The Forest Prime Evil Page 6

  “Where are you going?”

  “To get Teller.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “No need,” she said.

  I didn’t push it. Maybe Ashe didn’t want me to know about the cannabis. She went one way, and I went the other. I can’t say I liked that. I didn’t muse for long, though. A singer with a lot of lung, and a lot of soul, stepped in on my thoughts. She knew her Joni Mitchell, and she knew her cause; words for a forest primeval. I listened to the lament of paradise lost, and the erecting of parking lots.

  There was an encore last verse, and everyone joined in. Even me.

  6

  AT 11:00 P.M. only one motel in Garberville had a front desk clerk on duty. At that hour, all the other motels were ring-the-doorbell operations, and since I didn’t feel like doing a price comparison, it was easy selecting my home for the night.

  Since there were no bars on my cell phone, my only demand of the clerk was to give me a room with a working telephone. After ascertaining that my credit was good, he did. Miss Tuntland was used to me calling late, even seemed to prefer our talking in the quiet hours when we didn’t have to juggle our sentences between her other business calls.

  “Mr. Winter, I presume?” she said.

  “Dr. Livingstone to you,” I said.

  “That’s right,” she said. “You’re calling from the Heart of Darkness, aren’t you?”

  “No. The forest primeval.”

  “Same thing, isn’t it?”

  I wanted to discount her words as mere flippancy, but her inquiry had an edge of seriousness I couldn’t just slide by. There was some truth to her literary allusion, something Conradesque about Humboldt County. Heart of Greeness, maybe. Northern Humboldt County is reputed to be home to Bigfoot. Sasquatch legends are not the tales of the urban East, or the rural Midwest, or even the Badlands. In Marin or in Hollywood no one looks in the backyard almost expecting to sight a monster, or at least a nonhuman monster. The northern woods, with its big trees and wide spaces and rugged terrain, offers the illusion of still being largely unconquered, a landscape of the unknown.

  “Tell me about Mistah Kurtz.”

  My cases were more than vicarious sleuthing for Miss Tuntland. She wasn’t so much my switchboard as an answering board. People think I work alone. Maybe I even promote that impression. But I know that’s not true. So does she.

  “There’s been plenty written about the Green Man,” Miss Tuntland said, the slightest bit of satisfaction in her voice, “but most of the pieces read like public relations releases. Shepard usually orchestrated his talking to the media while he was out planting. He always involved the reporters in his work, made them toil at his side. It was a brilliant tactic: they gained an appreciation for his labors, and invariably their copy was sympathetic.”

  “No dirt on him?”

  “Only the kind shoveled. He talked a lot about trees, but not much about himself. Even most of his quotes weren’t his own.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He always had some homily or proverb appropriate to a situation, a stock body of passages all having to do with trees. It was difficult getting a quote out of him that wasn’t someone else’s. While looking for the Green Man, I had to keep sweeping away other people’s leaves.”

  That was in keeping with what Teller had said, I thought, Shepard emulating other tree planters and trying to live up to the historical image of the Green Man.

  “Anything stand out in his background? Upbringing? Love interests?”

  “He came out of the middle class, from the Midwest, and a middle-of-the-road family. Those who’ve traced his roots have scared up the usual anecdotal stories: how he tended to fallen birds and was helpful and considerate. I even read one account that seemed to be the exact opposite of the George Washington myth: instead of young George telling his father, I cannot tell a lie, I chopped down the cherry tree, in the Green Man story there’s some fable about young Christopher confessing to his father that it was he who had dug up the front lawn and planted a tree.”

  “Maybe the story’s true.”

  “That from the man who’s been coaching my cynicism for a decade?”

  I told her about his proclivity for imitation. Maybe he had decided to duplicate the George Washington story but with his own twist.

  Although Miss Tuntland was in no way satisfied she had gotten “to the roots” of the Green Man, she had managed to document his two decades of tree planting. His work had kept him crisscrossing continents. He typically stayed with a project from six months to a year and in the last three years had done plantings in the Sahara, and Kenya, and China, and Poland.

