Edge Effects: Notes From An Oregon Forest

To the Reader

To the Reader Think, live, be: next try to express scrupulously what you think, what you are living, what you are. -Henri de Lubac The essays that make up this book describe the first few years of my life on the edge of McDonald-Dunn Forest, a 12,000acre research forest outside Corvallis, Oregon. The house we live in is an ordinary house, pleasant neighbors each acre and a half, Timberhill Mall only minutes away. And yet we live on an edge. A forest stretches out behind us, full and rich and deep, as wild in places as the Cascades or the Coast Range, and living near it these past few years I've felt myself change. I've had adventures, in the woods and in my mind. The pieces I've arranged here form a kind of journal of those adventures, a record of the relationship between the forest and the life I live on its boundary. By "edge effect" ecologists mean the tendency toward greater variety and density of plant and animal life in the transition zone between two plant communities-a prairie and a forest, a clearcut and a stand of old-growth. A boundary is a very congenial place for species like gopher and deer. There are always two systems close at hand, ready to exploit and move between, the forest , say, for shelter and the meadow for food all along the large surface area of the boundary itself. For me the "edge effect" has meant a greater variety and density of experience, a multiplying of perspectives. Life is fuller here on the edge, and harder. There's more beauty and more tension, greater solitude and greater obligation. In a way Edge Effects is my version of "The Socio-Economic Impact of Harvesting Techniques on Residents on the Urban Fringe," an economist's study of the clear-cutting of our hillside. The shock of that unexpected harvest soon after we moved to the forest compelled the first few essays that follow. Like the wildlife biologists and silviculturalists and forest engineers and sociologists studying every aspect of the cutting, I, too, wanted to gather data. But my tool is the personal essay, and the data I've gathered concern my own feelings, impressions, and glimpses of beauty. I've simply tried to be empirical: these are the things I've actually thought and felt during the harvest and since, in more or less chronological order. These are the field notes of a severalyear study of my life and mind in the midst of trees. Only about half of them qualify as "nature writing," I think, at least in the sense of pure description and evocation of a landscape . The other half are autobiographical, simply stories of my life, though the forest is always there as a backdrop, the place I go to walk and think as I try to map out this inner territory. That's the general movement of the book, in fact, away from the forest itself and toward the forests of mind and memory, a movement that reflects how my interests have changed since I first started writing. My plan in the beginning was to do a cultural history or journalistic expose, something practical and somehow objective, but more and more I found myself drawn to other, more personal concerns, drawn to silence and the interior life, and gradually I began to understand that this was my real theme, this being pulled inward, toward the self, this frequent guilt and uneasiness about being pulled inward, this tension between reflection and responsibility. My question, I realized, is what to do, how to act. The forest evolved from subject to setting to metaphor , to put this another way, though finally I came to see these perspectives as interdependent, the outer and the inner world continually collapsing into each other, exchanging positions. The lesson I learned is that simplicity is always cultivated, nature always a paradoxical idea. Eventually I decided to write each essay as a separate piece XVI ,. 0 THE REA 0 E R and as things happened, not worrying at the time about its fit with other pieces, trying to fulfill the demands of that particular moment, that particular idea and form. I allowed myself to rethink , overlap, simply explore what interested me. And though I've since worked hard to sequence and blend the finished pieces into a unified book, even fictionalizing...