Chapter 2 #2
“It beats a lot of things,” she said. “I might even love it. Yeah.”
“And what library do you work at now?” I said.
“I’m at the high school,” she said.
“Not for long,” Phil said. “She’ll be out of there soon. Sarah usually gets a job at whatever college we’re at. They can usually arrange a spousal-hire type deal. But someone didn’t retire this time. So it’s taking longer.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “I like it at the high school. Teenagers are hilarious. I forgot. I get to hear everything about what’s going on over there.”
“And what are teenagers up to these days?” I said.
“Well,” she said, pleased to report. “They don’t wear enough clothes, that’s for one thing.
The girls seriously dress like prostitutes now.
Tiny miniskirts and frilly halter tops and fake nails.
And so much perfume! It’s like they just walked out of a brothel, I swear.
Toasted vanilla bean everywhere. And the crazy thing is they think it’s empowering.
‘My body, my choice.’ ‘Don’t slut-shame me.
’ They have no idea what they’re putting out there, though. ”
“And do you tell them that?” I said.
“God, no,” she said.
“And what about the boys?” I said.
“Confused. Weird. I don’t know. None of them can think because of their phones. I mean, it’s actually incredible what they don’t know. They don’t know who Uncle Sam is. Never heard of him. I put up a poster the other day and they’re like, ‘Who’s that guy in the stupid hat?’?”
“But you like them,” Phil said. “Some of the kids, anyway.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Some of them are great. There’s this one girl, Elizabeth.
Everyone talks about her. She crashed her scooter the other day and got a concussion.
Then she did acid that very night! She’s also having sex with her friend’s boyfriend, Ronnie.
And her other friend’s boyfriend, Danny, too. She’s a real mess. She’s fantastic.”
“What kind of books does she read?” I said.
“YA crap, mostly,” she said. “Not a big reader.”
“Don’t you have to report that kind of thing to anyone?” Phil said, scowling ahead. “The drugs and sex and everything?”
“If I heard about her doing anything really bad, I’d probably tell a counselor about it,” Sarah said. “But Elizabeth is just a kid testing boundaries. Nothing too scary. I’m keeping my eye on her.”
“I think I’d want to know if my kid were doing some of that stuff,” Phil said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Eh,” Sarah said, and I could feel her shrug behind me. “I did a lot of things I didn’t want my parents to know about at that age. It’s all about becoming your own person. You have to make some of your own mistakes. That’s my opinion.”
“Sometimes kids want to be confronted, though,” Phil said. “They want someone to take notice.”
“Not really,” Sarah said.
“Their brains aren’t done developing,” Phil said. “The prefrontal cortex—”
“I know, I know,” Sarah said. “Planning, good decision-making. I know. But she’s fine. It isn’t anything too scary that she’s doing.”
“It’s an important stage of development,” he said.
“I don’t regret any of the drugs I did as a teenager,” I said, stepping in. “I don’t think they hurt me at all. Granted, I might’ve been a genius if I’d been more careful. But I doubt it. I got a lot out of those experiences. Personally.”
“Yep,” Sarah said, and I could tell by the brevity of the syllable that she’d been one of the wayward kids, too, one of the kids who didn’t believe what the grown-ups said, who’d had to find out everything for themselves. We didn’t have to divulge any more.
“She’s just bored is all,” Sarah said in closing. “I can understand that. Anyway, these kids are living in a dying world. Let them have their fun. That’s how I see it.”
It was turning into a beautiful day, the cloud cover breaking apart into giant cauliflowers and hammerheads, throwing shadows onto the slopes of sugar and knobcone pine.
Soon Mount Shasta appeared, and we peeled off into the foothills rising toward the timberline.
The microecologies in the region were so drastic.
In a matter of hours we’d passed from oak savanna, to mountain pass, to scrub canyons, to charred burn fields, and now into the volcanic draperies of conifer.
Around noon, we landed at our destination, an unremarkable clearing low on the mountain’s hump, tucked on the side of a gravel service road.
A green Harvester truck was parked at a faint trailhead leading into what one might call a meadow.
We got out and mounted the low berm and stepped onto a field where thin, brown grasses spread between occasional shrubs and a few big-leaf maples and red firs.
On the ground were wide patches of mud, along with thick streaks of ice and snow, the crusted remnants of winter.
In the middle of the meadow two people were staring at the earth.