  “Where did he plan to go next?” I asked.

  “To work on his Green Belt,” she said. “Shepard envisioned a forest extending around the world, from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon, and from Dublin to Vladivostok.”

  I whistled. “He didn’t think small.”

  “No,” Miss Tuntland said, “he didn’t.”

  We talked about Sequoia Summer, its participants, and all the emotions it had stirred up. In the small quiet that followed, Miss Tuntland divined my need for more help.

  “What now?”

  “Ashe O’Conner,” I said.

  “The Green Goddess,” said Miss Tuntland.

  “The same,” I said. “I’m curious as to how frequently Ashe has visited Humboldt County in the last few months. Unless redwoods have been given the right to vote, I don’t know why she’d be spending so much time here.”

  “I’ll check on that,” she said. “And, Mr. Winter?”

  “Yes?”

  “I would remind you what invariably happens to mortals when they consort with the gods.”

  She didn’t give me a chance to respond; she chose that moment to pass on my messages. Miss Tuntland said she had hinted to my callers that I was attending a Boy Scout jamboree. To me, though, she wasn’t quite so nonchalant. I told her good-bye and heard that little pause from her, the one I’ve come to know is significant.

  “Watch your ax,” she said, then hung up.

  I was awake before the sun and went down to the front desk to ask for a breakfast recommendation. The switchboard was beeping, and the clerk kept smiling and holding his finger up, my signal to wait for him to clear the PBX of calls.

  “Breakfast?” I asked, just getting the word in before the interruptions started anew.

  “Woodrow’s,” he said apologetically and raised his finger once more, this time to point south.

  The morning was cold. I hugged my brown Harris tweed to my body, and walked uptown. Garberville doesn’t have that many restaurants, but I still managed to miss the one I was looking for, and had to backtrack. I had been looking for Woodrow’s, figuring some male proprietor had immortalized a greasy spoon with his first name. But two words had gone into the restaurant’s naming, not one: Wood Rose.

  The Wood Rose was a funky little restaurant with good smells, and good wood, and what looked to be good food. There wasn’t any hostess, but a waitress smiled and signaled for me to take an open chair at an already occupied table.

  I hesitated for a moment. The table was meant for a deuce. In San Francisco I would have waited for a table to vacate, or a spot at the counter to open. But when in Garberville . . . I walked over to the table and cleared my throat. A paper came down, and big glasses looked up. He was about forty-five, had a large nose, a bemused expression, and the ubiquitous town beard. He was slouched back into the vinyl, using his denim jacket as a pillow. Tricolored sneakers pointed out from under the table’s edge.

  “The waitress suggested,” I said, pointing to the chair, not finishing my thought.

  He looked to the chair, and so did I. Then, with his red, white, and blue footwear, he eased the chair out from under the table. “Property is theft,” he said. “Sit.”

  “These days,” I said, taking the chair, “I wonder if Marx wouldn’t say the same thing about property taxes.”

  He smil
ed, continued to hold his newspaper for a moment, then slowly put it down, apparently in favor of me.

  “Not so loud,” he said. “The only things I know about Marx, I learned in here. This is where the Trots, and the Marxists, and the anarchists, and the socialists, and the revisionists, all like to rehash the ills of the world.”

  “And which ist are you?”

  “Artist,” he said, laughing.

  I gave him a disbelieving look, and he held up his right hand. “What kind of artist?” I asked.

  “Glass, mostly,” he said, running his hand through his beard. “Large pieces.”

  “Your stuff shown in town?”

  He gave a little laugh. “No,” he said. “Artists live where they can afford the rent, and those are usually places that don’t have art galleries. Oxymoronic truth. Or maybe just moronic. My work mostly sells in San Francisco. People have money there.”

