Annie Proulx - Barkskins

On the pages she passed out Felix saw a jumble of new words — glacial till, ferro-humic podzols, Proterozoic intrusives, gleysols, fibrisols. He was excited by the names of the soils. This was real knowledge.

Jeanne had a question that had plagued her since she opened the envelope and saw the check fall out. “Why us?” she asked. “Why do you think Mi’kmaw people should do this?” Tom Paulin looked at Jeanne as if he were on a voyage of discovery and seeing a new land for the first time.

“It is not just Mi’kmaw people working on the project. Some are Mi’kmaw, we are even related as I’m sure you know, but Hugdis comes from Iceland and Charlene from Mexico. Tom is from the American south. In Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Cambodia, Sumatra, Vietnam, United States West Coast, many of the people working to replant forests and resurrect damaged rivers are the children of indigenous forest residents. Dispossessed people who lived in forests for millennia until recently are the ones who step forward to do the repair work. They are the ones who best understand how to heal the forest.

“It will take thousands of years for great ancient forests to return. None of us here will see the mature results of our work, but we must try, even if it is only one or two people with buckets of seedlings working to put forest pieces back together. It is terribly important to all of us humans — I can’t find the words to say how important — to help the earth regain its vital diversity of tree cover. And the forests will help us. They are old hands at restoring themselves.

“Now I’m going out to Sobeys market. Let’s try for supper at five thirty?” She left and they heard the red pickup charge up the hill.

• • •

“When she mentioned forest people,” said Jeanne to Hugdis, “I was going to ask if that idea of idyllic tribes living in wild forestland isn’t a myth, like the myth of pristine primeval forest before the whitemen came. And actually isn’t it a favor to bring those people into modern life now?”

“Jeanne!” cried Felix. “You don’t think it was a favor for the French and English to ‘bring’ the Mi’kmaq into their idea of modern life. I know you don’t.”

Jeanne blushed and tensed in embarrassment. “That was different.”

Hugdis changed the subject by telling the bizarre story of how the crazy Nazis tried to make the Bialowieza forest in Poland into the great primeval wilderness, about their efforts in back-breeding cattle to something they imagined was the extinct aurochs. And that started Tom on the sadness of Afghan people chopping down their last pitiful trees to sell for firewood; they talked until they heard the red truck come down the hill. One thing about this group, thought Felix, they really like talking about trees.

• • •

“Spaghetti tonight,” said Sapatisia, coming in with bags of food and bottles of wine. “If you don’t like the food you get to be the next cook.”

Tom Paulin refilled the woodbox, stoked the stove, Charlene put a great pot of water on to boil, Jeanne and Hugdis chopped onions and green peppers, Felix sliced a large wrinkled pepperoni sausage into near-translucent disks and found bowls and forks. When Sapatisia mixed the sauce into the pasta she set the pot directly on the table.

As they ate they talked of their lives and families, but everyone kept looking at Sapatisia. To Jeanne, who had become an instant disciple, she seemed to stand for all that was good.

It was almost dark when they finished. Tom Paulin went outside while the rest of them cleared the table and Sapatisia rinsed out the teapot. Jeanne began to wash the dishes. Tom came back in and said, “The moon is coming up.” In the window they all saw the red moon, made ragged by sea fog, rising swiftly out of the ocean, paling as it climbed. It looked close enough to hit with a harpoon and seemed to draw farther away as it rose. Jeanne knew the moon’s apparent recession was only its rise above the distorting atmosphere, but suppose, she thought, that this time it kept going, becoming smaller and more distant like the waving hand of someone on a ferry.

• • •

The old stove radiated heat as they sat with their cups of tea and talked on, picking up on their earlier conversation about the tropics.

“It seems,” said Sapatisia, “you are all more interested in tropical than boreal woodlands?”

“They are more endangered, aren’t they? I keep reading that the forests of Sumatra will be gone in twenty years,” said Jeanne. “There is a sense of urgency.”

“And you think boreal forests are less threatened? A misapprehension. You are attracted to the romance of the tropics. There has been a lot of media attention lately — Disney Company roasted for using wood pulp from poached tropical trees to make children’s books. Hardwood floor companies suddenly swearing that they only use ecologically sound plantation-grown trees.”

She went on. “Charlene, you’ve spent time in Brazil and Colombia. How many trees and how many tree species would you say grow in Amazonia?”

“My God, who knows! The diversity is so great and the different species so scattered—”

Tom interrupted. “I read the Field Museum’s report last year that said sixteen thousand species and I don’t remember how many million trees.”

Sapatisia nodded. “And they estimate around three hundred and ninety billion individual trees in the Amazon basin.”

Tom looked at her. “How the hell can we understand those numbers? North America only has one thousand species. Sixteen thousand!”

Sapatisia crooked her mouth in a wry smile. “Yes, how do we grasp these enormous diverse numbers? But the report also said that half the trees actually belong to a much smaller count of two hundred twenty-seven species — the predominants, including cacao, rubber, açai berries, Brazil nuts.”

Charlene poured more tea. “Those are the trees humans have been growing for centuries. Aren’t there more of those species because human have nurtured them?”

Sapatisia shrugged. “Possibly. We just don’t know. Some people are sure those hyperdominants were in the catbird seat because preconquest indigenous people grew them. On the other hand, some think they were always dominant and are in a naturally stable state. Quite a nice little puzzle.

“And that’s the allure,” she went on. “The slippery composition of ecosystems in general. It is uncomfortable to live in a spinning world of hallucinatory change. But how interesting it is.”

Tom Paulin leaned forward. Felix thought he had loosened up since dinner — maybe it was the wine. “I’m thinking about the other end of the Amazonian stick — not the hyperdominant species but the rarities. The extinct species. I’m thinking about ‘dark diversity.’ Like dark matter.”

“Dark diversity?” Felix liked the sound of this.

“A little like absent presence — when you pry a sunken stone from the ground the shape of the stone is still there in the hollow — absent presence. Say there is a particular rare plant that influences the trees and plants near it. Say conditions change and our rare plant goes extinct and its absence affects the remaining plants — dark diversity.”

“But if conditions change again will the absent plant return?” asked Jeanne. “Are you saying extinction is not forever?”

“Sit next to me in the van tomorrow and we’ll figure out dark diversity and dark matter. Right now I need sleep.” He thought that she was not pretty but she had that soft beautiful skin color. And feelings. And a mind.

• • •

No one could sleep under such a moon. Its bitter white light destroyed repose. It was like acid poured over the landscape, seeping into every crevice.