Good Lifestyle

This week, the award-winning author, the playwright and the poet Denis Johnson died at the age of 67. In 2007, the same year, he won the national book award for his novelSmoke treeHe wrote this article, "in the presence of wood", for Better life.It was published in the September 2007 issue.

This summer, in our place in the north of Idaho, I will build a cedar hot tub of a kit that arrives on a truck. The manufacturers claim that they cut each board of "tolerances of less than 3/100,000 inch" and I have no reason to doubt that and not to check it on them. I would need a microscope. As long as it fits together and holds water, I will be a hero in my sweet wife's eyes, who loves a long hot soaking after strangling weeds and murder insects in his sunny garden. As for me, what I want this cedar hot tub for cedar itself. The aroma, the sensation, the mysterious smoked grain of the wood. Because I'm crazy about working on wood, but everyone fascinated by wood eventually work with her, although the wood and I would like me to have left him alone.

It started quite innocently in the late 1960s, with the class of Mr. Fuchs High School's shop (for which in a whole year I produced a brilliantly varnished oak speed button for the 1965 Impala of my parents, a small cherry table that flickers and a thing that looks like another knob of oak speeds, that the huge, the size of a small pellet, and that really opens so you can Hide cigarettes and condoms inside, even now, up to my best creation), and progressed to the point where I am now a member of Idaho Forest's homeowners.

Once in a long time, I think of Mr. Fuchs, our store teacher, and I would like to have been less intelligent and that I had learned from him how to do things of that kind of thing. During the demonstration of fashionable fashion of a mortise seal and tenon, it could eliminate a small robust table in minutes. Mr. Fuchs had reached his end of forty to have lost more than half of an index, a good recording. I saw wood workers whose appendages looked more like duck feet, even hooves. Guys with opposable thumbs and nothing to oppose it. They like to work with wood and I like working with wood, but where our passions diverge. They want perfect angles and joints, and with an exalted concentration they work to produce them, using words like Plumb and level and square. For me, they are desired and fantastic concepts. I just hack. "Measure twice, turn off once," Mr. Fuchs told us. I measure five times and finish by cutting 10. last summer, working on a cabin 12 on 12 feet, I measured a board for a window of windows of at least half a dozen times, and I mean very carefully, and I have always managed to come with a 17-inch plank too long. Too long is not so bad. You can always make it shorter. Too short, however, ends up in the stove.

But Mr. Fuchs, wading through small piles of sawdust, surrounded by teen smiles that misprint his name on all occasions, Mr. Fuchs, with his gray haircut in the flattop, his face stupidly affable, his sort. Rectangular head, which seemed it had been reduced in a vise and his mind with her, Mr. Fuchs did not deserve any voices, say, in my business. Mr. Fuchs represented the oldest group used still stuck in the first half of the most gradual century of humanity. And the wood came to talk like that too obsolete, old-fashioned, not ready for the rest of the millennium. You could not hold it back on the flame of a lighter throwing butane just to see it turn to goop slight, like plastic. Or do cans of beer like aluminum, beer cans you could evacuate in your throat and crush a hand and then Beluch.

I grew up in cities of concrete and asphalt and glass, and after the class of Mr. Fuchs's shop, I have never given people from people until I lived in Gig Harbor, Washington, in my twenties and took a job, for a brief miserable spell, land cleaning for a future motel. This implied to cut all the trees, all the last and strippers of branches (called limpings) and cut them into 16 feet lengths (called bucking) and stack them to be loaded on trucks and sold as logs. No work for a graduate of a Screwneux college, and certainly not the kind to make me love trees or branches or newspapers, especially newspapers. A newspaper is nothing like a pole, believe me. I'm sure it's because they are heavier at one end than the other and tend to change, but when you stack them together, they seem much more alive than trees, inexplicably animated, likely to explode . Once I attended a log, a stationary battery and a light on the floor like a young gymnast. You may think that I am lying, but if you have been around the logs, you do not do it. This type of work was not only exhausting, but risky, with the perfidious materials and murderous saws, and my work habits did not help. To date, I did not bother to accelerate on a lists of the boss during the lunch break at half an hour and return to work unable to do a lot but the astonishing of my negligence and my incompetence, of My extraterrestrial stupidity and the general weakness of my frame. It was an old cowboy, and whenever all this did too much for him, he showed me lovely between the shoulder blades with his dirty hat and asks to hear what, if something, I ' had learned in my college years. To date, I would like to be able to produce an answer for him. It took us about two months to reach 10 acres, just him and me.

But wood, man, wood. Once from time to time, usually during the psychedelic lunch break, I would find myself looking at the rings on a strain, a whole story in concentric chapters, the tight rings representing less growth, more difficult years, the larger rings The recording more easily, and every trauma recorded also, each size and each wave replicated in the next ring, always more in evidence, never altered and forgotten, the defects grow bigger. And I wondered how a lot of land and water could rise into a forest. And what will they build the motel? Newspapers. Here, the substitution of the vessels awaited almost ready to be used, losing leaves and needles, inhabited by rodents, later to shelter men and women. And then the lunch was finished.

