The ruins of time builds mansions in Eternity.

[click pics for larger versions]

This is a quote from a letter about the death of a friend by William Blake. Since the last entry, I've been engaged in such demolition-construction. A week ago, Peter emailed me from British Columbia with news of the death of Kenneth Law, a man who lived with us on the farm in 1973 whom I hadnt heard from for the last 25 years. Peter said there was to be a memorial for him in Lund on Saturday and another in Vancouver on Tuesday. Kenneth's presence came back to me with a shock. I groped through the old albums and journals strewn on the floor around my desk and found pictures and stories, some in his hand. I decided to collect them in a new weblog and see about making a quick trip north.

Now I sit typing by a window at the edge of the ocean with a view of Harwood Island floating in a flat grey expanse of water and sky emitting a horizontal spearpoint of brilliant white light. This is the home of Peter and his wife Margaret, a cabin with a woodstove, an outhouse and crumbly foundations where they have lived since Jan and I moved back to California in 1979. While they both are at work in town massaging patients, I 've been reading poems about aging, death and childbirth by Margaret and two poets she introduced me to: Susan Cohen and Mary Tilberg, who lives up the coast.

My shoulders and thighs still ache after yesterday's excursion in the snow through the Smith Range. The plan was for Peter, Steve Ervington and me to go cross country skiing on logging roads and the Sunshine Coast Trail, but for most of the way either the trail was too steep or the snow was too shallow, and we ended up carrying the skis and slogging in the cold for most of the day. Rediscovering the trail after having lost it just before dark reduced the impulse to complain during the last grueling two and a half hours.

The closeness of the sky, the brevity of day, the muffled silence of the woods, the floating ash-sized snow flakes, the fir boughs drooping with their loads, the longing for the stove recalled the long winters that gave character to our sojourn in the wilderness during the 1970's. We've come back every year, but only in the summertime.

The day before fulfilled the purpose of the trip and more. The sky was a rare December blue. After Margaret's biscuits and Turkish coffee, Peter and I drove to Knoll House, the present family vacation home, and walked the new trails I cut last August. They felt seasoned and permanent, opening parts of the bush I had never ventured into before. The tree trail took us to

a grove of conky old-growth firs on the edge of the bluff overlooking Savary Island and the Straight of Georgia. The large clearing that Joe and I had hacked out over the past few years to open the view from the house felt like a spacious arena. Arbutus trees were fruiting in huge clumps of fat flourescent red berries, perhaps a response to an alarming decline and die-off the past

couple of years. Drunk on the fruit, the birds lost their shyness: ravens croaked, towhees flocked, a large unidentified yellow-bellied fellow watched from high in a fir. We skirted the house and took the moss trail down the north slope past the huge old-growth firs that I'd cleared and climbed around with Ethan, my grandson.






















Next we drove for an early lunch to Nancy's Bakery in Lund, the village silent and pristine, a contrast to the hubbub of summer, the restored waterwheelhouse and boardwalk thick with frost.

Back up the road, with permission of the present owners, we roamed around the "Marx Farm." During the time we lived there it was called the Bleiler farm, for the owners prior to us. I hadn't revisted in ten years. The lower field was almost grown in with alders, the rest of the 20 acres covered with oystering paraphernalia, old trucks and boats, commercial signs and other detritus.


The folks who had bought the place still lived in the old house, keeping chickens and a horse, doing some gardening, staying close to the land and its past.


Though the lawn, the sandbox, the beautiful cedar fence in the back yard were completely overgrown with brambles and brush, the apple trees that were ancient when we lived there still thrived--even the one that Paul and I and Raymond had split the winter of 1971-2 by falling a huge alder on it and closely missing the house. I remembered our exertions to jack up the half of the trunk that remained connected only by a bit of bark and cambium and to wire it back to the main stem.

I remembered how I considered that effort unlikely to repair what little remained of our blasted marriage.


But it has held.

Missing from the yard was the gate built the following year by Kenneth, when he lived on the farm and helped bring us through yet another marriage and family crisis. He made it out of cedar staves with a heart-shaped peephole to keep the goats out and welcome friends. Peter remembered it and remembered living in the loft of the barn together with a different Margaret and planting a huge garden between the Winter of Raymond and Paul and the winter of Kenneth.

