It is raining hard. There is a 2’ x 4’ skylight directly above my bed so I listen to the wind preening small branches from the fir, madrona and cedar trees that surround my cabin. The cabin was built in 1905, a chip shot from the water which is currently in blender mode. It is the first real storm of the year.
Sometime a few years back I discovered the warm and fuzziness of the heated fitted sheet. It warms the bed from the bottom up and when paired with my dual layered comforter, there is a victorious peace I find as I enjoy nature’s symphony. It is 0200 and I am reading. As I flip the pages, telling the WWII saga of two prisoners, an English woman and an Ozzie cowboy, searching for one another some ten years after the war, it feels doubly poignant as the electricity could end at any moment, as it usually does when the winds achieve their current speed. When two hundred year old trees come down they take whatever wiring remains strung beneath them. Should that happen it would quickly become cold and dark. All this creates a oddly gratifying moment. It increases my appreciation of Neville Shute, Australia, technology, history and the present moment. This could all end with the crash that follows the crack.
In an earlier chapter I built a cabin around two of those aforementioned trees. This thirty year labor of love, formally called the ‘Cabin in the Woods’, but more informally known as ‘My Art Project’, suffered from the ravages of bad design and bad craftsmanship. The trees would rock in the wind, literally moving the cabin on its make shift foundation and enlarging the crevice which, like a boot, served as a rain deterrent. The project failed, mostly from my shoddy construction techniques, but the memories of a hundred magical days, and a thousand joyous nights remain.
I remember laying in bed, upstairs, on stormy winter nights, heat sufficiently rising from the fire below, and rocking gently with the musical sway of my fir trees. Over the years we endured several severe storms, with power out and fire roaring, that a loud crack, onomatopoeia if there ever was, of a huge tree followed by its thunderous crash landing. One clipped the side of the roof, but I never took a direct hit. Because as I wanted to believe, there was an ‘understanding’ between us that since I built around instead of felling and building over a death-scar, that reciprocally, they would try their Ent-like best to fall, when brother wind decided to blow big, anywhere but overhead.
I am thinking about all this as I take sporadic breaks from the story, close my eyes and try to sleep. But the storm is a metaphor. These are scary times, innocent people are falling like cedar saplings in a Nor’easter. The evil wind blowing is rhetoric from the leader of the hate-fueled tribe that allows only one type of tree to grow in the forest. All others are treated as invasive, unwanted and dangerous species. They must be felled, cut into rounds, split and stacked. To continue the metaphoric angle, Bid Wood then hires splitters, maulers, axe wielding laborers at minimum wage to supply the demand and maintain a profit margin large enough to satisfy both shareholders and corporate executives. The wood is then sold back to the people upon whose land it grew to maturity at a huge profit for Big Wood.
I sigh, saddened once again by the runaway capitalism of a divided country. The chasm between the have’s and have-nots grows alarmingly.
It is 0300. The wind and rain join in tempestuous harmony above me. I re-open my book seeking solace and perhaps escape.
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