Page 78 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

I felt compelled to find out exactly where the noise was coming from. One of my neighbors, I soon

discovered, had just retired and was logging the entire mountain behind him, a mountain that happened

to be located across the road from me. It took him a number of years to strip his mountain of trees,

because logging was to him a recreational pastime. I felt such relief whenever the wind drowned out the

buzz of the ever -present chainsaw. With increasing distress whenever I walked up the woods road I

witnessed new patches of raw earth crisscrossed by tree bodies that left new holes in the sky. After a

season or two, during the summer, each bare area was covered over by the lush green leaves of

slender saplings attesting to Nature’s will to live and withstand harsh treatment. The winter told a

different story; the craggy mountain was clearly visible down to its bare granite bones. In my dreams

whole forests disappeared, while in day life my relationship to trees deepened, and became more

personal as I wrote poems and stories about them. Being sheltered by trees became an obsession. I

began to wonder uneasily if my dreams had been casting a net around a future that I was starting to

live...

At first I thought it was my imagination that I could hear the trees screaming as trunks and branches

were severed from their roots by giant machines as I walked down logging roads. But when they cried

out in my dreams, I started to pay closer attention to the collective wailing I thought I heard during the

day, and my disbelief collapsed. I am not sure where I got the idea that the way I could help trees the

most was to listen to their dying but I came to believe and accept that it was true, even though this

witnessing forced me out onto the edge of my own despair.

Each year the assault on the trees escalated. Huge skidder marks now ran in parallel lines up and

down the sides of some mountains, leaving deep scars on the surface. These ruts would become silt-

laden waterways removing precious topsoil from the mountains during the spring melt. More and more

logging trucks thundered down the winding roads, swaying dangerously. The hawks and owls and

many other birds that once inhabited the surrounding forests disappeared as they lost precious habitat.