The Flight

She checked the falling axe at the airline counter in Hartford. The woman at the desk looked at the case — a hard-sided rifle case that Wren had bought at the sporting goods store in Torrington, the axe fitting inside diagonally, the handle padded with a towel, the head wrapped in cardboard and duct tape — and asked what was in it.

"A tool," Wren said. "A hand axe. No motor, no fuel, no electronics."

The woman typed something and attached a tag and put the case on the belt and the falling axe went through the rubber curtain and disappeared into the luggage system and Wren felt a brief vertigo, the falling axe out of her possession for the first time since she had taken it from the house in Mill City twenty-two years ago, the axe traveling now without her, on a conveyor belt, in a cart, in the belly of an airplane, the tool making the journey home without the daughter or the father.

She flew from Hartford to Chicago and from Chicago to Portland. The flight west was five hours and the landscape below changed with a completeness that she was not prepared for. She had lived her entire adult life in Connecticut, in a landscape of hills and hardwood forests and small towns and stone walls, a landscape of moderate scale, the hills fifteen hundred feet, the trees a hundred feet, the rivers fordable, the distances manageable. From the window of the airplane she watched this landscape flatten — the hills of the Appalachians giving way to the plains of the Midwest, the patchwork of farms and fields stretching to the horizon, the earth flat and brown and green and without trees, the trees confined to the stream banks and the farmsteads, the landscape stripped of its vertical element, the world reduced to two dimensions.

Then the Rockies. The earth crumpled upward and the scale changed entirely — the mountains rising ten thousand, twelve thousand, fourteen thousand feet, the peaks snow-covered in June, the valleys deep and shadowed, the rivers white with snowmelt, the landscape of a planet that was not the planet she lived on, the scale impossible, the distances between things measured not in miles but in days of walking, the wilderness real in a way that the Connecticut woods were not, the Connecticut woods being the regrowth of abandoned farmland and the Rocky Mountain wilderness being the original, the uncleared, the never-farmed.

Then the Cascades. The mountains different from the Rockies — volcanic, the peaks conical, the slopes forested to the timberline, the forests dark and dense and extending to the horizon, the forests that Glenn had worked in, the forests that Wren had read about in the field guide, the forests of Douglas fir and western red cedar and western hemlock that covered the western slope of the Cascade Range from southern Oregon to British Columbia, the forests that were the most productive timber forests on the planet, the trees growing faster and larger here than anywhere else on earth because the rain came off the Pacific and hit the mountains and fell and the soil was deep volcanic ash and the summers were warm and long and the combination of water and soil and light produced trees of a size that the eastern forests had not seen since the glaciers retreated ten thousand years ago.

She could see the clear-cuts from the airplane. They were visible as patches on the mountainsides — lighter green where the young regrowth was growing in, brown where the cut was recent, the edges of the cuts straight lines against the darker green of the uncut forest, the geometry of industry imposed on the fractal geometry of the natural forest, the squares and rectangles of the timber harvest units visible from thirty thousand feet, the landscape marked by the cutting the way a body was marked by surgery, the scars visible, the healing in progress but incomplete.

She looked at the clear-cuts and thought about the cutting and the cutters and the fallers who had walked into each of those squares and had brought down every tree in them, one at a time, the saws running, the trees falling, the stumps multiplying, and among those fallers had been Glenn, her father, working in one of those squares twenty-two years ago, a man she could not see from this altitude but who had been there, on the ground, at the base of a tree, the saw in his hands, the axe on his belt.

The plane descended into Portland. The city was smaller than she expected — a grid of streets and bridges over a river, the Willamette, with a larger river, the Columbia, visible to the north, and beyond the rivers the mountains, Mount Hood to the east, snow-covered, conical, volcanic, the mountain a presence over the city the way no mountain was a presence over any city in Connecticut because Connecticut had no mountains, only hills, and the hills were modest and rounded and covered with trees and did not dominate the horizon the way Hood dominated Portland's.

She rented a truck at the airport. A Tacoma, like hers, the truck feeling familiar in a landscape that was not familiar, the cab and the steering wheel and the mirrors the same as the ones she sat in every day in Connecticut, the sameness a comfort, the known thing in the unknown place. She loaded the falling axe case into the bed of the truck and drove east out of the city, toward the Cascades, toward the Santiam Canyon, toward Mill City.