We made our way across the pasture to the barn which probably got its last coat of red paint in 1978, patted the stately horse, looked into the ruin of the cabin that Kenneth had turned into an exquisite shrine, and saw the ladder-staircase to the loft he'd built nearly covered with trash.


We also admired the tall fir whose lowest 150 feet of trunk I'd driven spikes into to get to the top for a view of the farm below and the ocean beyond.


It had always been the tallest tree on the property, but part of the surrounding forest. Saved by those spikes, it remained the lone survivor of the logging done just after we sold in 1988.

We walked out of the woods and drove to Rosemary's house on Ralph Road, the location for the Lund memorial.

Peter had informed me last week of another event taking place this afternoon: a community meeting in the Lund Hotel to organize opposition to plans for logging the Rasmussen Forest, a large parcel containing several rare patches of old growth timber just north of Heinz's former place, recently purchased by the poet whose work Margaret had showed me.

By the time we arrived, the meeting had been in progress for more than an hour and the small hotel conference room was packed with 70 people. Jack was chairing. Pam was telling an approving audience about the growth of the local Canadian Sierra Club chapter in the last year, so successful that it had received an award from the National. The representative of the local Provincial legislator provided information on Ministries to engage. Heinz gave an eloquent speech on the value of the few old growth trees remaining in this area--who would it hurt to leave them standing, he asked. All the issues that we hopelessly tried to confront in the 70'scame up, but now there was a sense of determination and confidence that I never expected to find. The people attending were between 3 months (Sage) and 93 years (Effie) old, there was a good representation of young people who had grown up here in my son's generation, of local oldtimers, and of new residents with energy and ability--retirees from the outside world who have settled in the area not for jobs but for its natural beauty. No one demanded a cessation of logging, just the use of selective and sustainable forestry answerable to the community.

Eagle Walz, creator of the Sunshine Coast trail and tireless negotiator with government and logging company officials, framed a resolution declaring a moratorium on old-growth logging until an adequate forest plan for the peninsula is developed. It passed unanimously except for two nay votes by Percy and Neal, ex-fishermen and loggers. The meeting ended with a flurry of financial contributions and signings of petitions and mailing lists.

After the meeting, Eagle invited Steve and me to the pub for a beer and a report on more grim news about the rescinding of agreements he had secured to protect the Sunshine Coast trail. He also had news about support of the plan for protecting Milennium Park between Cranberry and Willingdon Beach from logging by Weyerhauser.

After the sunset, we went to Steve and Juliet's house for a dinner of lamb and greek salad. The discussion of new demographics and prospects for political change left me encouraged. Perhaps the renewal that I had prayed for in 1971 was coming to pass.
_____
Solstice

Sap down.
Morning dark.
Rooster sleeps, infant coughs, wife groans.
Stove cold, pipes froze, truck stuck.
Uncoffied and late to work.

Screen Tender empties sewer samples:
"Groundwood down for cleanup
Pollution controls suspended
Today we flush the system out."

Thousands of gallons of woodpulp and bleach
Zinc hydrosulfite, sodium sulphate
Slosh through the flume into the saltchuck
Pablum for fish, heavily spiced.

In the Town Crier photo the Forestry Superintendant
Stands proud on the butt of a thousand-year-old fir.
They've finished logging the old growth grove at Goat Lake
It was one of the last virgin stands on the coast of B. C.

Cruised, felled, limbed, bucked
Skidded, yarded, loaded, trucked
Dumped, boomed, sorted, tugged
Towed, spiked, barked, lugged
Ripped, slashed, cross-cut.

Pulped, shredded, screened
Bleached, tested, cleaned
Blended, thickened, died
Rolled, pressed, dried
Wound, rewound, finished.

The Times is all that's left
For breakfast.

When darkness holds dominion here tonight
We'll find and cut a sapling hemlock tree
To celebrate renewal of the light
And hope for rebirth of the land and sea.