When the kids were little and their home was broken I’d use my days with them to hike. It’s hard, that, there’s an urge to overcompensate, a desperate brave face apology often bought in ice cream and Chuck E fucking Cheese. There’s also the terror in your own heart that besides just being a shitty dad you’ve also broken your own life.
So we hiked in the gorge. It’s always been impossible for me to feel broken in the Columbia Gorge and, though I suspect they could feel it all on their own, I wanted my kids to have that same association. I invented myths for our hikes, it’s what I do, I make up stories. One mottled wind and water carved cave I said was the fairy place, that the fairies hid in the small holes and fissures in the rock, and if we touched the rock with our right hands heading east and our left hands heading west the fairies would show us something new. We would look for the fairy gift in the woods, along the trail or in the high sequoia branches like a needled roof above.
One of the hikes we took started near the Columbia and climbed abruptly up to a trail, that if taken led to every place the falls along that stretch of the gorge fell from. There were a lot of myths along that trail. There was on that wasn’t a myth, though we always stopped and I said my little piece, more like a prayer than a story.
At the bottom of that trail is a park, a playground, six months of the year a public rest room. There was also this tree split in half by lightning, hollowed out near the trunk. The tree had grown around the split, the two halves of the trunk reconnecting at the top where the branches began to spread. The branches acted differently on each half and in the autumn when the leaves changed; the leaves on the eastern half would turn golden and on the western half red/orange.
My little story, my little prayer was to tell the kids how that tree was symbolic of how I felt about the world, about people, about Oregon. That no matter what adversity befalls us, split in two by lightening for instance, we find a way to thrive, and that I never thought the tree was ugly or lesser for it’s scar, I found it all the more beautiful for it’s uniqueness, for its will to thrive, that I loved it’s golden leaves and I loved it’s red/orange leaves.
Like any kids anywhere you can’t skip parts of a story or a myth or a prayer, the routine of the smallest ritual has to be consistent, it’s how they form their world.
The tree is gone now; it’s been maybe ten years, the kids grown with their own children. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to the tree, it’s was removed when I had some other sort of stupid life event consuming my time, my thoughts, my heart. I think it’s better that I didn’t watch it taken down. I celebrated it’s will to live in my own mind and heart I would have needed to add to the mythology or the prayer how all the will in the world doesn’t stop the parks and recs crew from coming with a chainsaw. They even pulled out the stump.
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