The drive was two hours. She took Interstate 5 south to Salem and then Highway 22 east into the mountains. The road climbed. The valley floor — the Willamette Valley, flat, agricultural, the fields green with grass seed and wheat and hazelnuts — gave way to foothills, and the foothills gave way to mountains, and the trees changed. The valley trees were Oregon white oak and bigleaf maple and ash, deciduous trees, familiar in their broadleaf architecture if not in their species. Then the conifers began. Douglas fir at first, the trees along the road, the bark visible — the deeply furrowed bark she had seen in the field guide, the bark darker than she expected, almost black on old trees, the furrows deeper than any bark she had seen in Connecticut, the bark itself a feature, a landscape on the trunk.

The trees got larger as she drove east. The roadside timber was second growth — trees sixty, eighty years old, planted or naturally regenerated after the old-growth logging of the mid-twentieth century. These trees were a hundred feet tall, two feet in diameter, tall and straight and closely spaced, the canopy high and dense, the understory dark. They were large trees by Connecticut standards and small trees by Oregon standards, and Wren understood this intellectually but did not understand it in her body, did not understand what large meant here, did not understand the scale until she rounded a curve and saw, standing alone in a clearing by the road, a single Douglas fir that had not been cut.

She pulled over. She got out of the truck. She stood on the shoulder of the road and looked at the tree.

The tree was enormous. The trunk was eight feet in diameter. The bark was a foot thick. The crown was two hundred and fifty feet above the ground — she estimated, she could not measure, the tree so tall that the top was lost in the haze of the afternoon light, the crown a dark mass against the sky, the branches beginning at a hundred feet, the first hundred feet of trunk bare, straight, vertical, a column of bark and wood that was wider than her truck and taller than any building she had ever entered.

She had never seen a tree this large. She had never imagined a tree this large. The white oaks and sugar maples and elms of Connecticut were big trees, impressive trees, trees that people stopped to look at and photograph and love. This tree was not big. This tree was beyond big. This tree was a different category of organism, a life form that existed at a scale she had not known was possible, the tree occupying a volume of space that in Connecticut would contain an entire grove, the single trunk wider than any tree she had ever climbed, the single crown larger than the canopy of a mature eastern forest stand.

She walked to the base. The root flare was a structure — a rampart, a fortress wall, the roots radiating from the trunk in buttresses that rose four and five feet above the ground, the spaces between the buttresses large enough to stand in, the roots themselves the diameter of mature Connecticut trees. She placed her hand on the bark. The bark was thick and rough and corky, the furrows deep enough to put her whole hand in, the ridges as wide as her palm, the surface of the bark a terrain, a landscape, a world of moss and lichen and insects and the accumulated biomass of centuries of growth.

She stepped back and looked up. The trunk rose above her in a straight line, slightly tapered, the bark uniform, the surface unbroken by branches for a hundred feet. Above the bare trunk the crown began — the lowest branches extending out from the trunk, themselves the size of mature Connecticut trees, each branch two feet in diameter, the branches carrying their own secondary branches and their own tertiary branches and their own foliage, each major branch a tree within the tree, the crown a forest in the air, the whole organism so large that it contained within itself the equivalent of a dozen eastern hardwoods.

This was what Glenn had cut.

The thought arrived and she stood in it. This was what Glenn had cut. Not the hundred-year-old elms and oaks and maples of Connecticut, the trees that Wren removed, the trees that were large in the context of a residential landscape but were not large in the context of what a tree could be. Glenn had cut trees like this one. Glenn had stood at the base of a tree like this one — eight feet in diameter, two hundred and fifty feet tall, five hundred years old — and had made the undercut with the falling axe and the back cut with the chainsaw and the tree had fallen and the ground had shaken and the tree had hit the ground with a force that broke the branches and drove the trunk into the soil and sent a shock wave through the earth that could be felt a quarter mile away.

She could not reconcile this with the man who had held her when she was small. The man whose hands had smelled like pitch and bar oil. The man who had grinned in the Polaroid. The man who had been gentle and quiet and had written in his notebook after dinner at the kitchen table in Mill City while Wren did her homework and Jesse read a library book. That man had cut trees like this one. That man had ended lives that had lasted half a millennium. That man had brought down organisms that had been growing since before Columbus, since before the European discovery of the continent, since before the world that Glenn lived in existed.

She stood at the base of the surviving Douglas fir and felt the scale of it and the scale of what her father had done and the scale was what she had come to Oregon to understand, the thing that Jesse had told her she needed to see, the thing that could not be understood from Connecticut, from the perspective of a hundred-year-old elm or a two-hundred-year-old oak, the thing that required standing at the base of a five-hundred-year-old tree and looking up and understanding that her father had stood at the base of trees like this and had cut them down.

