The Clearcut (Part 2)

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.