I Sing of the People of Forks

I sing of the body, the people of Forks.

I sing of the backbone: the men, who work, or who can’t find work, who range from desperation to cynicism, with little satisfaction in between.

I sing of the white man, caught in the middle;
who started out logging;
who moved on to commercial fishing when the logging slacked off;
who moved on to conservation when the fishing slacked off;
who now works for the Hoh Indian Reservation, managing conservation;
who mourns the loss of the streambeds and the hillsides, to logging;
who mourns the loss of logging jobs;
who blames technology by reducing crews from 8 men to 2, for the loss of jobs;
who trusts private logging industry and the DNR less far than he can spit.

I sing of the white man who is out of work
who 15 years ago started college in fisheries, but then moved to criminal justice;
who found he could not both attend college full-time in a city an hour away, and work
full-time here, even though he was 15 years younger then;
who has eaten a luau of octopus in Tennessee with a family of Samoans;
who sometimes guides the handicapped on hunting tours in the Olympic Mountains;
who sometimes works road crew;
who sometimes works for the DNR, counting fish;
who wants to do criminal justice, but the career path here is to work at the prison;
who doesn’t want to babysit big scary angry men all day;
who doesn’t want feces and pinecones thrown at him;
who is caring for his young nephews while his twin brother lies dying of cancer in a hospital ward in Seattle.

I sing of the white man who works for the DNR and the prison;
who takes work crews of prisoners out to the mountains;
who plants and thins three acres of forest a day with a 10-man crew;
who may do the planting too, or just supervises;
who takes his prison crew to forest fires in that season;
who earns $50K, not counting fire bonuses, for babysitting big scary angry men.

I sing of the wussy-assed wimp at the weather station;
who could not be from around here, because he drives a Prius;
who stood in his white socks and Birkenstock sandals;
who scolded me for leaving open the gate (never locked), thus encouraging vandals to come
to drive on the grounds;
who watched me from darkened windows for an hour afterwards.

I sing of the over-confident former commercial fisherman, who would not let me finish a
sentence.

I sing of the nervous system: the children, poised and ready for the starting gun, still close by
their mothers’ sides.

I sing of the boy, “taking a break” after high school;
who lives only to kill – moose, deer, elk, cougar, salmon, halibut;
who brings photos of the cougar he shot, and the moose in Alaska;
who wants to learn taxidermy, but thinks linesman’s school might be more secure.

I sing of the high-school senior who hopes for a baseball scholarship and wants to play in the
big leagues.

I sing of the midwife’s blank-eyed daughter, who sparkles when talking about boys.

I sing of the articulate boy reading a book in the back seat while his mother talks to me;
who was the only person to take any candy from the bowl;
who asks to sit in the Mini Cooper;
who is most delighted by the automatically dimming overhead light;
who is too young to mask his enthusiasm with the polish of high school.

I sing of the heart: the mothers.

I sing of the business owner who reminds herself repeatedly, aloud, that her boy must make his
own mistakes.

I sing of the midwife, awaiting two babies, who knows everybody in town and around it.

I sing of the young woman, starting late after nursing her three-week old son.

I sing of the elbows, or maybe the feet, bruised and sore: the men who are disabled,
who live with their families, on the cheap out here in the wilds.

I sing of the transplant from Detroit;
who was pistol-whipped by police 30 years ago in the city, crushing his skull;
who’s suspicious and sharp-edged;
who sees light more brilliantly than the rest of us and turns away in pain.

I sing of the gentle, funny, smart man, on disability, but not obviously disabled;
who is wider than he is tall;
who says All I have left is my appetite and my sight. But I’ve got diabetes, so even that’s
going soon.

I sing of the Vietnam Vet (two tours);
who took two bullets, and an AKA-47 rifle butt to the forehead just above his eye;
who is proud he can still count to 10 and signs his name in a childish scrawl;
who smells of ancient cigarette smoke, wood smoke, cheap alcohol, and mold.

I sing of his half-blind, glass-eyed younger stepson, monosyllabic.

I sing of his hardscrabble, handsome wife, goliath Chihuahua tucked under her coat;
who growls and barks against all strangers;
who keeps them all together by sheer force of will.

I sing of her elder son, as beautiful as twilight on a stormy day and smart as lightning;
who works at “The Park” (the National Park) on a maintenance crew;
who lives in a plumbless cabin on the shores of a glacier-fed lake;
who joys in the glory of the forest and the water and the rain.

I sing of their friend, the organizer, the arranger;
who is tiny and round and dark like a dew-painted stone in the forest;
who is lively and laughing like a salmon swimming upstream;
whose smoke-graveled voice is the nexus for seven disparate spirits, watching them,
nurturing them, rescuing them.

