Читать книгу Through the Woods - Gary Ferguson - Страница 11

Chapter One

THE MORNING SUN IS RIPPING holes in the fog, leaving scattered herds of gray ghosts running for cover in the grassy knolls off Frenchman Bay. Now and then one climbs the heights and glides across the campus, gives us a damp, chilling hug as it passes, then disappears into the quiet streets of Bar Harbor.

I’m on my knees again. The second day of it, hovering over a washtub filled with bundles of white-spruce roots. Simple work, really. Pluck a root out of the water, uncoil it, strip away the bark by pulling the length of it through a tight, narrow split in a wooden stake driven into the ground; then recoil it and place it into another tub of water. If the root’s too thick—bigger, say, than a pencil—you cut it in half lengthwise with a utility knife. I’m still a little nervous about that part, worried that I’ll slip and sever it, and the fact is, it takes a heck of a lot of effort to dig these things out of the ground. The tannin in the water has turned my fingers the color of copper, puckered my skin into the hands of an old man. But I’ve soaked up this wonderful scent, this smell like pepper and pine.

I remember sitting at home in Montana two weeks ago, thinking of how great it would be to start this summer of trees with some kind of ritual. Some occasion, a starting gun that years from now I could look back on and say it all began on this day or that, with those people, in the heat or the wind or the thunder. It dawns on me now that this is it.

My teacher is a Penobscot Indian named Barry Dana, a solid, good-looking man in his early thirties, tanned and fit, someone you’d expect to find modeling clothes for Land’s End. But here he is on his knees working these enormous sheets of birch bark, using a bone awl from the shin of a moose to punch lines of vertical holes along the outer edges. Once that’s done, he lays the sheets side by side, the edges slightly overlapped, and places a thin batten of mountain maple over the seam. Then come my white-spruce roots, which serve as thread for sewing the panels together, sheet after sheet, until they turn into dazzling runs of bark some twelve feet long. As each length is finished, I leave my root buckets, and Barry, his wife, Lori, and I maneuver the panels onto a squat, dome-shaped frame of white-ash poles, then make them fast with ties from the inner bark of basswood. A Penobscot wigwam. Since the outer surface of birch bark is more prone to weathering, the sheets are placed on the frame with the papery side facing in, which makes the inside room quiet and homey, a womb of oyster-white, scored with thin black lines and blisters shaped like crescent moons. A fire at night dances on the walls, drawing them in and then releasing them. Rhythmic, like breathing.

Really I came here to the coast of Maine for just a brief visit—a little talk with Barry, maybe some lunch, but then he invited me to spend some time actually working on his wigwam, and that changed everything. There’s something about the cadence of this shaping wood by hand, a patient, unhurried rhythm that over time leaves even quiet people like Barry suddenly generous with their thoughts. Yesterday we were stripping basswood bark for framing ties when he laid out this dream he has for a group of Penobscot teenagers. “Some summer,” he says, “I’ll take a bunch of kids and we’ll build an entire village of these things.” He tells it like it’s fact. “We’ll make birch canoes, too. Then we’ll set out from that village on a long trip up some historic river trail. It’ll be incredible.” I keep thinking about those kids slipping into their canoes—canoes they released from trees. The startled look on their faces when they push on the paddles and the thing skitters forward like some kind of water strider, as if it were being pulled by an invisible hand.

Something else Barry talks about is his love for running. He says the Penobscots used to have an elite group of gifted running men who carried messages in times of war—men so fast and nimble they could run down deer in a thick woods. They enjoyed few of the common pleasures that other people took for granted. No sex, for one thing. Strictly controlled diets. Sleeping as a group in one big wigwam, an elder standing by with a switch in his hand, watching so each man kept his legs crooked to the proper position throughout the night. They called them the “Pure Men.”

Every summer Barry makes a trek with some young Penobscots, running a hundred miles from Indian Island to the base of Maine’s greatest peak, the old giant, Mount Katahdin. It occurs to me that in the difficult hours—those painful miles when you think you’re going to either pass out or at the very least, throw up on your shoes—stories of the Pure Men must seem like extra breath.

All day long people on the street have been catching glimpses of the wigwam, this cinnamon-colored dome nestled in the cedars, and a lot of them have wheeled in for a closer look. Almost like they can’t help it. “It’s so beautiful,” says a woman from Kansas City, maybe forty-five, while her husband circles it, pokes his head through the east-facing door. “Will you be staying in it tonight?” he wants to know. “Not me,” says Barry. “I’ve got a motel room with a shower and a TV.”

Fifteen minutes later, Bev spots the wigwam from halfway across campus, clutches her books tight to her chest and runs over. “Oh wow,” she says, panting hard to catch her breath. “I can’t believe this. It’s just the way I saw it. This is going to sound really strange, but…well, I’m studying to be a midwife. Last month I started dreaming about helping women give birth inside a wigwam. It looked just like this.”

Barry nods, keeps quiet. She waits. “What do you think that means?” she finally asks.

