Chapter 2 #3
“We gave everything some space, gave it some air,” Merle said. “Just gave it a chance to mellow out, basically. And as you can see, we managed to get it back to something more recognizable.”
As they talked, they were touring us around, taking a meandering path from shrub to shrub.
They pointed out the deer grass, home to wintering ladybugs; the milkweed, a habitat for monarch butterflies; the yarrow, good for medicinal clotting.
They showed us the manzanita, the soaproot, the native flowering plants like curly dock.
What had seemed an unremarkable plot was in fact a dense weave of interdependent life, no surprise.
“We’ve got tons of pollinators here now,” Candy said. “Bird diversity is up eighty percent in the summer.”
“We see bears, bobcat tracks,” Merle said. “They like to come here and laze around. This has become a really prime hangout.”
“And this is the coup de grace,” Candy said. We’d paused at a frozen patch of earth, a plane of ice mottled with encased stalks of grass. “The underground spring even came back.”
We stared at the ground. It was just an icy patch of dirt. But to them it was a lot more, a miracle.
“It’s pretty mind-blowing,” Candy said. “We couldn’t believe it when the water started seeping up again. It tells us the earth is healing down deep in her bones.”
“The earth meets you halfway,” Merle said.
“More than halfway. When you do this kind of thing, the health multiplies. It spreads. What we’re doing in this meadow is having effects all the way down the mountain chain.
Down in Angels Camp, they’re seeing birds reclaiming old habitats.
They’re seeing wind patterns changing, bringing back old cycles of pollen, old butterfly migrations. That’s all from the meadow.”
“This is a nerve ending of the world,” Candy said. “We’re doing earth acupuncture here, opening up larger channels. When you do that, big things happen.”
For another hour or so, we hung around the meadow hearing more about their program.
We heard about their lives, too. Candy had been the queen of the Chico punk scene back in the day.
Merle had spent forty years as a lineman for PGE.
They told us all about the rich lore of Mount Shasta, where many well-documented UFO sightings had occurred, and how the spacecraft often disguised themselves as lenticular clouds.
They told us about the white-robed Lemurians who wandered the mountain’s honeycomb of fur-carpeted caves, and about Chief Skell of the Klamath people, throwing hot lava from the crater, and Saint Germain and the other interdimensional ascended masters who occasionally appeared in the forest. They had a lot of interesting theories, those two, and they’d lived interesting tales.
I could definitely see devoting at least a few paragraphs to them in the Tree Book.
It was midafternoon when we departed, and driving back home, the heater blowing, passing the cookies around, we did our debriefing.
“Well?” Phil said. “They’re pretty cool, right?”
“For sure,” I said. “They’re fascinating. They’re really doing something out there. I’m impressed.”
“If more people were like them,” Phil said, “we’d be living in a very different world right now. A much better world, I’d say.”
“Too bad everyone isn’t like them,” Sarah said from the back seat.
“You liked meeting them, too, didn’t you?” Phil said, glancing in the mirror. He could tell her words carried a trace of judgment.
“Yeah, they’re great,” she said.
“But you don’t sound that impressed,” he said.
“No, I like them, I do,” she said. “I think they’re awesome. I just thought their work would be more… I don’t know… real. I thought there’d be more reality to it.”
“What do you mean, ‘real’?” Phil said.
“I mean, it all sounds kind of wishful, don’t you think?” she said. “Weeding this meadow is changing the whole bioregion’s climate? I don’t know…”
“It’s all interconnected, though,” Phil said into the mirror. “Their work could absolutely be having effects we don’t understand yet.”
“I know, I know,” she said. “I mean, the butterfly flaps its wings and everything, I get that. But they’re just weeding a meadow. I weed our yard.”
“This is a long-standing argument between us,” Phil said to me. “We have different ideas of cause and effect.”
“Phil is very hopeful about a lot of things,” Sarah said.
“And Sarah’s not as negative as she thinks.”
“I’m not negative at all,” she said. “I’m just realistic. Phil believes in magic. It’s sweet.”
“I do,” he said. “It’s terrible. But I do.”
“We knew some Wiccans in Mendocino once,” Sarah said. “They told us a tree grew in their yard overnight. They claimed they walked outside in the morning and a whole, full-grown cedar was there. A hundred feet tall. Phil believed it.”
“I appreciated their narrative,” he said.
“Arthur understands about that. A good story is a good story. It makes room for a lot of things. Look at, I don’t know, Jules Verne.