I sing of the outsiders, rubbing shoulders: the people of LaPush,
who confirmed with me (three of them, two nights) and then didn’t show, a few hours later;
who hung up on me when I called to see if there was a misunderstanding.

I sing of the retired deputy sheriff, expensively blonde,
who has the skin of a woman ten years younger (all the locals have young skin in this
rainy region);
who lives across the street from her grandchildren;
who cares for her great-grandchildren one day every week of their lives;
who has recently remarried and laughs at every mention of her new husband;
who plans to build a home for her children to stay in when they visit, on the five acres
she bought with her new husband;
who says, pursing her red soft lips, Oh, LaPush – they’re Indians. They are so lazy!
You can’t count on them for anything. And drunk-! Always drunk!

I sing of the tongue: the friends, with ties other than blood;
who greet each other in surprise in the glow of the car lights;
who say I didn’t know you’d be here! How’s your father?;
who say See you Friday! Or See you at church! Or Say hi to your mother!
who sometimes say, as we drive back through the dark across the runway, Oh yeah,
I remember her now. My mom used to work with her at the bank.

I sing of the girlfriends in their 40’s, who both come together, twice;
who each sits in the dark car for two hours while her friend is with me,
who each is a silhouette with a cigarette for an evening, window half-open even in the rain;
who each is relaxed, but prepared to run to the rescue.

I sing of the gut and intestines: the retirees, who came here for the climate.

I sing of the early-retired nuclear chemist who came to hike the rain forest, because he had
hiked every other climate already;
who had lived five years in Las Vegas, hiking in the sear dry heat and learning to gamble;
who fell in love with the former deputy sheriff, a widow with young skin, and
who stayed;
who misses sunlight and travel and speaks often of god, and oftener of death;
who has a wife who will not sell her home as he sold his;
who plans, despite her, to build a house for them both on the five acres they bought together.

I sing of the retired gumshoe from around dere near Chicahgo;
who has an accent you could cut deep dish pizza with, and piercing blue eyes;
who at six foot five and three hundred pounds had nothing to fear while investigating;
who moved here with his wife because he’s thrifty, and you can live thrifty here;
who moved here because it was the only place in America you don’t need air-conditioning;
who knows all the honest car mechanics in Portland and gave me their names and addresses from memory;
who would have been happy to have talked for hours:
who did talk for hours: on the phone…during his wife’s session… and he came early;
who remembered I liked Ikea and brought me a catalog to read, and a book catalog, and the local paper.

I sing of his wife; almost as big as he;
who pleaded with him to find her a bathroom;
who lets him do all the phoning;
who waited for him to open her car door;
who laughed through our session and called her husband a babbler, just like his name;
who could have held her own against a cougar.

I sing of the Mrs. Cravitz, with three police scanners and four CC cameras on her backyard;
who caught those punks smoking down by the trees, and they couldn’t sell that car for
months -- that’s what limburger cheese will do;
who patrols the downtown blocks at the wee hours, laden with mace and pepper-spray;
who raised three kids alone, and raised them military, we’ve always been military;
who has two sons in the Marines in Iraq right now;
whose new husband has no military connections, and his eldest is a doper. When he comes
to the house, I follow him around with bleach, because dopers are full of germs.

I sing of the Mr. Cravitz, large and hearty and educated, friendly and warm.

I sing of the memories: the dead.

I sing of two teenaged girls in an especially gruesome car accident last weekend, their
sudden absence a reverberating, tingling shock for everyone we meet.

I sing of the husband, 55, chopping wood one minute, flat dead the next, while she was
making a phone call.

I sing of the baby boy, mentioned by his mother 25 years later, then carefully laid aside.

I sing of the baby brother, not a teenager yet, death unexplained.

I sing of the sinews and the muscles: the others.

I sing of the bank teller, come here from Detroit 30 years ago, only a local for 10 years;
who wants to talk about Lost and Buffy;
who knows all about how our money is filtering through town;
who explains about counterfeit traveler’s checks.

I sing of the nurse, intense and quick;
who came here from Michigan six months ago;
who shed her first name with her husband I was determined to lose something of
the old me;
who doesn’t recognize her old signature anymore as being her.

I sing of the bus-driver, the 3 a.m. to noon shift, between the pockets of humanity,
Forks to Clallam Bay and Clallam Prison, then Neah Bay, and back;
who traveled the world for 19 years with Disney on Ice;
who came here because his folks retired here;
who says Rain is better because once you’re wet, you can’t get any wetter.

I sing of the people of Forks.