  I identified myself as a San Franciscan, but not one with money. We exchanged names. His was Randall Maroney, but he said everyone called him Maroon. Colorful nickname. Maroon recommended the cheese-and-mushroom omelet with the home fries, which saved me from having to look at the menu.

  “You an ist?” he asked, a gentle enough way of inquiring about what I was doing in town.

  “A nonexhibitionist.”

  He laughed and didn’t pry any further. Privacy was respected in Humboldt. With its tradition of marijuana farmers, people had learned to ask no questions and hear no lies.

  I gradually steered the conversation over to the Green Man. Maroon seemed more than happy with the topic. “Lots of talk after his death,” he said. “For two, three mornings here, he was what went down with my coffee.”

  I tried to draw him out. “A lot of loggers cheering, I guess?”

  He shook his head. “Not really. Some of the Paul Bunyan posers were glad to see him go, but it’s not like the lumber companies declared a holiday or anything.”

  “That’s how it is with death,” I said. “Everyone is suddenly willing to let bygones be bygones.”

  Maroon shook his head slightly. “It wasn’t quite that way,” he said.

  “Then how was it?”

  He looked at me for a second and wondered who the hell I was to be asking these kinds of questions, and where my curiosity was leading. I hadn’t exactly finessed the interview and had the feeling I wouldn’t be getting much more in the way of answers without giving something in return.

  “Answer to your ist question,” I said. “Freelance journalist. I’m wondering if there isn’t a story here.”

  Maroon relaxed a little. “I’m not your best source,” he said.

  “I’m not your best journalist,” I said. “If I manage to find a home for this piece, I’ll cite you as an ‘uninformed source.’ ”

  That drew a little chuckle. “It’s probably nothing,” said Maroon, discounting the story with both his voice and his hands, “but I heard someone say that the Green Man had been getting cozy with Trans-Miss.”

  I looked properly skeptical. Even reportorial, I hoped. “Who told you that?” I asked. “A fantasist?”

  His beard didn’t hide Maroon’s smile. “No, I don’t think so. Environmentalist, yes. He said that Shepard was a real loose cannon, that he didn’t understand the politics of old growth, and that the only thing he knew how to do was plant trees.”

  “So how did that put him in bed with Trans-Miss?”

  “I’m not saying it did. But there was some guilt by association. What I’ve heard is that the Green Man visited the offices of Trans-Mississippi a few days before his death. Went there and asked for a tour, if you can believe that. He wanted to see their tree-planting operation.”

  I was still playing hard to convince. “Maybe he wanted to better know the enemy.”

  “Maybe,” said Maroon. “Most people in the movement will tell you that Shepard was an environmental martyr and that he gave his life to the cause. There has been a long history of that. I hear our Green Man liked to talk about the death of Chico Mendes.”

  Mendes had died in Brazil. He had been trying to organize the rubber tappers and, in his own way, to halt the deforestation of the Amazon. In that case, justice had been as slow as deforestation was quick.

  “I’m a little dubious about martyr-of-the-month flavors,” I said, still playing the cynic. “Doesn’t anyone die of natural causes anymore?”

  “A branch through the head isn’t exactly old age,” said Maroon, “but I know what you mean. Lots of theories. Some say the Green Man was killed by the FBI, and some say he was a CIA plant killed by a cabal of extreme Greens.”

  “I suppose it’s just a matter of time before someone says little green men were in on the killing of the big Green Man,” I said.

  I was warming up to the curmudgeon role. As long as I kept the conversation light, and not threatening, I figured Maroon would keep talking.

  My food arrived. I took a bite; then my fork took on a life of its own. I was hungry, and the food was good. Between bites, I continued to ask questions. “Wasn’t there some group that claimed divine intervention?” I said. “Thought the hand of God was behind the spearing?”

  Maroon nodded. “The Third Day,” he said, “and the Right Reverend Reginald Sawyer. You know about them and him?”

  “Genesis,” I said. “On the third day God created among other things trees. Same God said man should have dominion over the earth. Thus, the Third Day.”

