Cedar

Do you know the smell of cedar?

Gilgamesh, humanity’s first hero, journeyed to an ancient cedar forest, cut down the largest tree he could find, and carved it into a massive door to honor his God. Surely he smelled the forest when first he broke its stillness with his axe. Certainly that spicy dust from his saw livened his mood as he worked. Did Gilgamesh know what he was beginning, under the canopy of the elder trees? It is doubtful he did. After all, he was a hero.

I know what Gilgamesh felt, walking into the cedars. I’ve been there. Not to his forest, wherever that was. It is no longer standing. I have been to another forest, to my father’s forest, one of the last mountainous islands of the venerated trees. I spent my childhood summers there, under the blanket of the forest’s cool canopy. Just as my father had when he was a boy.

I can’t remember the first time I came under the trees, leaving the heat of the sun behind. I do remember the first time I realized where I stood, in that deep forest. I remember the silence. I remember the dark. I remember the enchantment of the sunbeams that did make it through, lighting up the sparse patches of fern and flowers that managed to live among the giants whose arms stretched wide across the mountain, keeping the sun from their feet.

Cedars rival redwoods in their size. These trees, in the forest my father showed me, stretched easily a hundred feet into the sky. Their broad leaves grew thick at their tops, meeting each other; providing perpetual shadow for those of us not so tall.

The effect is silence. The ground is composed of one thousand years of fallen canopy. Cedar needles make the ground a spongy carpet. You cannot stomp your feet, you cannot make a sound. I learn that the layer of needles is six feet deep.

Each time I visit I am taken by the trees. Their smell wafts through the dark-- tangible, comforting, alive. The cedars make the mountain into the deep ocean. I can never see the whole forest; it is never light enough, near their fuzzy trunks. Swirling disturbances beyond my sight are the only clues that I am not alone. The occasional squirrel, braving the heights, shouts down some nonsense about ownership, but I can barely hear her shout.

Each time I am perched upon the mossy rocks near the tiny stream that runs between the trees, thinking about my smallness, my father tells me something of the same.

Countless times in the cedars, he has said, “This is my church. This is where God lives.”

I believe him.

He has taken me to his church since before I could walk. We have strolled through the silent stand more times than I could try to count. He has shown me the hollowed trees, devastated by a forest fire hundreds of years ago, and still they grew. My father taught me the ease of worship, standing in awe within the natural cathedral.

We climbed a fallen tree whenever we came; one hooked high in the arms of its brothers. The fallen giant lay at an easy incline, and had been hollowed into a canoe shape by rot and weather. We could climb seventy feet into the air, among the first branches of the trees, where the living needles began. We would sit just under the warm, green-scented blanket, and look down into the dark while we ate summer sausage and chocolate.

My father showed me nature, in that forest. I learned respect, and honor. He showed me reverence, with his worship of the ancient grove. He showed me a glimpse at my place in the world.

Whenever we left the forest, coming out of its wise stillness, into the sunny, chirping world beyond, my father’s face reflected nature perfectly. I understood about religion because of what the forest did to my father’s face. It made my father look the way I felt. It took days for the world to wear away the faces we wore when we emerged from the forest.

We would drive from our property in the north, near the ancient cedar stand, to our home in the south of the state. Along the way, sometimes six or eight times a year, we drove past a unique real estate agency. One time, my father was driven to stop there.

The billboards drew him in. The smell made him stay.

Red and white-banded logs littered the yard of the model home office. Cedar logs.

The man inside welcomed us into his hope chest and handed out brochures. His handshake was wooden, but lacked the strength of the cedar bones surrounding us. There were cedar home plans nailed to the cedar log walls, and scattered on the agent’s matching desk. We toured the Lincoln Log house. My father took the brochures and talked about cedar home kits the whole way home.

At home, he sent away for competitor’s prices on ready- packaged log cabins, built from strong, spicy cedar. He priced, plotted, and looked for land to buy. He toured, and visited, and came home from log cabin agencies, carrying the faint scent cedar past my room.

Though he planned, years passed without him buying any of the log houses. We spent most of our summers as we always had. The forest changed far more slowly than we. Eventually, I moved away from home.

Not long after I left, my father asked if I’d like to spend a few weeks with him at our property. I jumped at the chance. It had been at least two years since I’d been.

On the first morning at the cabin, my father says, “Let’s walk up to the spring.”

The spring provides all the cabin’s water, and we check on the source now and then, clearing the mouth of the pipe. Just past the spring is the ancient forest. A trip to the spring means a day among the giants.

The path to the spring is an old bulldozer trail that my great-uncle made, when first he found the water source. Now it is choked with tall grass and young ash trees bend over the weathered road. We walk up the mountain quietly, searching for grouse to shoot on the way back home for dinner.

I smell the spring as we near it. We drink and inspect, and I’m very anxious to go on. My father is solemn. Without speaking he picks up his shotgun and his hat, and he motions for me to follow. We go over the hump that is the last of the road and into the pines that lead to the cedar’s edge.

When I push past the last of the piney branches and step into the fern grove that borders the cedar forest, I find my father, and the reason for the sadness I felt gathering in him at the spring.

The cedars are gone.

Ten rushed steps through ferns that try and trip me, ten furious, tear punctuated steps and I am standing upon the spicy scented stump of a slain giant. There is morning mist and salty water obscuring my view of slash-piles and trampled tree fingers. I am making a sound I haven’t made before. It is wailing, I realize, as my father’s hand finds my shoulder.

The forest is gone.

The sun is burning into the mist that mingles around the piles of limbs that had not been so close to the ground for a thousand years. The sun is poking at the soft needles, stealing their shadowy coolness gathered from the dark feet of the cedars. For as far as I can see there is ruin.

The scabbed stumps of the cedars smell sour, suddenly. The air is hot, flies scream around my head. I can see the stream, the one that was once mossy and fell between the trees in a hushed gurgle. I see the stream and realize that never before have I seen it from this far away, or heard it slosh so loudly downhill. I am shattered.

My father is crying, too. He tells me that he came here the year before, while the sap was still oozing from the flat stump upon which we stand. He says he couldn’t tell me about it, he had to show me.

We leave parts of our hearts on the stump, to keep alive any magic left lingering. We take the trail back to the cabin.

Still today, I remember the smell of pine inside our cabin’s walls and how it made me sick. I remember mourning.

I haven’t gone back. I’m angry with Gilgamesh.