The Thinking Log

On Longing for a Place to Be

The tree stood on the edge of space until it fell. The sun dried its bark and bleached its hull until its skin dropped, flaking, onto a soft, ruddy bed beneath its whitened bulk — a great bone jutting from the mountainside. The tree lay perpendicular to the mountain face, pointing north. A creek runs east to west at the base of the mountain, out of the deep cleft called the “Narrows” through which runs the first national road, now Route 40, with either side festooned with steel ribboned railroad tracks and the clatter of cars echoing in the soot-strewn crevices of the valley. The place where the tree had fallen, the tree a not insubstantial birch that had grown for years beside an abandoned rail-line running west along the mountain, parallel to the national road. The iron rails are gone, but the cross-ties remain in the dirt and mud and moss, lichen covered, sticking out of the leveled shelf that drops abruptly away to the creek run, where the valley levels off and spreads out into the suburbs.

The tree had fallen and conditions had stripped the bark and left a wide, pale bench on a diagonal across the path. Another tree, oak, lay beside it on the ground in a more advanced stage of decomposition, shelf mushrooms blooming in a ridge along the side, dense green growth softening the top, moist chipped wood spilling out of the end into the path, its circumference buckling under the weight.

From my mother’s front porch, you can see the faint trace of this path along the side of the mountain and, in the right light, you can just make out a little gap in the trees where this fallen one made a clearing. This line, traced along the mountain, extends from the fate of a nation, which just a mile east had found passage to a mythic frontier, the way from the tidewaters of the coast through the Appalachians and into the Ohio Valley where the great unclaimed future was alleged to lay. This already gives the lie to our mythology, as the Shawnee who were forced west to Missouri and Kansas can attest. Between east and west, in the violent, changing borderland between what has been called “civilization” and “wilderness”, there was created a kind of internal colony, designed to extract the wealth hidden in the mountains and send it east, to the industrial cities and ports that were and remain centers of commerce. Nobody living here in town or valley is untouched by those tracks. They connect across great distances while dividing what is nearest. They have reshaped the landscape as development followed, the land that once forced technology to yield now itself yielding.

In my case, it was two great-grandfathers, two grandfathers, a great uncle and aunt who all toiled on the railroad. My mother’s father was a real-life boilermaker whose color blindness kept him in the yard but whose ability to weld made him indispensable. His own father had escaped the factory to work on the railroad, escaped the same factory in which his father, my great-great-grandfather, lost both arms and died in an industrial accident for which no one was faulted. It was along the traces left from this old way of life that the tree had fallen where the tracks used to run, where no freight would run again.

It was a place for me, the eventual ironic Boilermaker pounding keys like rivets into the edifice of my own designs. I would walk along this path, to this fallen tree, and think in solitude to be most myself. Oftentimes, my friends would walk too and there, away from our parents, would be most ourselves together, between us. This is a place in-between: between the height of the mountain and the depth of the valley, between the city, suburbs, and country, between the technical and the natural, between solitude and solicitude, between myself and the world. It was a place for thinking — a place to be.

Many years later, when I returned to the spot, the tree, my thinking log, was gone. It had been cut clear of the path, its guts gathered in mounds of sawdust atop the anthracite speckled banks of the sunken, abandoned line. New neighbors used the path to ride four wheelers. What had been a bench for me for so long was, for them, a recalcitrant danger, the spot transformed from a place to be in one’s head to a place where one might lose their head, and so the obstacle had been dispatched.

I will never forgive these neighbors, who I do not know, who I will probably never know, and who themselves will never know what they destroyed, just some fallen tree but for another, the world. The path from there to here is so clear once sitting mole-skin I sketched the words “Ginny’s Diner…” after a faux-steel boxcar pretending to another century down the street that became a place and anchor in the text and pages written and rewritten again; going over that place and back to that place and peopling it with friends and lovers and queers who never felt like they had a place here except where once was rotted next to the fallen bones of an unknown and unknowing sister whose great bleached thigh still supported a boy and his notebook that themselves emerged from this place just as they once sank into it again standing on that rotted and rotting oak; fungus lichen moss decomposing the once-living flesh too timorous and trembling to hold the weight of living and at the threshold gave way to the sensation of sinking, of being swallowed whole, of crumbling and sliding so graciously into the disintegrating arms of rainsoaked wood chips that sitting on the ground in them after all that could be done was laugh and laugh and think I am, here I am, I, here between bank, ravine, and shadow of the old private citadel that lay crumbled at my feet and now in that sudden rupture cries Here I Am, Yes, Here