teacher fiction

The Clearcut (Part 3)

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , , ,

Jack turned the truck off Squaw Creek Road onto a rutted spur that led to the top of the clearcut. As he climbed, he noticed a brushcutter had marauded through since his last visit, mowing down volunteer trees and shrubs at the edges of the road. He also saw other shrubs defoliated, sickly, yellow, near death, victims of herbicide to reduce competition in the plantation. Some other piece of heavy equipment had also trenched the roadway and constructed water bars. They wouldn’t log this unit for another fifty years, but still, some business entity planned well ahead for the possibility.

Jack kept the truck climbing, and the road narrowed to a point where a brushcutter couldn’t follow and that meant passing ripe salmonberries, thimbleberries, elderberries, foxglove, vine maple, and bitter cherry trees.

Finally, the road crested, came to a dead end and Jack stopped the truck. He jumped out, threw down the tailgate, and the dogs flew out. Jack returned to the truck, grabbed the rest of the Hamm’s, and started off to find his favorite place in the clearcut—the super stump. As he walked, he took in the scene around him: the replanted conifers, the charred slash piles, the stumps, the snags, the tires, the beer cans, the multicolored shotgun shell casings, and the makeshift shooting targets, usually empty jugs of bleach nailed to plywood. Jack always tore the targets down and wrote on them with a Sharpie he carried for just such a purpose: “Can’t you enjoy nature without a gun?”

The dogs fanned out ahead of Jack, darting in and out of the undergrowth. How purely and sensuously green it was everywhere, thought Jack. The green, its many shades in many shapes, its many smells and multiple textures, seemed to be exploding all around him. Sometimes, Jack was amazed how a clearcut could regenerate itself after such mechanized obliteration. He often wondered if human beings had the capacity to regenerate after experiencing something as totally destructive as what a clearcut did to a watershed. Of course a forest, like a man, could also be denuded one tree at a time, by one logger, on one job, with one chainsaw, over a long period, and Jack thought about that too.

He walked a mile, maybe more, leaping across rivulets, examining coyote and bear scat, tasting salmonberries, finishing a Hamm’s and then starting another. Some thirty minutes later, Jack arrived at the super Sitka spruce stump, one that bore the notches of many, many years ago, when a plank fitted into the notches bore the weight of two men laboring for hours, days, with a fifteen-foot crosscut saw, to fell the tree.

Jack always used the same notch to step onto the stump. From there he looked around in a three hundred and sixty degree rotation. Nothing but Douglas fir as far as the eye could see. Nothing but densely, unnatural young stands of the plantation conifer species. Nothing but a cell in a spreadsheet.

He sat down and counted, as he always did, the stump’s rings. This afternoon he stopped at two hundred and eighty. Sleep began to undermine Jack’s concentration. He could hear the dogs thrashing in the slash. He shielded his eyes from the sun to survey the sky. He opened the last beer and took off his shirt. Reclining on the stump, he dangled his shoes over the edge. The stump’s surface was level and smooth: decades of one hundred inches of rain washes away all roughness. Well, almost all.

For ten minutes Jack didn’t move and kept investigating the sky. A kestrel zoomed by with a vole in its mouth. He saw a jet’s vapor trail. People were going somewhere. He noticed a couple of Sitka and Western hemlock seedlings sprouting from nearby rotten stumps. Nurse logs they called them, nursing tree species that weren’t wanted in this watershed, wanted by the industry. He saw the tops of Douglas firs at the edge of the clearcut oscillate in the breeze. He shot straight up in bed, his favorite stump—all that remained—from a grand conifer from an epoch when people like him didn’t teach, couldn’t teach, would not teach. Christ, he thought, he had to go back to work in nine fucking weeks!

A few minutes later, the dogs scrambled up on the stump to join him; there was ample room for all. They waited for Jack to get up, and keep heading down the trail or back to the truck, or really, anywhere. They waited for him to move and offer some instruction.

