The bench is not the only place things get made. Some trees ask for a second telling.
Haumea's sulfuric breath coaxes a bud from the loam. A sapling sentinel to stand this Pacific outpost. Deep through crystalline Andisol, tendrils scratch and seek, to join a community of entanglements.
One hundred and twenty years, and sixty feet, ring by glowing ring, embodied. Keeping watch from Krakatoa to Hiroshima and on. From kingdom, to territory, to state.
What's the difference, bayonet or axe? It's the hands that wield, that kill. This island grows by fire, and dies by water. Shallow-rooted trees detest a breeze.
The elders whisper of a twin-hulled canoe run aground by insatiable appetite, brothers and sisters cut down in their prime to make room. And more canoes.
Absorbing this insult and that injury, weathering this fire and that storm. Witnessing neighbours ripped up by the roots. Dismembered, eviscerated, gone.
Still, you conjure yourself out of thin air. Another ring, no matter the year. From the outside, nobility and art. Inside, a slowly burnishing heart.
Flying straight out of the morning sun, so close you could almost touch them, ripping leaves off in the prop-wash, ripping holes in the ocean with fire.
You must always strive to reach the sun, and when you have it in your grasp, remember; Night will fall regardless. And Eagles will perch wherever they please.
One hundred and twenty years ended in an afternoon, with the smell of gasoline, to whet the appetite. Fed to the mill, with steel jaws and teeth, measuring life by the perfect board foot.
Thirty years you laid in state, waiting for the maker's hands to hold you up to the light again. But even the maker is unmade, in time.
From his hands then, with hope, to mine.
A teardrop caught in a curling leaf? A frozen ocean glittering? A lava flow, petrified, but still aglow? The heartwood remembers in chatoyancy.
With reverence and optimism this morning, I carved two large Koa bowls with brass inlay. One for my son. One for my daughter. For our children to remember us by.
Breaking new land is murderous work. Even a giant, like the old man's old man, hands of a grizzly with a temperament to suit, could maybe manage a small copse of birch with iron will, an ox, and a bottle of vodka, in a day.
A quarter section and title for ten bucks! Who could resist? Who'd want to? Rich black soil rolling all the way to the sky. (Just like home.) Picture an ocean of wheat, and a clan of well fed cubs. A man has a duty to provide. Go to!
Take the train through Lviv and on to Rotterdam. Steerage straight to Quebec, if you're lucky. Then the Canadian Pacific to Winnipeg. Right out of the station. North up Main. Keep going. A little more. When you reach Valhalla, you're there.
A week into the muskeg, at the blade's edge of civilization, where the winter makes crystals of your breath and your bones, where the thaw is only a harbinger of more hard graft, where the summer is blood, sweat, and mosquitoes, and the reckoning arrives with the harvest every fall. Here. Make yourself at home.
The land offers songs. The sparrow and the chickadee, quiet, now the air is hung with new music. For the Benevolent, songs of praise sung proudly. Spires like Chantarelles, blooming from fallen boughs. Progress never takes place in silence.
The centre of the world, Manitoba. A fresh millionaire minted by the month. Screaming steam and gleaming rails in every direction. Golden eyes atop a man-made limestone mountain see only prosperity, wherever they gaze.
Before railways and roads, fences and fields, before treaties and territories, titles and deeds, before the cloth and the crown brought the church schools to town, and the Company with it, blankets and rum, there were bison from horizon to horizon.
But before all of this, before any of that, and before even the land, there was only water. And one brave muskrat.
I hear the Almanac's calling for a wet spring.