They were late-middle-aged, a little dumpy, a little grimy, well bundled in hats and scarves.
The woman had plaited gray hair and a small, finely wrinkled face.
The man was a shaggy giant, his loose clothes falling around his body like elephant skin.
As we approached, they traded affectionate hellos with Phil, who introduced us all around.
“Merle, Candy, this is Sarah and Arthur,” he said. “Sarah’s been wanting to meet you guys for a long time. Arthur’s the writer I told you about.”
“Good to meet you,” Merle said, shaking our hands. “You’re writing a book about trees, we hear.”
“Trying to,” I said. “Thinking about it.”
“Big topic, trees,” Merle said.
“I’m still just finding my way in,” I said. “Phil’s been really helpful so far. He knows a lot about the subject.”
“Phil’s taught us a lot about trees, too,” Candy said. “He’s like an encyclopedia, isn’t he?”
“Not as much as you’ve taught me,” Phil said.
“He’s also full of horseshit,” Candy said. “But he’s a nice guy. We like him.”
“Before we get started,” Merle said, “we wanted to ask you something. We have a little request, if that’s all right.”
“Of course,” I said.
“We appreciate your interest in what we’re doing out here,” he said. “We’re real happy if you want to get the word out. We just want to make sure you don’t tell anyone exactly where this is. We’d like to keep this a secret location if possible.”
“This is public land,” Candy explained. “We’re here at the pleasure of the Forest Service. A lot of herbalists, if they hear about a healthy, thriving patch of ground, they come pick it clean. Goldenseal, white sage, there’s a big market for that stuff.”
“They have decent intentions,” Merle said. “They just don’t know what they’re doing in the big picture.”
“That’s totally fine,” I said. “A secret location is great, actually. Even better.”
“You’re sure?” Merle said.
“Absolutely,” I said. “Secrets are what make a book go.”
A curious look passed over to Phil. The agreement seemed too easy. Merle only sort of believed me, and wanted Phil to guarantee my word. He did.
And so Candy began their full spiel. In this case, their story actually did go all the way back to the beginning of the world.
Once upon a time, she recounted, this was an ocean planet, in whose Cambrian waters sponge spicules and worm tubes proliferated and evolved into things like mollusks and fish.
Over time, landmasses emerged, and the fish climbed onto the dry land and became lizards and birds.
Here in Northern California, the waters eventually receded enough that a band of mountains between the great basin and the fertile rain forest of the Pacific coastline appeared.
Thus, the beautiful watershed of the Cascades and Sierra came to be.
For many millions of years, she said, all was well.
The reptiles and mammals and fish and birds, even the human beings, got along fine.
And then, only about two hundred years ago—two hundred years!
—new humans arrived, white humans, who started destroying everything in sight.
They rerouted rivers, leveled forests, strip-mined mountains.
They killed anything they could put a price tag on.
Then they invented the internal combustion engine and things really accelerated.
“In a hundred years,” Candy said, “a single lifespan, the whole world got thrown out of whack. We’ve poisoned the air, spiked the rivers, turned the watershed into a desert. And now, here we are, standing on this ruined mountainside, staring into the abyss.”
“They made the forest into a tree plantation,” Merle said sadly. “Monoculture all the way down the line. All the trees in these sterile rows. Hardly any meadows left at all. Hundreds of millions of trees dead from drought and beetles, but no praying mantis to keep them in check.”
“They never think about meadows when they’re making their tree plantations,” Candy said. “A meadow is the forest’s negative space. It provides natural firebreaks. It sponges up the water to keep erosion from happening. Without a meadow, you don’t have a viable system.”
“This meadow we’re standing in now,” Merle said, “used to be a literal dump. People came up here and dropped off their washing machines, their old Christmas trees. But worst of all were the invasive species. Pampas grass. Cheatgrass. Scotch broom.”
“Fucking Scotch broom,” Candy said.
“So about ten years ago,” Merle said, “we started cleaning it out. We started making trips up here on weekends and pulled out literally tons of debris. And then, a few years ago, we got permission to do a controlled burn. That was quite a bureaucratic feat.”
“We burned out the saplings of the black oaks,” Candy said. “We burned the invaders. And that nitrogen went straight back into the earth. The heat was exactly what the knobcone pine needed, too. We melted the resin from their seeds so they could pop out and germinate.”