Xylotheque: "Soviet Trees"

My book, Xylotheque, is made up of nine essays accompanied by ten photographs. Every couple of weeks, I am posting an excerpt from one of the essays along with a photograph that was not included in the book. The photo accompanying this post was taken in Riverside when I was twelve, shortly before the events described in the essay. “Soviet Trees” first appeared in Parcel in 2011.

Excerpt from "Soviet Trees"

The girls crowd around you, studying your face, your hair, especially your clothes. They scrutinize the words Highland and Riverside printed in goldenrod letters on your royal-blue sweat shirt. What do they mean? Are they a brand name? The girls demand answers. They ask you to repeat the words again and again. You’ve been taken captive by these anthropologists in the guise of Soviet teenage girls. Like all anthropologists, they see you projected through themselves. They don’t understand why you would grow weary of saying the words—Highland, Riverside, Highland, Riverside—like some tired incantation. As far as you’re concerned, whatever significance the words carry has been eked out on the third or fourth repetition, and you want to tell them that the words are now nonsense on your tongue, that you yourself have forgotten what they mean. Highland. Riverside. For the girl-anthropologists the words are redolent of freshly manufactured goods, and of freedom and dollars. They stare at your sweat shirt as though it provides a window into America, all of it, in its unimaginable wealth.

There a few things you need to know. It’s the summer of 1987, and you’re in Kuybyshev, a city closed to foreigners. The girls are Young Pioneers, and this is still the Soviet Union—but actually, there’s no still about it. Remember that. It simply is, for you and the girls, for as long as you’ve been alive, and for as long as your parents have been alive. To say it is still the Soviet Union is like boarding the Titanic for her maiden voyage, looking out at her massive decks, and thinking, Someday, I’ll remember this as the time when the Titanic was still afloat. How could you believe, standing on the deck, that either of those colossal ships, the Titanic or the Soviet Union, would ever go down?

You’re only twelve—remember that, too—but you’ve been put in the oldest group, with girls who are mostly fourteen, because you’re tall and precocious. They keep asking about what kinds of things you own, how much stuff costs in America, what the stores are like, and how much money your family has. They want a full inventory of America, from top to bottom, from side to side, as though America is just a vast storage unit full of material goods. You don’t know where to begin, but you feel like a celebrity. For the first time in your life, you’re popular, the star attraction. You suddenly have so many friends you can’t remember their names. They crowd closer and closer, trying to lay their claims on you, trying to see what an American looks like. They comment on your American face, which leaves you stunned. Americans have always commented on your Russian face. It’s turning out you look like no one at all. It’s turning out that your amalgamation of Russian and American features has made you only uniquely yourself, unlike anyone else, which is the last thing you want. You’re twelve, remember. You want to shout—but I’m Russian like you!—though quite clearly, you’re not. Quite clearly, you don’t belong here. The hot heavy press of the girls in the cramped humid room renders you an exotic cornered animal whose fate lies in the hands of your captors. And quite clearly, they haven’t finished sizing you up yet. They haven’t yet decided what to make of you.

They demand to know, among other things, how you got here. To get into the camp you have to have a pass, and in order to get a pass, you have to have connections. You explain that your mother was able to get you a pass through her former college roommate, who is connected to the trade union. The girls seem dubious. This is a camp for future Soviets. It certainly is not a camp for American girls, even American girls who don’t believe they’re American, who think they’re Russian, which is the kind of American girl you are.

In your slightly awkward Russian, you tell your unlikely story: that your mother is Russian and your father American, that they met in graduate school in Leningrad, that you were born in Kuybyshev and lived there with your Russian grandparents and mother and aunt until you were three. And then you left with your mother to be with your American father in a fantastical place called Riverside, California. Yes, you’ve seen the Pacific Ocean. Yes, you have a river of sorts, but it’s puny—often just a dry riverbed—compared to the Volga,. Yes, that’s the unlikely kind of rivers you have in America. And you have unlikely trees—palm and navel orange and avocado and eucalyptus—and unlikely stores, too, where, yes, it’s true, you can buy just about anything you want, as long as you have money. Yes, Highland is the name of your school, but you don’t know why. You know the names for many things in America but don’t know why those are their names.

To read more of this essay, look for my book Xylotheque, available from the University of New Mexico Press and other online retailers.

Xylotheque: "Song of the Redwood Tree"

My book, Xylotheque, is made up of nine essays accompanied by ten photographs. Every couple of weeks, I am posting an excerpt from one of the essays along with a photograph that was not included in the book. "Song of the Redwood Tree" first appeared in South Dakota Review in 2011.