I wandered south. Once again, a city of asphalt and stone: Phoenix, Arizona, in the middle of the desert. Not a lot of wood there. The curious feelings I had looked into in tree strains did not bother me there. I forgot wood. I swore alcohol and dope and worked with strange offices until the amazing summer heat that led me to the east of Wellfleet village on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I got married and married my new wife in a 150-year-old house with a fireplace, next to which I placed my office and I spent eight hours a day "work on my book" -Split firewood, organizing the equipment for fire, getting it with a single match, looking at it, the grain of the blackening of the wood and get up as it is charged, the flames revealing poignant truths having to do with the Life and death and transformation, then I could write a small scene, always in a fireplace and a long description of what went there, flames and stick and lifting it, etc., then it was time to dinner . I grew up to approve so deeply from the wooden fire that I found worthy of consuming the only copy of my first novel, a manuscript that I did not know how to destroy it for years. I hope that it seems, as I write from this, only a fault of young romanticism and not a unreachable idolatry, but I tell you that the sanctuary of my chimney was worthy of this victim and that I watched every page turning Towards the smoke, the burden of my soul was much lighter, until I was free from the writer, I had not become and free to be the one I was.

The most wonderful thing about the life of the writer is that you can live wherever you want, as long as you can afford, and we wanted to live in California. We found 28 hectares with a remote view of the ocean in Mendocino County at the very end of this era of Bygone, while hippies and bikers were interested in land in northern California. The rural owner! Country Squire! The minute I saw it, I loved the place. It was not the view of the ocean or the orchard of apples, nor the ramShakle stables or the stucco hut with a bullet-screened ceiling where the previous occupant had kept his girlfriend and his own hostage until To what the local deputy had told him about getting off the hotel bar Gualala for a drink (he has never been busy, although his old father wrinkled, who I bought the place, said, "I asked the sheriff if I may have to take his firearms"). It was not local color or visual beauty. It was two redwoods near the front door. When the old boy showed me the place, he stopped the truck and directed it - each nearly 200 feet high and a dozen feet in diameter - and said, "Those are over 1,500 years And something changed in my heart and I was lost. And that the old man knew I would be lost. These ancient, gray and green beings filled and emanating from a serenity of gargantues, were the first of the characteristics of the property he had directed. Every human being would have bought him right away.

Most of the original sequoia of the coast had been leaving for a long time, but the second growth trees covered the County of Mendocino, and all that seems to him, including our stables (the word has a certain dignity that these cabins. Animals do not deserve), where Mrs. Johnson has kept some horses. These two animals were standing around nibbling all day on the boards of their stalls and would have eaten their home if we did not painted it with creosote to dissuade them. I thought REDWOOD felt a lot, but I never felt attempted to chew it. To be frank, I have never trusted a lot for horses. They are stupid and hay is expensive, at least in the quantities they need. If they just stay around all the time, why do not they take root and feed, like trees? They have eaten grass too, in a grazing of 10 acres fenced with posts of aged Swedish ages of a monster like the couple who still grows on my land, only he had dropped who knew how many centuries earlier, Before the recorders arrive a hundred years. It is enough to overthrow the superb giants and ship them to 128 miles south to be transformed into San Francisco - and this monolith had been set up in the middle of the Gualala River, in the water, for all this time, until 'To the previous occupant, the biker hostage intake, had shot it with a sloping machine and split it, by hand, in shredded poles. The only thing I liked about these horses was the closing poles of their pastures.

We called it IT Doce Pasos Ranch. My wife and I loved the place, but not the other, and after the divorce, all I had left was a baseball cap with the ranch of Pasos de Doce on his crown, an object of Clothing I called "My $ 100,000 hat". I hunted the north coast for another paradise, but I had only a few great and that the world had discovered Mendocino and that the only hippie-biker affair proposed was two acres with a geodesic dome that seemed to have been struck by a meteor. I needed trees and needed it on an extremely cheap and abundant land, and that's how I found myself in northern Idaho.

I found a "country estate" in my steep price range, on 23 miles of unpaved road not far from the Canadian border, 120 acres where we (new woman and two children) lived all year long since 10 years , up to 28 feet of snow in '97 healed us and now most winters I teach writing to Texas. During the summers, I hike around Idaho Place (Doce Pasos North; our motto: "A whole new generation of baseball caps"), working on novels or plays and collects funny or bossed form logs or Otherwise, for me, fascinating - for the largest wooden sculpture in the world, which I have not started yet. I can never start, but I will come here every summer. Civilization has become uninhabitable, at least one year. I do not enter here in a spirit of romance. It is a necessary and practical pension form, as jumping behind a rock when the Stampede buffalo.

