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Walker Creek
- University of Iowa Press
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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WalkerCreek A t the airport outside Seattle my family greets me—dogs and sisters, kids and Mom—everyone except our father, who has died of cancer two months before. My mother now looks shorter, my sister more brittle and thin, and the gaggle of nephews too timid and shy to meet my eye. We adults trade compliments and hugs. Just moments and we’re home, as the sisters and I still call it, a low ranch house surrounded by flowers and grasses and trees. We are in a suburb of Seattle, where ranchettes of several acres slope from the road to marshes and fields. Back to my youth I slide, to the garden overgrown in pumpkins we siblings planted, weeded, picked, and sold from the card table at the roadside; back to the grease pencils for marking pumpkin prices and the muffin tins for making change. The acreage conjures up the abundant pets of my childhood, the herds and ponds and flocks. Once more I smell lanolin from lambswool on my hands and hear our beef cattle bawling for someone to toss them hay. Dazed by these memories and the summer sun, I wander out past tufts of orchard grass and blackberry canes, beside the weathered barn and sheds, to the busy willows grown from shoots that Harold and I cut and thrust into the soil. I have flown back to help my mother in this difficult time but also to rendezvous with my son Braden, who is almost a man now. He and I will cultivate native shrubs and trees, haul bark and pull weeds, and try to finish the indigenous botany job my father began before he fell ill. In a vacant lot beside the house, he built an arching trellis over double benches that serve as entry to the would-be garden that lies beyond. Here we will do our spadework. The garden has good drainage and southern exposure, a sweet setting in this region of fog and drizzle, whereas northern is dark and Walker Creek 5 damp. Finding a place where native plants still grow in a spot that hasn’t been grazed, bulldozed, drained, or sprayed is rare. The garden plot lies in the shade of a dozen Douglas-firs that Harold allowed to continue towering when he cleared the sloping lowland to the east for pasture—for horses, Hereford cattle, and sheep. Nearly a century old, the firs have withstood roads and homes, phone wires and sewer lines, gas mains and power poles—even two stout bars embedded in their trunks for us kids to practice gymnastic stunts. When gales tried to topple the trees, we feared they’d fall on the house, but they still stand. We lopped their boughs to make Christmas wreaths and mantle mangers, flung ropes over the branches to fashion tire swings, and watched robins and orioles and blackbirds brood among their needles. We liked to think we used those old trees well. The grove was our evergreen sanctuary, the remnant wild space into which we gazed and wondered how it might prove useful. On this visit to the family homestead I get reacquainted with the trees, marveling at the thick resilient bark, the pitch that smears my hands. The trees call up more than memories for me. They remind me that I have become what some would call a tree-hugger, a pantheist engaged in the praise of Earth’s creations. Before I sit down to supper with my mother this evening, I will scrub with a hand brush to remove the sticky residue of those trees. In the tribal way of those sustained by memories and blood, my family mostly lives near regular jobs and haunts, hanging on to early farmland turned suburbia. Anchor-hold for the kinfolk, the neighborhood is changing. People move in and out more often. Where we used to have sledding parties and borrow baking supplies, we no longer know who lives next door, much less several houses down. Exotic faces blend and blur with the freeway spurs, the quickie marts, the airport grown from one runway to three, the jets that take off so much closer now. Pollution, germs, and crime preoccupy my family’s time and conversations. Homes burglarized in the daylight, automobiles hot-wired and stolen. The guard dog’s yelping after nightfall prompts alarm. Idling in traffic or shopping in town, I wallow in a haze of nostalgia , memories as thick and sweet as the scent...