He smiles, tells her it’s not for him to decide. “Put it in your life where it fits best,” he says. To me, the dream seems perfect. Back in the 1920s, paper birch was chosen as America’s “Mothers’ Tree,” which is why you can still find it growing at the White House, where it was planted to honor the mothers of the presidents; and at the Capitol, for the mothers of the nation; at Arlington National Cemetery, for the moms of fallen soldiers.

“Can I touch it?” Bev asks, looking hopeful. And she walks up and lays the flat of her hand against the skin of the inner bark, just like I’ve seen Barry do at the end of the day when we’ve finished working.

Around eleven we take a break, lie on the grass beside the wigwam, eat bagels and drink coffee and play with Barry and Lori’s eleven-month-old daughter, Sakwani—the Penobscot word for springtime. In the two days I’ve been here, Sakwani has never once strayed from these pieces of the forest. She snubs squeaky ducks and Fisher-Price blocks in favor of sheets of birch bark—hugs them, rubs her cheeks on them, smiles like a blue sky whenever she feels them against the bottoms of her bare feet. When she’s not fondling birch she’s chewing on spruce roots, or running her fingers through the ribbons of basswood bark, or wobbling over for another whiff from the bucket of sealing pitch. When she sits on my lap I can smell the forest in her hair.

Lori is saying that the best part of working with birch bark is going out and finding the trees. Being out in the woods in early spring looking for that special one—the way the trunk glows against the dark of the balsam and spruce. There’s a strong smell of sap when the knife blade cuts through the outer layers of the bark. And then a loud “pop” as it releases from the tree.

We’ve set about our work again when a friend of Barry’s shows up: a woman in her sixties, a Penobscot artist from North Branch who’s come to town to be part of a weekend art show. She works with birch too, though her talent lies in using knives to make fine engravings on the inner bark, slicing delicate lines through the thin, rust-red winter layer to reveal the buff underneath. She describes her latest project to me—a series of three panels depicting her last deer hunt. She stays for a long time, just sitting quietly while we work—Lori scraping bark, Barry sewing, me with my roots.

Nearby, a class of fifth-graders is playing some kind of nature game where the kids are supposed to act like different parts and processes in the life of trees: leaves falling, random visits by woodpeckers and bees, rain being sucked up along the lateral roots, nuts falling, water pumping up the xylem, moisture rising to the clouds through transpiration.

“People are adrift these days,” the Penobscot woman says to me out of the blue. “It’s because they don’t have acts of creation in their lives.”

And that’s all she cares to say about it. Later on, driving west across Maine in my van, I’ll find it hard to get that comment out of my head. In the end I’ll decide that people in America start out giving birth to all kinds of creative acts. But when those acts turn into something different than we imagined, something less than perfect, we walk away, tell ourselves it wasn’t meant to be. One of the most comforting things about the old Penobscot world is that the creators made mistakes all the time.

The great giant Gluskap, who created humans by shooting arrows into the trees, splitting the trunks and allowing the first men and women to step out into the world, was just a guy of average intelligence, a kind of blue-collar superhuman who learned as he went. Take fish. When he first started making them he was all thumbs, which is why even today some, like puffers and toadfish, are so incredibly homely. Likewise, Gluskap’s squirrels used to be enormous. Later on, when people stumbled onto the scene, Squirrel went berserk, running around gnawing off trees, tossing boulders around—a real loose cannon. Gluskap called him over and soothed his fever by petting him. Each time his hand stroked Squirrel’s back, the creature got smaller and smaller (and its tail curled a little more), until it reached the size and shape we see today. Squirrel still runs around chattering and tossing nuts at the sight of people, but let’s face it, the damage is trifling. Grasshoppers, skunks, moose, beaver—all of them were works in progress. Gluskap just kept fussing until he got it right.

It’s nearly dark when we call it quits. All that’s left to do is seal the seams with pitch, then secure the bark with an exterior frame of ash poles. I’m leaving tonight, heading west to chase the ghost of Joe Knowles, so I’ll miss those final touches. Sakwani is asleep in the car seat, and Barry, Lori, and I sit on the grass in the last of the light, mostly just looking at the wigwam.

“If we were going to use it in really cold weather,” Barry says, “we’d put another run of birch bark on the inside of the main frame, then stuff moss into the space between the layers. When you’re ready to move—maybe it’s time to go where the salmon are running—you just take off the panels, roll them up like a rug and be on your way. Use them on other frames in other places.” Ingenious, really. It’s curious that the earliest colonists, who were in no small measure ramblers themselves, used to sneer at the Penobscots for being so nomadic. Finally they claimed that the Indians’ refusal to stay put and farm was a breaking of biblical law, a transgression that left them ineligible to own land.

We finish loading the last of the tools, say our good-byes, and just like that, they’re driving off into the night toward Bar Harbor, the taillights of the minivan blurring in a thin sheet of fog. I walk over to the wigwam one last time, lay my hands against the cinnamon-colored bark, find myself hoping for an act of creation.