She got back in the truck. She drove east. The road followed the North Santiam River, the river running fast and clear, the water the pale blue-green of glacial melt, the color different from any water she had seen in Connecticut, where the rivers ran brown with tannin and silt. The canyon narrowed. The hillsides steepened. The trees thickened — the Douglas fir mixed now with western hemlock and western red cedar, the three species intermixed, the canopy varied in color and texture, the hemlock's fine needles and drooping tips next to the fir's stiff branches and the cedar's scaly, aromatic foliage.

Mill City appeared at a bend in the river. A small town — a few streets, a gas station, a market, a post office, a school. The town was built on logging and had contracted when the logging contracted, the mills closed, the jobs gone, the population declining, the storefronts on the main street half empty. Wren drove through it and recognized nothing. She had lived here until she was twelve but the town was not in her memory the way Litchfield was in her memory — the streets were unfamiliar, the buildings unrecognizable, the landscape alien despite having been her first landscape, the place where she had learned to walk and read and ride a bike and hold a chainsaw.

She found the motel — a small place on the highway, clean, cheap, the parking lot empty except for two trucks and a van. She checked in. She carried her bag and the axe case to the room. She set the axe case on the bed and opened it and took out the falling axe and held it and looked at it in the light of the window, the light of Oregon, the light that Glenn had worked in, the light filtered through the Douglas fir canopy that Glenn had cut, the light that was different from the light in Connecticut the way everything here was different — the scale, the trees, the mountains, the rivers, the air itself, which smelled like Douglas fir pitch and wood smoke and rain, the smell of the Pacific Northwest, the smell that Wren had not known she remembered until she smelled it and the memory was there, not in her mind but in her body, in the olfactory nerve that had stored the smell of her childhood for twenty-two years and released it now, in a motel room in Mill City, the smell of home.

She set the axe on the bed. She went to the window. The view was the highway and the river and the hillside above the river, the hillside covered with trees, the trees Douglas fir, the trees young — fifty, sixty years old, second growth, the trees that had grown back after the old growth was cut, the trees that had replaced what Glenn and the other fallers had removed. The replacement was real. The trees were real. The forest was real. But it was not the same forest. It was a younger forest, a simpler forest, the trees uniform in age and size, the canopy even, the diversity reduced, the complexity that had accumulated over five hundred years of growth replaced by the uniformity of fifty years of regrowth.

She could see a clear-cut on the hillside across the river. A recent one — the trees gone, the hillside brown with soil and slash, the stumps fresh, the logging road switchbacking up the slope, the road cut into the hillside like a wound. The cut was perhaps fifty acres. Fifty acres of trees, gone. The stumps standing in rows, the rows following the contour of the slope, each stump a record, each record exposed, the rings facing the sky, the rain falling on the rings, the dissolution beginning.

Tomorrow she would find Ray Dunbar. Tomorrow she would go to the Opal Creek drainage. Tomorrow she would stand in the clear-cut where Glenn had worked and look at the stumps and feel whatever she was going to feel and the feeling would be the thing she had come for, the thing she could not get from a photograph or a notebook or an axe in a garage, the thing that required her body in the place, her feet on the ground, her hands on the bark, her eyes on the stumps.

She ate dinner at the market — a sandwich, a bag of chips, a bottle of water. She sat in the motel room and ate and looked at the axe on the bed and the window and the trees and the hillside and the clear-cut across the river and the stumps on the hillside, the stumps visible even from this distance, the pale circles on the brown soil, the records open, the rings exposed.

She went to bed. The motel was quiet. The highway was quiet. The river was not quiet — the river ran all night, the sound of water over rocks, the sound constant, the sound of the Pacific Northwest, the sound of a landscape built on water and stone and wood, the three materials that made this place what it was, and the wood was being removed and the water was still running and the stone was still there and the landscape was becoming something different, something with less wood and the same water and the same stone, and the difference was the absence, the subtraction, the trees taken and the space left and the space filling slowly with new trees that were not the same trees and would not be the same trees for five hundred years, if they were allowed to stand for five hundred years, which they probably would not be because the timber companies owned the land and the timber companies cut on a forty-year rotation and forty years was not five hundred years and would never be.

She slept. The river ran. The axe lay on the bed beside her, the edge sharp, the handle smooth, the tool resting in the landscape where it had been made to work, the tool home for the first time in twenty-two years.