Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods

The Wild Work

THE WILD WORK It's good to work—I love work, work and play are one. Allof us will come back again to hoe in the ground, or gather wild potato bulbs, or hand-adze a beam, or skin a pole, or scrape a hive — we're never going to get away from that. We'll alwaysdo that work. That work is alwaysgoing to be there. GARY SNYDER The Real Work hen Gary Snyder signs his letters to me, "yours in tne wild work," I know what he means. He's talking about organizing alocal watershed institute, preparing presentations for the board of county commissioners, participating in forest-fire training sessions with the volunteer fire department, writing another poem for his Mountains and Rivers without End cycle . . .planting a garden, making a firebreak, splitting firewood, sewing beads onto a peyote-meeting fan,putting a water pump on his old flatbed truck. The highbrow and the lowbrow of the work of self-sufficiency. The intellect intensely engaged alongside the forearm. I watched him and his neighbors attentively during my years living up on the SanJuan Ridge—the way they worked as solitaries and the way they worked as a community.It was no easy thing scratchinga life out of the rough climate and terrain of the Sierra foothills along the Yuba River. And the word "work" took on a new meaning for me asI wiped the sweat from my brow working and playing alongside Gary's friends and my new neighbors. But there's work and then there's "the wild work." While it's afine line that separates the two (if,indeed, they should be separated atall), the wild work, for me, is more about time spent in thought and deed in the wild world. In the world of nature. In the wilderness. This emphasis on wildness and wilderness comes from my own upbringing and my memories of those years. Those memories are juxtaposed with days like today, when the wind is blowing from the west and I can hear the incessant roar of the trucks on 1-26 all day long—which, even though a long way from w. 23 the cabin, with the windows open sounds like it's right outside my door. This particular unpleasant disruption puts me on the defensive, and I yearn for an even simpler, quieter life—even farther from the fray and noise of the world and even deeper into the undeveloped and uninhabited woods that, ironically, are owned by Duke Power Company and border the GreenRiver. My initiation into the world of wildness came during my childhood yearsgrowing up on Snowbird Creekin Graham County,North Carolina. Snowbird Creek, the woods, the abundant wildlife, and the free-form, free-ranging relationship the young Cherokee boys and I had with this natural world were all there in my backyard—just outside the door of the little house where Iwas reared, irrespective of my parents' livelihood and values, as a child of nature. My own essential and permanent social and environmental values were formed during those years, as were friendships, some of which have alsolasteda lifetime. And it was there, Ibelieve, that wildnessbecame a part of my own personal bloodline—part of my genetic coding . Those were the barefoot years, running unimpeded and uninhibited through a seemingly boundless, wooded, watery, loamy, mossy, fern-resplendent, and blooming photosynthetic Eden. Surrounded in every direction by clean air, drinkable water, and the green silence and great solitude of the woods, my friends and I used the creeks and forests as a playground, where we were asfree and at ease aswere the animals. While a good many families in our little mountain community eked out their livings working in the lumber industry—the main employer in the county—I was living a charmed life, oblivious to the unpleasant issues associated with the logging business and such specters as clear-cutting, which is on the tip of every tongue here in western North Carolina these days. The wilderness that surrounded my home across the road from Snowbird Creek was the source of my sense of freedom. In the shadows of the deciduous rain forest, I became conscious for the first time of the paradox of being anonymous there amongst the trees and, at the same time, of being soveryvisible, vulnerable, and known as a part of the community of wild animals and species that lived there so freely. At that point I began living, consciously , a dual life: the life...