Elizabeth Tallent - Mendocino Fire

She’s been warned against it — subjected to detailed lectures on safety — but on her third day Finn abandons the ropes that are her only insurance against a fall. She free-climbs into the vaults of this aerial brazil, gardens of licorice fern, couches of moss, single boughs as grand as reverend oaks, thickets, hidey-holes, moths indistinguishable from bark till they flutter away, dewy arboreal salamanders insinuated in crevices, forest after forest ascending this five-hundred-year-old tree whose lightning-charred pinnacle, visible only when fog melts away, looms far above. Finn wants to climb that spar, but decides to practice more before attempting it. The sun slants thus across a continent of cloud, igniting its upper verge in flaring platinum, streaking through space, silvering the drops beading a cobweb wide as a bedsheet, so that the spider legging it down the shining strands is forced to step high. A satellite blinks across the gray chasm between two cloud summits.

About dealing with the human threats, there have been other lectures, equally detailed. How you conduct yourself reflects on the movement. Defuse aggression, don’t feed it , Trespass told her. Try to connect.

They are Smoke River boys, the fallers, they catcall, invite her to get naked, accuse her of being a dyke, ask how long since she’s had a bath and how bad she smells, unzip their pants and urinate on the tree, promise her pizza if she comes down, say hey why don’t we all just go out for a beer, say they’ll marry her if she cleans up good. And why not come down and get it over with, this tree’s gonna die one way or the other, either rotting out from sheer age or because they cut it down, and why shouldn’t they get the wood while it’s still worth something. Finn answers according to the doctrine of nonviolence, hanging out over the platform’s edge or walking barefoot down the tree as she leans back into her ropes, trying for rapport, smiling twelve stories down with her hair falling every which way around her face, her smile slipping at Fuck you, cunt, I’m just trying to feed my kids.

The original treesit, improvised from salvaged and secondhand finds, has mostly disappeared, supplanted piecemeal by newer, safer, higher-tech materials. River says it’s like the ax in the fable whose handle gets replaced three times and head gets replaced twice but is still the same ax. Still the same treesit, the fallers thwarted for going on two years by a series of sitters. Within, the shelter is clean-swept and orderly, the medley of jars comprising Finn’s garden of alfalfa, lentil, and sunflower sprouts positioned to catch the sun, her climbing gear stashed, sleeping bag aired out and lashed tight, lanterns, laptop, cell phone, radio snug in the waterproof locker, clothes mended and folded like the housekeeping of an Amish control freak , River teases over brown rice with goat cheese and shiitakes on his next visit, adding, when Finn doesn’t laugh, “This is what comes of raising a kid around a bunch of potheads, right? This kind of rage for order.” He licks his chopsticks clean, studying her tattered shirt. “Why ‘Fire’?”

Finn, who has never been sure why, doesn’t answer.

“Be mysterious then.”

He lights the joint, draws the smoke in and holds it, slouching into a more restful pose against Tara’s trunk, and so embracing is his well-being that Finn breaks the fundamental law of her private universe, taking the joint from between his fingers, sipping the smoke, angling her head back to rest against Tara’s bark alongside his, slipping into the dream he’s in the middle of, the dream Mary was continually dreaming, the dream Finn swore she’d never get sucked into, but she’s been lonely in this tree whose life depends on her, and he is the lover who’s come to spend the night, his closeness so right , his company so easeful it makes her want to laugh — she would laugh, except he’s talking again. “Interesting being alive. So far it’s interesting, though there’s been what you’d call long stretches of despair. I forget about them when I’m with you. You’re like the anti-despair angel, the way you’ve held on. The commitment. One hundred forty-three days,” he says. “The doubters said you wouldn’t last two weeks.”

He’s older. Emotion has had its way with River’s face, strenuously so, inscribing brackets at the corners of the witty mouth. An earring in the ear toward her, a silver lightning bolt visible only when he drags hard and the ember sparkles. Flannel shirt, mussed dreadlocks with the prized loofah-like gnarliness. When she waves it off he smokes the joint down, pinching it out and tucking the tiny burnt tip into the pocket of his jeans. With most visitors she remains covertly vigilant for the clumsiness or oversight that will jeopardize either the guest or her precariously cobbled-together shelter; his meticulousness soothes her. They sit side by side, backs to the tree, no movement in the forest stretching away below them, no wind bothering Tara’s branches, the world asleep as far as they can see.

Finn says, “I dreamed I came down and there was this horse waiting for me with a look like Come on, get on , and I did and rode it out of the woods into a city with miniature people in it, who came up only to the horse’s knees and kept saying Hurry! hurry! like I was late.” Finn refrains from saying Late for something wonderful , though that was how it had seemed in the dream, and why this shyness about wonderful , does she think he’ll think wonderful means him? Such is her trepidation — she’s beginning to concede she’s in love — that what she says next is equally likely to mislead. “We can’t have children, can we? People like us, I mean. Who think, who are aware of what’s coming. Who wouldn’t want a child to live through that.”

River says, “That would keep me up at night, I guess, if I’d ever wanted a kid. But I haven’t.”

Sounds like you might, though.

Some risks are worth running.

Things she wants him to say, that he doesn’t say.

He says, “What do you think, can you get through the winter? They’ll mostly leave you alone in the winter. Spring’s when they try stuff like siccing the sheriff’s department on us, like sending in Climber Dan up in the dark to catch treesitters asleep. Spring is when we worry.” River straightens and stretches before saying, “All treesitters dream about the ground. Once you’re on the ground you’re gonna dream about the tree.” After a while he says, “‘Fire.’ Whoever wore that shirt before wanted to save live things from fire.”

Last night the rain came down so hard a bird couldn’t fly through it, literally. You think a bird won’t make any sound when it hits, but it cracks like a baseball against the plywood and lies there flattened out with its wings spread wide, so when I picked it up I had to fold its wings in, like wet paper fans that might tear. When it warmed up in my hands, to my complete amazement it wasn’t dead. The thing has a heart the size of a dime, you’d think it would make the softest little bumps. But no. The body was so light, but inside it was earthquakes. It’s called a fog wren around here, though its right name is marbled murrelet, and it’s almost extinct, since what it needs is the sheltered horizontal branch of an old-growth tree. About this it’s very particular, it’s not capable of adapting to forests devoid of old growth. It doesn’t make a nest, just presses its tiny self down into the moss, bringing all its strength to bear, but how much strength is that? The impression it makes in the moss, no deeper than if you pressed your hand against it and counted to ten, that’s where it lays its eggs. So you can guess what wind does, any wind at all, and the thing about Tara is, this wren might have wanted one of her branches because there are some nice big horizontal ones, but all her sister trees that once filtered the wind are long gone. She’s all alone and gets all the wind. Wind that will for sure roll the eggs right out of any hollow pressed into moss. What else can I tell you? How we are all to blame for that bird’s not knowing where to go? How I would have let her nest in my hand if I could have? How you would have too, if only you could have seen her?