The Clearcut (Part 2)

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , ,

Jack turned off Highway 101, onto his gravel road, and sprayed rocks like a spread from a shotgun. He raced the half mile to his home, skidded to a stop, scattered the several dozen barn swallows roosting in the house’s eaves, left the truck idling, leapt out, threw open the garage door, and braced himself for the onslaught of his three large mutts. They attacked him as they always did and Jack addressed each one of them separately with a special voice, telling them what nuts they were. He also told the dogs he was looking forward to hanging out with them exclusively the next two months, as opposed to teenagers in desperate need of English instruction.

The brief rumble concluded, Jack dropped the tailgate down, and the dogs hurled themselves into the back of the truck, where they proceeded to generate an unhinged cacophony of barks, cries, whines, and snarls that Jack recognized as one of the happiest sounds in his life. He turned the truck around, gravel sprayed again, and he headed for the clearcut he explored with the dogs to commemorate the end of things.

It was a pedestrian clearcut as far as devastating Coast Range clearcuts went: not a tree left standing when the industrial massacre took place five years ago; access roads and culverts poorly constructed; slash piles incompletely burned; garbage strewn about; and thousands of quality board feet of timber left behind, wasted. All of this, too, at a substantial lost to taxpayers, a generous government subsidy to some corporate low bidder employing tough men who railed against the government and then depended on it when their children were born with Down’s Syndrome or they needed job retraining after all the trees they cut near their homes were gone.

Jack was somewhat cognizant that this clearcut represented a model of retarded and obscene forest policy. But he hadn’t seen this stand of trees, or unit as it was called, before loggers working for a far-flung investment corporation laid waste to it. Jack had discovered his clearcut in its fifth year after replanting, and the landscape was rapidly assuming different characteristics than that of a No Man’s Land where no men died, just everything else, including the soil.

As Jack drove, he reached over to the floor in front of the passenger seat and opened the lid to a small round Styrofoam cooler. Inside, iced down, was a six pack of 16 oz. Hamm’s. He grabbed one and cracked it. He used to celebrate the end of school differently, especially with his ex-wife, who, when they were married, surpassed genius at surprising him on these occasions, such as the time he opened the refrigerator and found she had tied a bow around a new Gerber knife sticking in her prized homemade pumpkin cheesecake. She had left him and the dogs several teaching gigs ago, to become something other than a nomadic teacher’s wife, but Jack still hung her art on his walls and she still sent handcrafted Christmas cards to the dogs. They occasionally talked on the telephone, about the health of the dogs, and if she was making art. One day not too long ago, she told him a prominent Portland gallery planned to show her new work, huge oil paintings of deer, broken, bloody and twisted along Oregon country roads, victims of accidents with vehicles. Jack offered his congratulations and remembered her insisting they pull over whenever they came upon a dead deer so she could sketch it.

Jack turned north onto Highway 101 and a few miles later, the Hamm’s can emptied, he forked east onto the Little Nestucca River Highway, which followed the river, cutting into the Coast Range and the Siuslaw National Forest. He pushed the truck over 65 mph for several minutes until he saw the familiar sign that someone had spray painted over ‘Squaw Creek Road,’ which loosely meant ‘Cunt Creek Road’ if you knew anything about derogatory Pioneer terms for Native American women. Every time the Forest Service repainted the white lettering, some vandal spray painted over it within twenty-four hours. As an English teacher, Jack loved watching this semantic struggle unfold, a literal war of definitions. Clearly, a renegade and master teacher was at work here, producing instant and verifiable public education. One day the Forest Service would simply give up and maybe Squaw Creek would be renamed for someone else, or better yet, become nameless.

The truck made a sharp right onto Squaw Creek Road, also designated as Forest Service Road 1633, and Jack unavoidably bounced through several potholes and one gigantic crater that sent sparks flying. As soon as the dogs sensed the shift from smooth asphalt to rough road and the light from the highway to the darkness of a forest canopy, they went completely nuts. As Jack reached for a second Hamm’s, he saw three turkey vultures picking through three or four carcasses of spawned-out salmon near the creek’s bank. To the uninitiated, this scene might have appeared macabre, perhaps even suggestive of a bad omen, but Jack knew the carcasses meant wild salmon had returned to a watershed pulverized by expediency and indifference during the Reagan years. But, miraculously, and it was a miracle, somehow how this watershed had started healing itself and was coming to life again.

