Clearcut - legacy of breast cancer in - family - Brief Article

A BRUSH WITH MORTALITY. A DREAM OF MORE TIME, HERE, NOW, ON EARTH.

THE REPORT FROM THE PATHOLOGIST READS "benign." I do not have breast cancer. I am relieved to be healthy, but a melancholy hangs over me. This story tires me, breaks me down, erodes my spine. It is the sick mantra that never goes away--Mother had breast cancer, so did my grandmothers. They are dead. I am alive. I wonder why.

Last night, I had a dream. The mountain across from where we live had been clearcut. Green swirls, spirals, patchwork designs became the hillside. I am horrified. My grandmother Lettie is sitting on the chaise in our den. I say to her, "How did this happen, and so soon?" She is dressed in white and says nothing. I run outside to see if it is really true. My eyes open. The hills beyond our home are still wild. It is only when I look into the mirror that my body reveals the trauma.

In another segment of the dream, I am creating a narrative on the forest floor out of found objects--pine needles, sticks and branches, pieces of bark, cones, stones, feathers, moss--it is a sentence written in the native voice of the woods. I do not know what it says, only that I am its scribe. What I feel as I place these "letters" on the ground is that it is a way to stay the cutting--long, flowing sentences rising out of the duff that acknowledge the death of trees.

I hear the poet William Merwin's voice. "I want to tell what the forests were like. I will have to speak in a forgotten language."

A friend from the forest sends me a large wooden ball. It is made out of yew, yew that heals the cancers of women--taxol. This is a tree that I know from the Willamette Valley. Pacific yew, so elegant below the towering cedars and firs. I remember watching the slash piles burn, the pungent smell that inevitably follows the chainsaws and timber sales. I recall all the clearcuts I have stood in, walked through in Utah, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.

The silence. The heat. The mutilations. The stumps. The phantom limbs still waving above my head.

The hillsides from a distance look like a woman's body prepared for surgery--shaved and cleared, ready for the scalpel.

I hold this yew ball in my hands, close my eyes. What do I see? Heartwood. What do I feel? Wood, round like the cyst my body created, now removed by a surgeon, the same surgeon who removed my grandmother's breast, his hands holding the knife, cut and release. What have I released?

Another dream fragment flashes before me. Bear tracks in the snow coming down the mountain. They are filled with blood. I see the blood of my mother and grandmothers. I smell the potent sap of yew, slash and burn, cut and release. I cup my two breasts, one tender, one firm.

WHERE DO THE CLEARCUT BREASTS OF WOMEN GO? WHERE DO the trees go? Where has the tissue of my body been thrown? I should have asked for it back so I could have buried it in my garden like a sunflower seed. What is taken from our bodies becomes our pathology--the frozen sections of ourselves placed under a microscope for review. Benign or malignant. We wait for the word.

In the meantime, I daydream, make plans. I want to be buried on Antelope Island in the middle of Great Salt Lake. It is not legal, but my husband and brothers have promised to sneak my carapace onto the land, dig a good hole, then cover it with rocks, a fine perch for horned larks. Mormons believe you should be buried with your feet facing east so you can rise in the First Resurrection.

I want my feet facing west, toward the setting sun, toward the unknown, my body easing back into Earth, food for beetles, worms, and microbes. The songs of meadowlarks and curlews will be my voice. I am satisfied to be soil. Stampeding bison over my grave is the only eternal vision I need.

Collisions with mortality always create death dreams, daydreams, creative contours of mind that circle our fears and transform them. These moments of acute awareness allow us to claim our deepest desires: I want to live. I want to love. I want more time, here, now, on Earth.

The final dream is simple. My friend from the forest and I are canoeing in a lake. The mountains that surround us are burning, the trees are burning. When I awaken, my left breast is burning.

Merwin's voice echoes again: "but what came out of the forest/was all part of the story/whatever died on the way/or was named but no longer/recognizable even/what vanished out of the story/finally day after day/was becoming the story/so that when there is no more/story that will be our/story when there is no/ forest that will be forest."

What do I do now with the open space in front of my heart?

TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS is a writer living in Utah. She is the author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Vintage, 1992). Previously published in Artrageous (Chronicle Books, 1997). Permission granted by W. S. Merwin for use of "One Story" (Knopf, 1997).

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