Excerpt from “Song of the Redwood Tree”

We look and look, but we do not see the trees. There is no place to stand to see an entire redwood. For hours we crane our necks, peering into the sky where the trees disappear from sight. We circle their behemoth trunks, stupefied. We are underwater. The light on the forest floor is murky, greenish, yet freighted with clarity. There is levity to our steps on the spongy duff. We are walking on the ocean floor. “The forest canopy is the earth’s secret ocean,” writes Richard Preston in The Wild Trees. Hundreds of feet above us, the trees collect fog from the air. Their canopies are like root systems reaching into the sky. They seem as distant as the stars from where we stand in our green-tinged seafloor environment. The trees reach into the earth and into heaven, drinking, drinking. We are blind to the work of the roots under our feet, to the slow constant pull, to the enormous suck, the seep of water upward, unceasing for centuries.

“You really can’t tell much about what’s happening in a forest from the ground,” says noted redwood expert Steve Sillett in 2009 National Geographic documentary titled Climbing Redwood Giants. So true. From the ground, we do not see the life that teems within the canopies hundreds of feet above us; we never glimpse, for example, the salamanders that live their whole lives in trees without once touching the ground. We do not see the epiphytes, fifty-plus species of mites, copepods, earthworms, bumblebees, huckleberries, lichens, voles, rhododendrons, currant and elderberry bushes, or the bonsai groves of California laurel, western hemlock, Douglas fir, tan oak, Sitka spruce, and buckthorn that perch atop the sprawling canopies that are like land masses held aloft in the sky. The canopies of the world’s forests, I learn, contain half of nature’s species. The scientists who rappel themselves into the trees, scaling redwood trunks like the faces of sheer cliffs, go into this undiscovered country. And they see.

Science has other ways of seeing. Researchers peer at the redwoods through microscopes, poring over cellulose, lichens, the structure of shrimp found snarled in trees hundreds of feet above sea level. They fly over the forests in twin-engine planes, using LIDAR, light detection and ranging, to create highly detailed maps of the topography of redwood forests, determining the heights of the tallest trees from the air. Dendrochronologists squint at great slabs of redwood cross sections, peering at the rings, counting, seeking out minute differences in annual growth. All of these are ways of seeing. And all ways glimpse only pieces of the whole.

To read more of this essay, look for my book Xylotheque, available from the University of New Mexico Press and other online retailers.

Xylotheque: "Navel Country"

My book, Xylotheque, is made up of nine essays accompanied by ten photographs. Every couple of weeks, I am posting an excerpt from one of the essays along with a photograph that was not included in the book. "Navel Country," which appeared in Colorado Review in 2013, was the last essay in the collection that I wrote. It is a memoir about my grandfather, about growing up in the Inland Empire, about orange trees and memory, about landscape and nostalgia.

Excerpt from “Navel Country”

Summiting, I look down. My eyes find the straight line of Palmyrita, now flanked by warehouses and a tech park. I search the land for groves and finally spot the eight acres still being farmed by an elderly widow; the block of green is nearly lost in the sprawl of houses and the rectangular white roofs of warehouses, a new patchwork overlaying the land. I look a little farther, toward the base of Blue Mountain, where the family groves used to be. Here, there is nothing at all, just leveled dirt. The developers have razed the trees but put nothing in their place. The project was halted when the economy went sour, the developers running out of resources or vision, running out of some essential quality necessary to effect a transformation. What is here is emptiness, waiting to be overwritten, waiting for the next iteration of progress, the next conquest.

I try to think of a way to tell my daughter what this place looked like when I was a child: all those verdant nubs of trees tucked up against the hills, tidy as machine stitching, nature perfected. I want to redeem my grandfather and the land that made him. Before I can say anything, my daughter speaks. “California feels like home because we’ve moved so many times we always live somewhere different, but California always stays the same.” This is her second trip up Sugarloaf so she has a reference point, a sense of continuity. “I can see why you would feel that way,” I tell her. I don’t say the rest out loud: You have the disease of nostalgia, too, I fear. You will someday think back to your childhood when you mistook your own innocence for an innocence of the world, when you mistook the simplicity of a child’s life for universal simplicity, your own happiness for universal happiness, when you mistook the long yawn of time that makes up childhood for permanence. Or worse, you’ll believe that you just missed out on something. And you did. And so did I. And so did we all. Even Grandpa.

Because when my grandfather arrived in California in 1922, even then people said the glory days were already past. I imagine the one perfect day—sometime in 1895 or perhaps 1905, when North and Tibbets were dead but my family was not yet on the scene—and it went by completely unnoticed. There was nothing remarkable about it, just a sun-drenched day with blossoms clustering tightly to the trees, their fragrance heavy in the air, and the Riversiders going about their business, driving their wagons up and down Victoria, men irrigating their groves, women buying eggs, and no one even suspecting that they had reached the pinnacle of their glory, that tomorrow and the day after and the day after the glory would slip a little further into the past, and even though more groves would be planted and more houses would be built, forever after there would be that sense of nostalgia, that sense that something beautiful and pure had slipped away. I see those Riversiders on their one perfect day, and they don’t know it’s perfect, and they have no one to tell them: This is it. You’re living the dream. Don’t let it go by unnoticed. Put a border around it and paste it to an orange crate. Hold on to it, however you can.