That was fiction that became reality. Storytelling is a kind conjuring, isn’t it, Arthur?
It’s how we bring the future into being. ”
“Like Mein Kampf ,” Sarah said. “Or The Fountainhead .”
“Oh please,” Phil said. “That’s not what we’re talking about here.”
“It is, though,” she said, “Everyone has their own fantasy. You might like some of them better than others, but that’s what they all are.
A lot of people like to think controlled burns solve everything now.
They think Indians used to groom the whole planet.
There were so few people back then! They barely touched anything!
Sleeping bears, romping bobcats. These are predators. ”
“Sarah thinks Nature is a constant state of war,” Phil said.
“It is,” she said.
“The way I see it,” Phil said, “Merle and Candy definitely aren’t hurting anything. And it’s the spirit of the work they’re doing. The citizenship—”
“Here we go…,” she said.
Phil rolled onward, ignoring her, and getting a little fiery as he entered the chamber of his deepest beliefs.
“We’re at a point now where we have to try anything,” he said.
“This is what I’ve been saying for years, Arthur.
I’ve spent my entire life trying to heal the planet.
I’ve marched in the streets, I’ve educated in the schools.
I’ve shouted from the rooftops since I was a kid.
That’s what’s compelling to me about Merle and Candy: they’re not waiting around for anyone to tell them what to do.
They’re just getting down to work and doing it.
Tending their little garden. How can you not admire that? ”
“It’s totally admirable,” Sarah said. “It just isn’t true.”
“Bah,” Phil said agreeably.
“What do you think, Arthur?” Sarah said. “Did you buy their plan? Are you going to put them in your book?”
“I might,” I said. “I’m not sure yet.”
“And what’ll you say if you do?” she said.
“Well,” I said, and slowed myself down, wanting to navigate the schism between my two hosts as delicately as possible.
“I guess I’d probably end up relating their work to writing.
That’s what I usually do. I’d frame the regreening program as a form of revision.
I’d talk about how small changes can have big effects.
How if you move a few words around, or rearrange a paragraph, a lot of energy can suddenly start flowing.
A lot of writing is weeding and watering, in my view.
I’d probably say something to that effect. ”
“There you go,” said Phil, taking my words as a victory for his side.
“Whatever,” Sarah said, disgusted by our mealy holism.
“Plus,” I added, “there are a lot of good words attached. ‘Yarrow,’ ‘acupuncture,’ ‘butterfly,’ ‘chaparral.’ I don’t have to literally believe what they say in order to use it in a book, you know.”
“See, now that makes sense to me,” Sarah said. “Practical.”
After that, conversation returned to daily life.
We talked about groceries, email etiquette, book bans.
According to Sarah, the kids in her school only read banned books these days.
Anything with a Pride flag on it, they loved, whereas anything over twenty years old, they found totally uninteresting.
Phil and Sarah bickered for a while about the significance of this trend, in a way that was hard to tell if they were being affectionate or genuinely annoyed with each other, but such was the way with any couple, I thought; the subtexts were ultimately unreadable.
By dusk, we’d retraced our path over the pass, and they’d dropped me off at the gate to my mother’s property, where we said good night.
Inside, I poured myself a whiskey and sat in my little reading nook where I could ponder the day’s raw information.
I liked Candy and Merle. I could see how they might offer a whole chapter in the Tree Book if I chose to go that route.
I could also see their figures from both Phil’s and Sarah’s points of view.
Phil was a good person. He refused to let go of hope.
Sarah was a good person, too. She refused to have false hope.
I could see their argument as exactly the subject the section would explore.
Theirs was exactly the unresolvable conversation I would restage in print.
I poured myself another whiskey and picked up a copy of Earth’s Shadow from the shelf.
I often enjoyed leafing through one of my books after meeting new people, scanning a few pages through their fresh eyes.
This time I wasn’t reading it through Merle’s and Candy’s eyes, however, but through Sarah’s.
I was wondering what she’d think if she ever took the trouble.
As I read, my mind drifted from the page, revisiting our conversation in the car.
I found myself trying out different phrasings on her, different arguments to keep her attention.
I imagined comebacks I might have attempted, alternate quips to bring out the music of her laugh.
When I finally returned to the words, I was happy to find the sentences seemed passable to me, even good.
I didn’t think I’d be embarrassed if someday Sarah decided to hold them in her lap.