cemeteries in the woods
Used to be, in the spring, we’d haul our firewood in. The winter storms blew part down and we’d cut the rest. The slash, we’d stack up and burn. Sometimes for a couple of days, sometimes for nearly a week. Keep dragging the downfall over to a bed of coals so deep it’d catch the root systems of the long-gone old growth firs on fire and they’d smolder for weeks, spreading along 500 year old tributaries of pitch, sort of an underground river of fire.
We knew every square inch of our nettle forest. The places where the bleeding hearts had gotten established. The gullies where nothing but ferns grew beneath the cedars. The salmonberry savannahs and the nettle jungles. We found the old shelter where Yazel’s kids had made a fort and built a temple with homemade idolatrous animal gods. We discovered the pioneers’ dumps with the old dishes and the linament bottles. We knew what their favorite whisky was and when they got lightbulbs.
You explore your woods and you discover the past. The stumps of those giant Doug firs with the gash still there where the loggers shoved a springboard so they could saw above the rock hard wood at the base — you still see em. You find the barbed wire strangling a maple, then finally it’s swallowed inside where the fence line kept the cows. Cedar snags charred from the fire of the 1890’s when the entire South End burned.
Some of the past is too far gone. The old barn didn’t have good timber left. The pig pen barely did. Some of my own shelters and outbuildings are long gone now, leaving not a clue for the next folks. The woods is a history book. It’s a museum going to ruin. It’s a lesson to me every year that what we do will be swallowed and lost and forgotten. Something about that I find a comfort, I guess. Knowing that we’ll disappear back into the rot and the rust as surely as the trees will fall — something humbling about this. Something part of something relentlessly ongoing.
Every year we go back in there. And some day we won’t come out. Someone else will burn the tree that grows on me. Someone else can warm themselves on that… I just hope they pay a small respect. We aren’t the first. We sure aren’t the last….
Hits: 34