For most of my adult life I've lived on fourteen hectares of mixed old-growth rain forest on the west slope of the Cascade Mountains in the western
United States. The house sits on a bench of land about six meters above and fifty meters from the McKenzie River, a white-water tributary of the
Williamette, itself a tributary of the Columbia.
It is still typical of this part of the state of Oregon for a wanderer to find patches of primordial woods a few minutes' walk from the edge of
the road. A privilege of living here over the past twenty-five years has been the sometimes startling nearness of wild animals -- elk, mountain lion,
black bear, river otters, a large elusive weasel called a disher, harlequin ducks. Every September
chinook salmon the length of my extended arm deposit eggs on a gravel bar in river shallows in front of the house. From that spot I can see
two active osprey nests. I don't keep a bird list, but if I did it would be long. This morning I heard a belted kingfisher, ravens, a pileated
woodpecker, Swainson's thrushes, the ubiquitous robin, and an Eastern kingbird call out. This afternoon I watched twenty-some swallows hunting the surface
of the river for insects, each of the three species -- cliff, violet-green and tree -- swooping in a slightly different way.
When I was a young man I wanted to impress people with the wildness of this spot we'd found. Now, even as my knowledge of it continues to deepen, and as it
lies threatened like a thousand other natural places by the development rationale of capitalism, I have grown oddly silent. From the
outside, it must seem I've grown philosophical about loss.
Our house is walled and stacked with many hundreds of books -- plays, novels, collections of poems, histories. They lie about marked or open in every room. I
know and have appreciated, in places as different as the Vatican Museum and the streets of Nairobi, the depth of human culture, its intractable and
beguiling intricacy. The landscape in which I live is as deep. And it resists as steadily the intent of Enlightenment philosophers to order the chaos. I find
in the fabric of these woods -- in their colors, textures, movement, perfumes, their sonic amplitudes -- a continuation of nearly everything I read. Among the vivid and
undelineated insects, in the image of a coyote moving smartly through stormlight after a rain or an osprey tearing a fish out of the river, looking at my own
fistful of elderberries, I find an amplification of every kind of civilized knowledge I've gained, from Bach to Vermeer to Stephen Hawking.
The sobering realization that the wildness of this landscape is diminishing, its edges snipped continually by timber companies and real estate
developers, haunts me daily. I am no cynic but no optimist either about the temperament of Congress. My arguments for the preservation of this land, based on
Enlightenment principles of dignity and justice, on a plea to conserve the deeply complex, "quarkish" patterns inherent in what we call "the woods," would
fall dead to the floor.
So for the most part I am silent in public venues. Like other writers, I console myself with the adage that the problem can be attacked in myriad ways, and that I am
better at some of these other ways.
But my silence still wrankles me.
This past spring, within the same few days, I saw a mountain lion come down to the far bank of the river to drink at dusk and woke at two in the morning to
hear a bear dismantling my wooden compost bin. Standing on the porch, shooing the cinnamon-coloured black bear, I had the same thought I'd had seeing the large cat,
who bounded across a road to reach the water; the country is shrinking. Digging down through my emotions after these two incidents, I found something
unexpected: grief.
It is grief that makes me silent.
Over the years -- I know because I've counted -- fewer salmon have been coming back here to spawn. Fewer birds now migrate in the summer. I've walked
thousands of hectares of nearby old-growth clearcuts, morose with disaffection, as tight in the chest as a distraught relative. It is not nostalgia I feel,
any more than I would feel nostalgia over the loss of my fingers to a power tool. It is grief. Sensing the mountain lion and the bear are now cornered has
compounded the grief.
When people visit here, there is little of the cause of this sadness I can point to. What most see is beautiful and overwhelming. I cannot show them a kind of history,
the long process I know of life in a forest by a river. It is this deep, sprawling, diverse natural history, not objects (a bear, a fish, a bird, a tree) that is
disappearing. And because my history is entwined in this history I can't purge the grief I feel unless I obliterate the affection in those memories. It is
not a grief another geography, a change of scene, can cure.
I want to say to the bear, They want your home, you know. Hold out as long as yu can. Eat my table leavings if you must. A lot of us will be going down
the river with you.
The last unyielding days will be beautiful, I believe. I do not think the bear will ever honor the request to dance.