of the time. The land passes, and I sit in a continuous line of cars waiting for the next parking lot to arrive. While the cars appear to be static, the land writhes under the asphalt.
Snoqualmie was going by me, a small town rapidly lapsing into suburb, known for its captive waterfall, expensive spa, predatory police force and retired trains. The trains are most in evidence, rusting patiently at the side of the road, resigned to abandonment.
Ahead, the mountains haven't given up. Logging wounds on their flanks are scabbed over in brighter green, and patches of snow streak their peaks like enamel on savage teeth. Gazing at the shadows of mysterious gorges, I feel their power still strong.
At the center of Snoqualmie is a curious monument: a metal-roofed shed housing an old sawmill trolley that clutches a single gigantic log, 10 feet across. "We used to be a logging town," it says to the passing suburbanites. "We chopped down trees and sent their trunks away on the railroad. Look how big and important a tree we used to be able to cut!"
But there is also remorse: "Look at this great tree's body -- there are no more like it around here because we cut them down. Not every one of us meant to cut them all down."
Trees are warriors. It seems strange to say, but as you walk in a young woods, you can feel it. The battle for light is ferocious -- most saplings starve under the canopy and fall back to the forest floor. Only strong, lucky ones grow tall enough to reach the sun.
But then how about the time after the fight has been won? When you've reached the canopy top, thrust your branches into the sunlight and established your place, what then?
Then, after that rite of passage, with roots deep enough in the earth for anchor, food and drink, you may live in relative peace for hundreds, even thousands of years.
What do you learn through those seasons of sun, wind and rain? You have no eyes to watch the patterns of the clouds and the deep blue-black of a clear sky, unless your needles are your eyes. You don't think as humans do. How do you think? What do you feel?
I watch the dead log pass by, imprisoned in defunct equipment, brought low by human power, and it occurs to me that the hard-muscled, hard-drinking young men who cut down that great old fir have grown old, wrinkled and feeble and have died. Their polished axes and long steel saws have long since rusted and been thrown out. The railroad is obsolete. If they won, what did they win?
At least we still have that tree corpse as a sign of victory from days when the oceans still teemed with fish and there was space enough for everyone to have a garden. We can show our grandchildren.
As the shed disappears behind me, I finally notice that the prisoner is escaping. Damp night winds and seditious lichen have conspired with communist bugs and sympathetic fungi to rot the old tree back to the forest. The steel roof is helpless to prevent it; the tired mill cart doesn't care any more. Our grandchildren can look at pictures, but the evidence is moving on.
It brings tears to my eyes to realize that all our programs of mass destruction won't stop the Dark Lady -- her quiet forces of mass regeneration will have us in the end. For a moment, I almost pull over to pay homage, but I have a parking lot to wait for.