  “Also known as Three-D,” said Maroon. “Those kind of glasses are even better than rose-colored.”

  “Conservative, huh?”

  Maroon whistled. “Conservative understates him by about a century or two. We’re talking about a frontier mind-set, a real atavist.”

  Another ist for my list. I took a bite of the home fries and was glad I didn’t have to interrupt my eating with more questioning. Maroon was on a roll, and I had an appetite.

  “Sawyer seems to have a personal vendetta against the forest,” he said. “His God, he likes to say, abhors pantheism. He thinks old growth is a new age plot designed to draw the young and impressionable away from the true faith back to the days of tree worship.”

  I chewed a little more, and chewed on what Sawyer sermonized. I’d heard an idle mind is the devil’s playground. But now I was being told it was old growth.

  7

  SEVEN MILES NORTH of Garberville I exited at Sylvandale and started on a stretch of road called the Avenue of the Giants. Physically, the road isn’t far from 101. But there are special places along its thirty-three-mile expanse that call for you to stop and linger, that allow you escape into another world.

  “The redwoods,” wrote John Steinbeck in Travels with Charley, “once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time. . . . The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect. Respect—that’s the word. One feels the need to bow to unquestioned sovereigns.”

  Steinbeck devoted a number of his travel pages to the Sequoia sempervirens, gave more words to those trees than he did to most states. He assumed that the redwoods would be the high point of the trip for his French poodle, Charley. What dog, he reasoned, wouldn’t see a waiting redwood as a heavenly vision? What greater deed could a canine aspire to than to sprinkle at the foot of the granddaddy of all trees?

  Scouting for just the right tree, Steinbeck finally found one to his liking, a three-hundred-foot giant. He let Charley out of his vehicle, expecting a historic moment. But Charley didn’t respond as expected. It took all of Steinbeck’s urging and guile to get Charley to do his oblations at the foot of the redwood. You can lead a dog to the brink, but you can’t make
him make water.

  Sixty-five million years ago the dinosaurs disappeared. Redwoods are almost that old. Their ancient grandeur speaks of that prehistoric legacy. They are eldritch presences, out of proportion to human sensibilities. But it is more than their gargantuan appearance that people find disquieting; their aura of anomaly and mystery make them stand out as much as their height. The oldest known coast redwood was estimated to be 2,200 years old when it was chopped down in 1932. But even that figure might be misleading. Some contend that redwoods are immortals.

  It is not simple to kill a redwood. Early settlers were frustrated by the trees. They cut them down while clearing fields, only to have them rise from their stumps again. These were trees that refused to die, trees unlike any the farmers had dealt with before. Their stump sprouting wasn’t new life but a continuation of the old. To the dramatic, there was a measure of resurrection in these trees. Determining the life and death of a redwood almost becomes a moot point, even if that notion is not agreeable to the human psyche. Immortality, long the psychological domain of Homo sapiens, is encroached upon by the physical reality of these tall trees. Counting their rings and years tells only a part of the story. Within the circles, a sylvanist might discern the climatic events of a thousand years, while a poet might read the history of the ages.

  And what of the Green Man? I thought. How would I count his rings?

  I took the Dyerville Loop and pulled over into a parking area at Founders Grove. There were only two other cars in the parking lot. The morning was cool. Sequoias contribute to their own microclimate. The canopy of the forest helps them to retain the foggy ocean moisture, insulating the trees from any temperature extremes.

  It was eight thirty. Doc wasn’t due to arrive for another half hour. Rather than sit around, I decided to take a walk on my own. Trail guides were offered from a display box at the head of the path. The way was flat and well-marked, but, even in this much-traveled area, I had only to take a few steps off the trail to feel alone—and overwhelmed. You give up your shadow when you walk among the redwoods, and a bit of human arrogance as well. I stepped through the Walk-Thru Tree and felt a little bit like Alice through the looking-glass. You’re not supposed to be able to pass through a tree in much the same manner you would a tunnel.