Chapter 5
All this time, I was making progress on the Tree Book.
I was shifting out of the research phase and starting in on the writing phase, or at least the writing-things-down phase, which was still a prelude to actual grammar.
The research wasn’t finished yet, it never would be, but I had enough information to start piling words into files.
I could start mushing them around, making fragments, fashioning the clay that would eventually be sculpted into actual meaning.
I even had a loose structure in mind, or at least a few guiding concepts.
I’d decided the core chapter would be something about a mother tree, those hub trees connecting the network of life in a forest. That seemed requisite in this era of tree-related literature, though in my book it would be a different kind of mother.
In my book, I’d talk about the mother tree as a controlling figure, persistently demanding, guilt-inducing, rationing her love, and making cruel choices.
She’d be like a real mother, in other words, not the benign, giving force most people liked to imagine.
I didn’t think of it as a negative portrait, only more complex than usual.
I loved my mother. But mothers were many-faceted, often manipulative.
This was a technique I often liked to employ: take some given conceit and twist it the wrong way.
I’d also have a section rebutting John Muir and his latent monarchism.
I’d go heavy explaining the eugenic implications of his grandiose worldview and compare him unfavorably to the lesser-known but more observant and humble John Burroughs, a confrere of Thoreau.
And I’d definitely have a chapter about Candy and Merle, celebrating their simple, spiritual collaboration with the trees of their region, allowing for digressions into portraits of the bonsai master and a longtime tree dweller in Big Sur.
I had a few other chapters in mind, too—a fairy chapter, a tree sentience chapter—all taking trees from different angles.
It was a hodgepodge, which was always the case.
Why write a book anyone else would write?
In June I decided I needed to pay another visit to Merle and Candy’s meadow.
It was becoming clear that their regreening project was going to be a load-bearing rafter for the book, and I felt like I needed to conduct a proper interview.
Phil kindly put me in touch with Merle and we made a date.
And then, a few days later, Sarah approached me in the library with her own ask.
“I hear you’re going back to the meadow,” she said.
“Yep,” I said.
“You want any company?” she said.
“Sure,” I said.
It seemed normal enough. We were new friends, going on a day trip together, nothing to be excited about.
It would be interesting for both of us to see the meadow in a new season.
Phil himself might have come along if he wasn’t so busy.
He certainly didn’t object. I knew there were people who had the idea that women and men couldn’t be normal friends, that men and women were for some reason unable to relate outside the project of procreation, but that was stupid in my opinion.
Sarah and I were modern, sophisticated people, beyond any regressive rom-com clichés.
We were capable of many kinds of mellow fellowship.
And how conceited to imagine Sarah would ever think of me like that anyway.
She’d once looked at me kind of smolderingly at a party, big deal.
I wasn’t in her mind in that fashion. She obviously didn’t consider me—a balding, potbellied, unrenowned writer—as some kind of paramour.
We’d be taking a drive together, nothing more.
I arrived at Phil and Sarah’s house late in the morning, and it was already hot.
The shadows were shrunken little blots, bunched under the trees and bushes like creatures in hiding.
I texted Sarah, and a minute later she emerged from the front door, and wended her way down the steps, and through the yard’s riot of euphorbia, rosemary, heather, and lavender.
She wore a cream-colored bucket hat that day, with a white oxford and a pale raspberry skirt, and moved with her normal slow, loping stride.
She paused at the front gate and turned to make sure the clasp was latched before gracefully climbing into the car, pushing the clean cotton billows of her skirt down into her lap.
Her beach bag went into the back seat, like she owned it.
“You’re prompt,” she said, buckling in.
“This is a business trip,” I said. “There’s business to do.”
“I brought us snacks,” she said. “Just in case.”
“I made us some lunch,” I said. “I hope you like soba noodles.”
“Well, we won’t starve on the mountain, at least. That’s good.”
We headed out, taking the same route we’d taken four months before, over the Siskiyou Pass, into the arid hinterlands of northernmost California.
