My parents planted a forest

We just could not imagine life functioning at tree-scale time.

When I was 10, we moved from Los Angeles, capital of Califas, to Ridgefield, Washington, population 1390.¹ We arrived in high summer, driving past the cow pastures, and up the gravel road to a little green house on a ridge surrounded by hay fields that sloped down to a seasonal stream that supported a marshy forest. To me, the most exciting thing about the place was the massive container of lemonade powder that the previous owners had left. Well, that, and the riding lawnmower.

While the forest was dense and interesting, the fields were just high and dry grass. The house looked like it had been helicoptered in and dropped.² My parents decided to terraform everything in the acres around the house.

On the weekends, we started going up to Tsugawa’s Nursery in Woodland (long before I knew about the Japanese nursery tradition, I lived it) and buying these baby trees. We’d load them into the Mercury Sable station wagon (dark red) and drive back down I-5.

Back home, someone would tell me I had a young back, so I should shovel, and I did, so I did. I loved digging holes. Shovel and shovel and shovel, get down on your knees and make extra room at the bottom of the hole, loosen up the roots, drop the tree in, cover it up, and on to the next one. We did it over and over and over with so many trees. A couple hundred. And after a big work day like that, we'd go back up to Woodland and eat at the Oak Tree, which was fancy feeling, and had a large front display of what seemed like very exotic tinned candies and mints, like Altoids.

The work agreed with me, but I was 10, what else was I gonna do? My mom, I always knew loved the country, loved fresh air, loved growing stuff. She’d grown up on land and always wanted to return to it.

But I had thought my dad was a city boy all the way through. He’d spent his life in Guadalajara, Mexico City, DC, and Los Angeles. He bore a striking resemblance to the Most Interesting Man in the World from the Dos Equis commercials both aesthetically and narratively. But in this rural place, it turned out that he possessed only an urban mantle and that at his molten core, he loved tending this yard.

Not farming. Not even “gardening” in the traditional sense of trying to achieve some productive or aesthetic human-centered outcome. Rather, my dad embraced the chaos of life. They both did. One of my fondest memories of my dad is that when we still had lots of field to mow, he’d sometimes leave random patches of little flowers, or even just patterns that he seemed to find pleasing. This was not by the book lawn maintenance.

Their yard now is riotous and alive. It is life! Not natural, but biophilic. Each thing that they (we) planted is allowed to embrace its trajectory. Trees jostle for photons. Vines find their marks. A cherry tree is swallowed by an aggressive grape. A blackberry and kiwi find mutuality. A bulky magnolia rises amidst Douglas fir and redwood on the edge of the marsh forest, which has hardly changed, it seems.

Not everything did well. Not everything survived, but life did. And now, if you sit on the back deck, there is a wall of shimmering greens. So many different tones and morphologies. Any breeze touches off a gorgeous dance of light and leaf.

My parents have deer friends that come hang out mere feet away from the house. Three baby raccoons moved into a cherry tree one year and my dad had them literally eating out of his hand by the time they’d grown up enough to move out and start eating garbage in some city. There are birds absolutely everywhere, redwing blackbirds and tanagers and scrub jays and mourning doves. There are fairy trees for children to hide under (weeping birches) and majestic pines and trees dripping with fruit that my parents gift to the ecosystem.

My role was tiny, but even my parents’ roles were relatively small in the scheme of life. We did not truly know the properties and potentials of all the things we planted. We just could not imagine life functioning at tree-scale time. How could a redwood your own height become a 60-foot tree? I think of these redwoods as some kind of kin, cousins maybe about my same age. They sure have changed a lot, but I have so many good memories with them from childhood, especially aiming my toboggan between them on the rare good snow day as we slid down the big hill.

There is no space between them anymore, and there isn’t as much snow anymore either.

It makes me a touch wistful. That green house sitting at the top of the hill near the road with nothing around it. It was a child of a house, lacking in chaos and repair. Innocence, naivete, hay fields, 1992.

But now: ringed with trees, rings within trees, thick and thin, through time, with time, in time. It is good to feel my life intertwined with all that green life, grown.

1. Why is a bit of a complicated story for another time. But suffice to say, for now, that my Mexican grandmother lived in that town, and her mother had actually lived there for a couple decades, too, our beloved Mama Louisa, known and buried locally (it turns out) as Marie Louise. Our relationship with this town runs very deep, though I’m not sure that we even understand how deep until we’d been there for a long time.

2. It actually sits on the topographic boundary between two different water sheds. To the east, our little stream runs out to the East Fork of the Lewis River, which has come down from the Mt Adams and through a series of huge dams. By the time it reaches our area, it’s a rolling hill kind of country. A few hundred feet in the other direction, though, and you’re into this fractured canyon land, where everything is not far from the Columbia and on its way there quick through a series of lakes (Rosannah Lake, Lake River, Vancouver Lake). It’s called the “West Slope,” watershed, but it’s just a grab bag of gradients.