T. Boyle - A Friend of the Earth

So this is how it is, the sun up there in the sky, me down here thinking lions, the wind out of the southeast ripe with a smell if not of redemption then at least of renewal — and isn't it supposed to be Easter soon? — When I hear Andrea calling my name. And this is remarkable in itself, because we're shy of noon by nearly four hours and she hasn't been up this early since she reinserted herself into my crabbed life back in November. She's wearing a white flowing dress, low-cut, and half a dozen strings of multicolored beads that bring to mind hippie times, and she's lifting the hem of the dress to keep it out of the muck and moving in her gum boots with the kind of lightness and grace you wouldn't expect from an old lady. I watch her pick her way to me, and I know I must have an awestruck look on my face (for a minute there I'm not even sure who I am or what lifetime this is), and then I watch her lips moving and notice her lipstick and hear her say, "So there you are."

I lift one of my boots from the grip of the muck and point to it: "I'm pacing off the new lion compound."

She's got a hand to her forehead, screening her eyes from the sun. "Did you remember your sunblock?" And before I can answer: "You should be wearing a hat too. How many carcinomas have you had removed now-what was it, twenty-two, twenty-five?"

Andrea isn't wearing a gauze mask, by the way, and neither am I. Nor is Mac or Only or April Wind or anybody else in the house. We gave up on all that nonsense back in January, when the screen informed us that the mucosa scare was just that — a scare. It seems there was a localized outbreak of a new and especially virulent strain of the common cold on the East Coast (people died from it, mostly the old-old, but still, it was only a cold), and a certain degree of hysteria was inevitable. Mac insisted on the charade for a week or two after the news became definite, but we were all relieved when finally, one afternoon, he appeared at lunch with the bridge of his nose and thin, pale, salmon-colored lips revealed for all to see. I remember the sense of liberation I felt when I tore off my own reeking mask and buried my dental enhancements in a thick, chewy chili-cheese burrito without having to worry about getting a mouthful of gauze with every other bite.

"Is that what you came out here to tell me?" I say, and I'm irritated, just a little, because I know she's right.

"No," and her voice is soft as she moves into me with a slosh of her boots and wraps her big arms around me, "I just wanted to tell you we've got eggs for breakfast this morning."

"Eggs?" We haven't seen anything even vaguely resembling an egg since the storms started in, and forget the cholesterol, I can already picture a crisp golden three-egg omelet laid out on the plate — or, no, I'm going to have mine poached and runny, so I can really taste them. "Where'd you get them?"

She pulls back to give me a sly smile, then lifts her chin toward the wreckage of the condos across the way. The two buildings that collapsed back in November have gradually subsided into the muck, a spill of ruined sofas, exercise equipment and video attachments littering the far shore under the glare of the sun. "The good old barter system," she says. "There's a kid over there — a kid, listen to me; I mean, he's got to be forty-five or so-who says he's a big Pulchris freak, went to all the shows, lifted all the performance tracks off the Net, that sort of thing-"

I smile. "And he's got chickens."

"He wouldn't take money, but April gave him a couple of old tour T-shirts-with Mac's permission, of course."

"Nothing like living off the past," I say, and then I loop my arm through Andrea's and we slog off across the yard to the house, awash in sunshine.

Storm chasing another down the coast, the rivers flooding and the roads washed out, mudslides, rogue waves, windshield-wiper fatigue, drip, drip, drip, everybody as depressed as Swedes. Nobody liked it-except maybe the surfers. And Coast Lumber. Coast Lumber loved it. Coast Lumber couldn't have been more pleased if they'd ordered up the weather themselves. A tree-hugger by the name of Sierra Tierwater, twenty-one years old and a complete unknown--nobody's daughter, certainly-was trespassing in one of their grand old cathedral redwoods and the press was waiting for them to send a couple of their goons up to haul her down, as brutally as possible. But they weren't about to do that. Why bother? Why give her anything? All they had to do was sit back in their paneled offices and let the weather take care of her. And then, quietly, while the eco-freaks and fossil-lovers were hunkered in their apartments watching the rain drool across the windows, they could take that tree down, and all the rest like it, and put an end to the protests once and for all.

The first night, the night I drove up there to rescue her from the storm, I was so disoriented I couldn't have found her if she were standing behind the cash register of a 7-Eleven lit up under the trees. All I managed to do was add to my quotient of suffering, inhabiting yet another dark night of the soul, face to face with my own dread and loss of faith. Drunk, I stumbled around through the graveyard of the trees while the wind screamed and the branches fell. I don't know how long I was out there, but it was a relief when I finally found my way back to the car, though the car was stuck to the frame in mud and there was no hope there either. My head was throbbing, my throat so dry it was as if somebody had been working on it all night with a belt sander, and my clothes were wet through to the skin. I felt dizzy. Nauseous. I was racked with chills. I stripped off my clothes, socks as wet as fishes, underwear like something that had been used to swab out toilets, and then, thinking Sierra, Sierra, I wrapped myself up in Andrea's mummy bag, and in the next moment I was asleep.

The morning wasn't much different from the night that had preceded it. Rain fell without reason or rancor, an invisible creek blustered somewhere nearby, the car settled into the mud. There may have been a quantitative difference in the light, a gradual seep of visibility working its way into the gloom, but it wasn't much. I pulled on cold wet socks, wet jeans, wet boots and a wet T-shirt, sweater and windbreaker, and went off to find my daughter. This time I walked straight to her tree.

There were eight redwoods in her grove, two conjoined at the base and blackened by the ancient fire that had scarred the trunk of her tree, and the forest of cedar, fir, ponderosa and other pines was a maze of trunks radiating out across the hillsides from there. Except to the west, where the skin of the earth showed through and there was nothing but debris and stumps as far as you could see. This grove was scheduled next, and my daughter — if she was alive still and not a bag of lacerated skin and fragmented bone flung out of the treetops like a water balloon-was determined to stop the desecration. I was proud of her for that, but wary too. And afraid. I leaned into the wet, dark trunk and peered up into the sky-her platform, the shadowy slab of plywood lashed across two massive branches with nylon cord, was still there. I pushed back from the tree to get a better angle, blinking my eyes against the fall of the rain, and saw the bright aniline — orange flash of her tent trembling in the wind like a wave riding an angry sea. She was there. She was alive. "Sierra!" I shouted, cupping my hands.

A gust shook the treetops, and Sierra's tree quaked till I could feel the recoil of it in my feet. I looked up and there she was, her face a distant, drawn-down splash of white in a welter of rocketing green needles. And then her voice, buffeted by the winds and assaulted by the rain, came drifting down like a leaf: "Dad!" She called. "Dad!"

My heart was breaking, but she was smiling, actually smiling, if I was seeing right — and even in those days, my eyes were nothing to brag about. "Sierra!" I called, feeling as if Pd been turned inside out. I didn't want her up there. I wanted to be up there with her. I wanted to bomb Coast Lumber, neutralize their heavy machinery, throttle their stockholders. "Honey," I shouted, and my voice broke, "do you want to come down?"