We followed the bends of I-5 through the Klamath Knot, as some called it, catching long views into the scrubby canyons opening and closing on either side.
As before, we talked about Ashland’s failings.
The public art was gentrified hippie crap.
The speed trap south of downtown was an insult to our intelligence.
Overall, we said nothing we wouldn’t say with Phil in the car, too.
“God, these fucking trucks,” she said, as two eighteen-wheelers roared alongside us. “I hate these things so much.”
“Seems like a lot of them out today,” I said.
“There’s always a lot of them,” she said. “I guess most of the drivers are Sikhs now. Did you know that?”
“I did not,” I said.
“I guess they came over and took all the long-haul trucking jobs in the West,” she said. “Well, maybe not all of them, but a lot. I read an article about it. You get great curry at truck stops up and down I-5, they say. And in Utah and Arizona.”
“That seems like an improvement,” I said.
“Sort of,” she said. “But the biggest rednecks in the world are Indians, you know. These drivers might be Sikh, but they’re still rednecks. And they’re just as shitty drivers as the white guys and the Mexican guys. Probably worse.”
“I have a Chinese friend who claims the biggest rednecks are Chinese.”
“I have Arab friends who say the same thing about Arabs,” she said.
“Planet of rednecks,” I said.
“Planet of shitty drivers,” she said.
We broke free from the trucks, only to pass through another formation, and another after that.
We arrived at the interstate agriculture checkpoint and didn’t declare any fruits or vegetables even though I’d packed us bananas and Sarah had packed us grapes.
Outside Yreka, Mount Shasta appeared, like a giant Chinese scroll painted across the sky, etched with inky filigrees, spotted with cloud shadows on the northwestern shoulder.
The gas gauge was getting low, but I kept passing up exits, holding out for better prices.
Finally, after we’d split from the freeway and started into the foothills, we couldn’t wait any longer.
I had to pull over at a little no-brand roadside convenience store/gas station where the prices were the worst we’d seen, but I’d waited too long, and there was no going back.
“I told you Arco was the best,” Sarah said.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said.
The place had two pumps on a gravel apron, both of which were already taken.
The front pump was serving a gray Honda; the rear pump was attached to an SUV.
In line ahead of us was a giant white pickup truck, the kind that had become symbolic in our region of a certain phallocratic assholism.
The bumper sticker informed us that the second amendment was not about hunting.
“He’s literally driving inside a metal penis,” Sarah said.
“You don’t drive a truck like that if you don’t have some kind of complex,” I said. “Whereas if one drives a Subaru Forester such as this…”
“Pure understated confidence, yes.”
Soon, the Honda drove away, leaving the front pump empty, but for some reason, the giant truck didn’t budge.
I gestured at the driver to go ahead and pull forward and back into the spot, but he shook his head, no.
He made some gestures that I couldn’t understand, maybe that he needed to use the rear pump, or something like that, so I went ahead and backed into the front spot and walked inside to pay in advance, per the signage.
When I came out, the rear pump was empty, but the giant white truck still idled in place.
Maybe he was waiting for something other than gas, I imagined, not that I really cared.
I started tanking up, but before I was finished, the pickup driver cut his engine and climbed out of his cab and stalked into the store, obviously in a huff.
I followed a minute later to get my change and found him at the counter, complaining loudly to the cashier about me.
“Some people are such goddamn morons,” he was saying, “they don’t even know how to pump their own fucking gas. You end up waiting half an hour before you can get into a spot. I mean, Jesus Christ, people need to pull their heads out of their asses, I’m serious, who do they think they are?”
I pretended not to understand what he was talking about and eventually he stormed outside. The cashier shook his head.
“Sorry about that,” the cashier said.
“Yeah, that was weird,” I said.
“It’s just that the pumps are too close together,” he said. “My dad built this place fifty years ago, and he didn’t leave enough space. You wouldn’t know that if you haven’t been here before. If you could move your car up a little bit, that’d be great.”
“I’m done anyway,” I said, and walked away, annoyed the cashier was giving the asshole truck driver any credence whatsoever.