And then I picture myself as a sixteen-year-old girl, painting standpipes on a summer day that feels like it stretches forever, and I want to say the same things to her. I want to put a border around her. And does some future version of myself capture me here, today, at the top of a peak flanked by my young children, looking down on a vanished landscape, and does that future self long to put a border around this moment, render it as landscape? How many layers deep can nostalgia accrue? What is this palimpsest of the self? There is no extracting the self from landscape. We are the landscape, for it is our creation.
 

To read more of this essay, look for my book Xylotheque, available from the University of New Mexico Press and other online retailers.

Photo/Text 8: Winter Bloom

Starting from a place of dirty snow and incessant talk of wind chill, you board a plane and emerge, half a day later, in a tepid place that confuses your senses, a place of plants in strange winter bloom. At first, your winter-hardened self recoils from the alien landscape, from roses and bougainvillea, jade plants and birds-of-paradise. You walk from one botanical specimen to the next, as on a movie set, marveling. When your skin relaxes, no longer steeling itself against cold, you don summer clothes and sit in sunshine. The locals, sealed up inside, seem impervious to the miracle of warm winter; no one else’s bones are starved of warmth. Yet you were once one of them, believing winter was but a milder form of summer and not a different species of season altogether, a gray season with teeth like a wolf. You moved from this place nearly fourteen years ago, trading year-round bloom for winter, for the wolf, and you would not trade it back. Never again do you want to be immune to blooming. Heading back on the plane, stepping back into winter, you welcome the terrific chill that claims you, sinking its teeth in your flesh.

Looking for the Mountain

When I moved to Connecticut three years ago, I explored the area around my town and described some of my travels to new acquaintances. When I told one neighbor that I had gone to the town of Avon, she said, “So you drove over the mountain.” Puzzled, I replied that I didn’t recall seeing any mountain. “I love mountains,” I told her. “I’ll be sure to look for it next time.” She gave me a quizzical look.

Several weeks later, I was talking to another acquaintance about how to get somewhere in Canton, and she told me to “drive over Avon Mountain.” I asked her how I would do that, and she told me to take Route 44, which was the route I had previously taken to Avon. So again I got in my car and drove to Avon and then to Canton—and I still didn’t see any mountain.

Finally, when “the mountain” came up in a conversation a third time, I didn’t let it pass. I asked my interlocutor where, precisely, this mountain was. “You go right over it on Route 44,” she told me. “No,” I told her. “I’ve driven on Route 44, and I didn’t see any mountain.” Then she began to describe the grade going up over a rise, the runaway truck ramp on the downhill side, the treacherousness of the road, and I realized that our definitions of “mountain” were severely misaligned.

“That,” I maintained, “is no mountain.”

Later, I learned that the area referred to as Avon Mountain where Route 44 connects Avon and West Hartford is actually part of another mountain, Talcott Mountain, which at under 1,000 feet also doesn’t qualify as a mountain in my lexicon.

Last week, I was talking with a woman in the library while the kids played in the toy kitchen area. My friend described to me her trip to the town where I grew up in Southern California. She once flew out there from Connecticut to attend her cousin’s wedding. When she arrived, she was in awe of the mountains. She remarked to her cousin that the mountains where so tall. “Those aren’t mountains,” her cousin replied. “Those are hills.”

For several days, she kept looking at and remarking on the mountains, and her cousin kept correcting her. “Those are hills,” her cousin kept saying. “You just wait and see.” The mountains that my friend was seeing were covered in brown grasses and chaparral, and they looked tall to her. In fact, the tallest peak in the hills near my childhood home is over 3,000 feet.

Finally, one day the smog cleared out, revealing the true mountains—the blue snow-capped splendors on the horizon. “Those,” her cousin told her, “are mountains.” And my friend was in awe. “Those,” she repeated to me, “are mountains.”

“I know them well,” I said. “Both the mountains and the hills.” And then I told her my story about driving all over Avon Mountain looking for the mountain and being unable to see it. She laughed, and we began to talk about how our internalized landscapes—our very definitions of words like mountain and forest and river—affect our ability to see and name new landscapes. But then the children ran up with wooden pizza and pretend tea for us to enjoy, and we never finished our conversation.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about how our intimacy with the landscapes of our childhood sometimes makes us blind to new landscapes, or at least unwilling to see the wonder in a place that we do not yet call home. Since then, I’ve been thinking about our personal definitions of words related to landscape and how those meanings are formed. Since then, I’ve been thinking about mountains.

What does your mountain look like?