into the back of a pickup truck with my father and other men and went to work. It was raining, and we all wrapped ourselves in black waterproof ponchos. The road was cut into deep ruts by the heavy tractors, and the truck slid and lurched. In the back, we constantly fell against each other, and there was a great deal of cursing, which distressed my father because I was with him.
I asked him how long it would take us to get where we were going. I was ashamed of myself, realizing that I did not know even this basic detail of my father’s daily life.
‘In this weather,’ he said, ‘almost an hour.’ From the way he said it, he seemed to expect me to be impressed. In fact, I was dismayed.
‘You know,’ my father said, ‘when I started logging, it took maybe fifteen minutes to get to where we were cutting. Every year it takes longer. It’s amazing how much of the forest we have cleared.’
And as we traveled, the forest began to show its scars. On both sides of the road there appeared vast areas from which every tall tree had vanished. What grew instead was a thin green skin of scrub and creeper. Above these shaven landscapes the gray sky was suddenly huge.
Farther on, the forest showed its open wounds. It had been scalped. Vast hillsides had been reduced to red mud and blackened stumps. Here and there, low cliffs of rock poked through the soil like naked bone. I simply stared at all this, too dazed to speak.
We arrived at last at what Father called ‘the camp.’ The rain had stopped, but the air was still wet and heavy, and getting hot. Steam rose from the soaked earth and from puddles the color of tea. I threw off the heavy poncho and jumped out of the truck to stretch my aching legs. I looked around and saw that I had been brought to a place where a terrible battle had been fought. Looking around at where I might spend the rest of my working life, I felt as though my heart were dying.
Our truck was one of many parked at the edge of an area of leveled gravel about the size of a big city plaza. Along one side of this space there were several metal sheds, blue or yellow, all blistered and streaked with rust. They had numbers painted on them, but the numbers were not in any particular order. Some of the sheds had great openings in their sides that could be closed with heavy roller blinds made of steel strips. Each shed like this had a huge workbench in front of it rigged up out of scaffolding poles, timber, and sheets of steel. These benches had roofs made of filthy, heavy plastic sheets bolted onto scaffolding.
On the workbenches were lumps of engine guts, dismantled chain saws, the broken arms of machinery. Already, men were working at these benches, wrestling with screaming power drills that hung from chains, welding in storms of brilliant sparks, bent over lathes cooled by jets of dirty water.
On the opposite side of the camp stood a row of huge, damaged machines smeared with red mud. Many had terrible weapons attached to their snouts: thick, gleaming spikes of steel, pairs of jaws fed by rubber hoses, scoop-shaped blades. Some had had wheels amputated. Their stumps were propped on wooden blocks, bleeding oil. They all looked like casualties of a disastrous war. Men in orange overalls climbed over and wriggled under these wounded machines, reaching into their innards. I remembered animal corpses I had seen in the forest, and the ants and maggots that were working on them.
Of the forest, here, there was no trace. No, that’s not quite true: I was standing in its ruin. Beyond the camp, in every direction, there was a wasteland: stumps whose roots groped the air, shattered branches rotting in puddles of brown water, torn bark all over the place. The remains of fires smoked the air, which was dense with the stink of sour ashes and diesel oil.
My father and another man were unloading crates of bottled water and big plastic canisters of fuel from the back of the truck.
‘Where are the trees, Father?’ I asked
I asked him how long it would take us to get where we were going. I was ashamed of myself, realizing that I did not know even this basic detail of my father’s daily life.
‘In this weather,’ he said, ‘almost an hour.’ From the way he said it, he seemed to expect me to be impressed. In fact, I was dismayed.
‘You know,’ my father said, ‘when I started logging, it took maybe fifteen minutes to get to where we were cutting. Every year it takes longer. It’s amazing how much of the forest we have cleared.’
And as we traveled, the forest began to show its scars. On both sides of the road there appeared vast areas from which every tall tree had vanished. What grew instead was a thin green skin of scrub and creeper. Above these shaven landscapes the gray sky was suddenly huge.
Farther on, the forest showed its open wounds. It had been scalped. Vast hillsides had been reduced to red mud and blackened stumps. Here and there, low cliffs of rock poked through the soil like naked bone. I simply stared at all this, too dazed to speak.
We arrived at last at what Father called ‘the camp.’ The rain had stopped, but the air was still wet and heavy, and getting hot. Steam rose from the soaked earth and from puddles the color of tea. I threw off the heavy poncho and jumped out of the truck to stretch my aching legs. I looked around and saw that I had been brought to a place where a terrible battle had been fought. Looking around at where I might spend the rest of my working life, I felt as though my heart were dying.
Our truck was one of many parked at the edge of an area of leveled gravel about the size of a big city plaza. Along one side of this space there were several metal sheds, blue or yellow, all blistered and streaked with rust. They had numbers painted on them, but the numbers were not in any particular order. Some of the sheds had great openings in their sides that could be closed with heavy roller blinds made of steel strips. Each shed like this had a huge workbench in front of it rigged up out of scaffolding poles, timber, and sheets of steel. These benches had roofs made of filthy, heavy plastic sheets bolted onto scaffolding.
On the workbenches were lumps of engine guts, dismantled chain saws, the broken arms of machinery. Already, men were working at these benches, wrestling with screaming power drills that hung from chains, welding in storms of brilliant sparks, bent over lathes cooled by jets of dirty water.
On the opposite side of the camp stood a row of huge, damaged machines smeared with red mud. Many had terrible weapons attached to their snouts: thick, gleaming spikes of steel, pairs of jaws fed by rubber hoses, scoop-shaped blades. Some had had wheels amputated. Their stumps were propped on wooden blocks, bleeding oil. They all looked like casualties of a disastrous war. Men in orange overalls climbed over and wriggled under these wounded machines, reaching into their innards. I remembered animal corpses I had seen in the forest, and the ants and maggots that were working on them.
Of the forest, here, there was no trace. No, that’s not quite true: I was standing in its ruin. Beyond the camp, in every direction, there was a wasteland: stumps whose roots groped the air, shattered branches rotting in puddles of brown water, torn bark all over the place. The remains of fires smoked the air, which was dense with the stink of sour ashes and diesel oil.
My father and another man were unloading crates of bottled water and big plastic canisters of fuel from the back of the truck.
‘Where are the trees, Father?’ I asked
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