Squaw Creek Road wound its way through the trees and here, inland, at higher elevation, the fog had vanished, and sunlight punched though the canopy. Jack followed the road for several miles, drinking Hamm’s, listening to the dogs and the creek. This afternoon marked the fourth end-of-the-school year visit to the clearcut, and although it was shaping up as a gorgeous day, Jack doubted he could top last June’s celebration when he brought along a date, a twenty-three year old nurse he’d recently met online, and a half pint of tequila and a dozen Mexican beers. After her second or third shot and third or fourth beer, Jack’s date, without prompting, jumped on the hood of the truck and began wordlessly taking off her clothes while the dogs panted in the background. A few minutes later he joined her and a few minutes after that they left a sizable dent in the hood that Jack took notice of every now and then but never bothered to have repaired.

Jack also doubted this year’s commemoration could match the sheer bizarre nature of the first two years coming to the clearcut. In year one, as Jack walked up the road, suddenly out of nowhere, a feral cat jumped on his back, clawing at him, ripping through his corduroy jacket down to the skin. The cat appeared almost as an apparition, initially spooking the dogs into an unprecedented reticence. They watched for ten seconds, regrouped, then charged barking into the fray, commencing a running, hissing, snarling pitched battle for a hundred yards that ended when the cat disappeared into a charred slash pile. Jack watched the raw spectacle silently, trying to recall the last time he’d been inoculated against rabies.

In year two, walking in almost precisely the same spot where the cat attacked him, Jack noticed the dogs tightly circled around something twenty yards ahead of him. As he came closer he saw a blood trail and then what appeared to be the entrails of a large mammal. He yelled the dogs off, moved forward, and beheld the severed head of what was either a burro or donkey or mule—Jack never could keep them straight. There was no smell of decay. Something very recently, perhaps within the hour, had eviscerated a domestic animal, eaten most of it, and left the head intact. Jack recoiled when he saw the mess, dropped his beer, and instantly came up with twenty questions about what had happened here. He couldn’t answer any of them and kept walking up the road.

The Clearcut (Part 1)

Fiction, NSP Meditations , , , , , , ,

There is a special type of urgency that attends to a teacher driving home after the last day of school, and it doesn’t matter if the teacher has just completed the first or thirtieth year of a distinguished or incompetent career in a public or private institution. Nor does it matter on the last day if the sun shines or the rain pounds or if the teaching assignment took place in an elementary, middle, or high school. (College hardly counts.) All that really matters is that the year is over.

Jack, a high school English teacher, felt the urgency, but he wasn’t yet driving home, so he leashed the feeling with a choke chain as he stood in front of his fourth period class, as one might leash a hostile dog before taking a pleasant city stroll.

A few hours later, the clock struck 3:19, the final bell rang, students rushed into the halls tossing paper and textbooks into the air, took goofy photographs with their cell phones, and hugged one another or grabbed ass. Jack walked over to his desk and picked up six periods of unread and ungraded final essays, each one approximately six hundred words in length. Thirty students a period. One hundred and eight thousand words. The paper recycle box rested ten feet away. Jack concentrated, and then in a graceful underhanded motion, set the essays free from his clutch in coordinated flight. They flew, and landed all together, neatly in the box, a feat utterly elegant to behold if someone had actually been around to behold it. Ten minutes later, as Jack left school, he heard a cheery female voice on the PA announce a faculty social in the library at 3:45 where cookies and coffee were to be served. At 3:31 Jack fished his keys from his pocket and a moment later, was cruising out of the parking lot and waving goodbyes to a few of his students who signed yearbooks while sitting on the hoods of their second-hand sedans. They were the same students who never turned in any work and never appeared in any yearbook.