The property borders the American National Forest. The backyard is heading east of the Montana border and a few hundred kilometers, on a series of mountain ranges, at the Glacier National Park, almost every square feet of Evergreens. Our patch represents about 3,000 of these trees, slightly more than the inhabitants of the nearest town, Ferry bells, about 32 miles south. Shortly afterwards, I took the residence among the pines and the spruce, I had a letter from the Idaho Forest Owners Association, offering me membership. Since there is no contribution, I was proud to accept. Once from time to time, they send me newsletters promoting trees and trees. I do not know what else they do.

But the wood - the wood! Our house is composed of cedar cedar of four inches thick and nothing else, no insulation, no dry partition, wood, man and heat it with a wooden blasive king cook. In the early 1990s, a hundred feet pine fell outside and I just destroyed our little dwelling. For three years, this tree rested behind the house, as a precursor and colossal that an overwrought-line aircraft, until I borrowed a "Moulin in Alaska", a device with which, allegedly, a person and a chain saw can cut a big log into straight planks. My friend Russ, a former Logger of Alaska, a robust and thick man, a person looks closely like a bulldog he really belongs to a cartoon, knew everything from the mills in the chain and came out to ask me to ask stand with a tight cigarette in his teeth, painting the forest atmosphere with his memories of brothels and fight and epic binses and death thunder of the millennial trees, while I tried to give meaning to the Breakdiction. And then I had these wonderful Lodgepole pine slabs. A welder made me a robust trestle to rest and that I whipped a dining room table. All I had to do was out of the wrinkles of the wood and make it shine with varnish, but the process consumed two summers.

Russ was not entirely useless. He advised me that most of the woods are sawn in parallel with annual growth rings, revealing "flat grain", peaks and jagas that look like Zen monks ink brush landscapes. Cut at right angle to growth rings produces planks with "vertical grains", the tight lines that I do not find as interesting. I went to get flat grains, because I like to sit at the table in the morning and drink coffee and watch the table. After a few years now, I have everything memorized, and if I had Zen painting skills, I could probably reproduce everything on the parchment. However, I'm never tired of studying grain, I never stop feeling that there is even more to see, I continue to find something fresh to admire.

Lately, I am lifting a small cabin. I like this idea. This involves something bio and life, without square corners or level surfaces. The first comment of my daughter when she visited the college and I took it to show him the 12-foot chalet by the singing creek was "which does not look stable". It took me a moment to get it into inside. She glanced around Wildly, said "Very nice!" And came out as quickly as possible. I should confess that this cabin was built mainly by other poets and writers, former friends and former students who come for pleasant visits and are pressed in slavery. Later, this spring, supposing that I succeeded with the hot tub, I will surface the floor of the cabin by myself-birch and the alder of the land of a neighbor, then our visitors d Summer and I intend to build a large terrace behind her, after which we will have a baptismal party with many people who dance to hammer rock 'n' roll. Expect a minor tragedy.

Nowadays, I seem to draw wood for me. A few years ago, the land next to two wooden mills, father and son, who shot in a home trailer and a portable mill and started cutting on planks and giving me all the extra things. Shortly after the arrival of the mills, a neighboring woman on the road took under his roof a new friend, a guy with a tab that sculpt statues and poles Totem out of the logs and who did only go by the name de brad. Brad had a genuine gift for the creation of cedar animals, gypsiers and eagles, as well as representations not only made, but fat with arrogant unremitted eagles, sincere and well-intentioned grizzlies, totems to the beat an ancient power. I liked to watch it tease these cedar cek personalities with tiny and specialized chain saws. Brad was in flight, it turned out an old condemnation for marijuana cultivation, and when the good guys caught up with him, they gave him 15 years in the Idaho Correctional Center and I inherited several tons of cedar logs. At that time, I had gathered enough free discharges from the born of the Carroute that I had to spend thousands of a great friend to cover everything.

I go to Home Depot or Lowe's on a simple race and spend hours visiting the wooden stacks like a child at a carnival and looking at the cans classified with wooden spots in the same way that I have already looked at Cotton Candy. White pine, yellow pine, larch, birch, cedar, mahogany asian, white stripping, riverstone, blue pearl. MINWAX has a water-based rosewood that I would like to live. In the presence of wood, I feel something very much like the interest of a child in things like sweets and desserts. In fact, the stack of remnants of wood in my carport excites me the same mixture of the greed and satisfaction I lived as a boy coming home with a shopping bag full of inexplicably free candy on Halloween. They just give you the material. You have just put a mask and knock on their door. And the wood is like that too. The tricks grow on the trees, grow dirt, transmitted from a cone or seed in a living thing that throws a long shadow and comes almost ready to be used. When a tree is shot down, its connection to the earth is cut off and starts its service as a material. Until the moment, he eats and drinks and breathes among a multitude of doing the same thing, but in a formidable silence. Surrounded by these civilian and pleasant neighbors, I saw the other multitude, the two-legged horde in the assemblies of technology and confusion. I am delighted with the numbness that falls under the avalanche of information and calls for supercharging and images and goods for sale, and I am restored to my childhood - not to my childhood in the woods, because I n 'Did not mine in the Woods, but at this time of my life when the adult world care float from the overhead, like clouds, and some other things near the ground held all the meaning on earth for me .