The urgency commanded Jack as he sped home, north on Highway 101, the Pacific Ocean on his left, the Siuslaw National Forest on his right. As he drove with his left hand, he counted silently with his right-hand fingers how many years he had taught secondary English and social studies in public schools since he commenced his career at the age of twenty-five in 1988. Nineteen years, in nine different schools all across Oregon, in rural, suburban, and urban districts. He thought of himself as a seeker although he sought nothing. He liked to transition, live in different places, meet new colleagues, and experience different educational customs, although he had come to discover that there weren’t many different educational customs in Oregon or probably anywhere else in the country. About the only thing that made any difference was whether the families of his students had any money. In this rural gig in Lincoln City on the Oregon Coast, they did not. Indeed, many of Jack’s students didn’t even have families, let alone semi-functioning ones, as was apparent at graduation last week when one of Jack’s seniors, a girl, still wearing her mortarboard, circled the lobby desperately with her diploma in hand, apparently looking for someone. Jack watched her, off and on for fifteen minutes, between congratulations and handshakes with other graduates and their families. He finally went up to her and saw a face he’d never seen before. It looked the color of new snow and appeared as if it might actually collapse. Jack put his hands on her shoulders and she started crying

“What’s wrong?” asked Jack.

“My parents never showed up. They were drinking earlier this morning and never made it. Can you fucking believe that?”

Jack squeezed down on her shoulders. “Listen to me. Make a pact with yourself right here. You will break this cycle and never do this to your own child. Can you do that?”

“Yes.”

Jack hugged her hard, she squeezed hard in return, and he whispered then do it into her ears.

Then she left, left high school forever, the last place employing anyone who would ever sincerely care about her or her future.

As the new graduate left the building clutching her diploma, she edged by an old obese man in shorts. Jack had talked briefly to him in the restroom before the ceremony and learned by easy admission that the man had been drinking an Everclear and chocolate milk concoction in a Thermos all morning and was so drunk he couldn’t remember the name of the relative he was supposed to watch graduate. In the restroom Jack made a joke about this and decided against informing the man that he had pissed down his right leg

Jack had now logged four years at this latest stop, or tour as he called it. His itinerant behavior marked him somewhat as an eccentric nomad in the profession, particularly to the school’s veteran teachers, seven of whom had actually graduated from the school and wore its black and orange colors every Friday. But Jack didn’t really care about the label. He stayed as long as it interested him, and then he moved on. He always carried a symbolic letter of resignation in his back pocket. No job would ever trap him. There were always teaching gigs in rural Oregon if you were willing to relocate and smart enough to drink at home.

No, Jack didn’t care that his resume struck some administrators as evidence of instability. He was more concerned that despite all his years in the classroom and teaching twenty-five different subjects, he really didn’t fathom what constituted his ultimate purpose in front of students, much less carrying out that purpose well as would befit a professional educator paid $53,400 a year and $1700 a month in health insurance by taxpayers, most of whom believed he was scandalously overpaid and ineffective to boot.

It was exactly twenty-two miles from school to Jack’s home and he passed a dozen vehicles to get there, including executing a tricky two-car maneuver at the summit of Cascade Head near the intersection of the logging road that led to a trail to Hart’s Cove.

Since teaching in the area, Jack had learned the legend of Hart’s Cove, a rocky and roiling site at the base of the western edge of Cascade Head. So the story went, Hart’s Cove had been named for a hearty hermit of a man who lived long ago in a cabin above the cove and walked twenty miles roundtrip to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. Jack loved the story, even if wasn’t true. He imagined a crusty Hart, whipping his unruly students with a stick of willow while simultaneously declaiming sonnets to the rhythm of the beating, and then, with the show over, telling the students that the previous generation of students was much better behaved and much better at doing anything academic, or for that matter physical, than this current crop of miscreants. For time immemorial old and tired teachers made this exact same bogus historical comparison and Jack swore if he ever followed suit, he would quit, on the spot, or maybe pull a Richard Corey.