Thomas RainCrowe

from Zoro’s Field, installment chapter

“It’s good to work--I love work, work and play are one. All of us will

come back again to hoe in the ground, or gather wild potato bulbs,

or hand-adze a beam, or skin a pole, or scrape a hive--we’re never

going to get away from that. We’ll always do that work. That work

is always going to be there.” -Gary Snyder (from The Real Work)

When Gary Snyder signs his letters to me, “yours in the wild work,” I know what he means. He’s talking about organizing a local watershed institute, preparing presentations for the Board of County Commissioners, participating in forest-fire training sessions with the local volunteer fire department, writing another poem for his Mountains and Rivers Without End cycle....planting a garden, making a firebreak, splitting firewood, sewing beads onto a peyote-meeting fan, putting a water pump on his old flat-bed truck. The high-brow and the low-brow of the work of self-sufficiency. The intellect intensely engaged alongside the forearm. The dovetailing of the cultigen and the cupule. The ability to find fun in a furrow, even a frown.

I watched him and his neighbors, attentively, during my years living up on the San Juan Ridge--the way they worked as solitaries and the way they worked as a community. It was no easy thing scratching a life out of the rough climate and terrain of the Sierra foothills along the Yuba River. And the word “work” took on a new meaning for me as I wiped the sweat from my brow working and playing alongside Gary’s friends and my new neighbors.

But there’s “work” and then there’s “the wild work.” While it’s a fine line that separates the two (if, indeed, they should be separated at all!), “the wild work,” for me, is more about time spent in thought and deed in “the wild world.” In the world of nature. In the wilderness. This emphasis on wildness/wilderness, for me, perhaps comes from my own upbringing and my memories of those years.

Those memories are juxtaposed with days, like today, when the wind is blowing in from the west and I can hear the incessant roar of the trucks on I-26 all day long--which even though a long way from the cabin, with the windows open, sounds like they’re right outside my door. This particular unpleasant disruption puts me on the defensive, and I yearn for an even simpler, quieter life--even farther from the fray and noise of the world, and even deeper into the undeveloped and uninhabited woods which, ironically, are owned by Duke Power Company and which border the Green River.

My initiation into the “world of wildness” came during my childhood years growing up on Snowbird Creek in Graham County. Snowbird Creek, the woods, the abundant wildlife (and the free-form, free-ranging relationship the young Cherokee boys and I had with this natural world) were all there in my backyard--just outside the door from the little house where I was reared, irrespective of my parent’s livelihood and values, as a “child of nature.”

My own essential and permanent social and environmental values were formed there during these years, as well as were friendships, some of which have also lasted a lifetime. And it was here, I believe, that “wildness” became a part of my own personal bloodline--part of my genetic coding. These were the barefoot years, running unimpeded and uninhibited through a seemingly boundless, wooded, watery, loamy, mossy, fern-resplendent and blooming photosynthetic eden. Surrounded in every direction by clean air, clear, drinkable water, and the green silence and great solitude of the woods, my friends and I used the creeks and forests as a playground, where we were as free and as at ease in this environment as were the animals.

While a good many families in our little mountain community eeked out their livings working in the lumber industry--which was the main employer in the county--I was living a charmed life, oblivious to the unpleasant issues associated with the logging business and such specters as that of “clear-cutting” which is on the tip of every tongue here in western North Carolina these days. The wilderness that surrounded my little home across the road from Snowbird Creek was the source of my sense of freedom. In the shadows of the deciduous rain forest, I became conscious, for the first time, of the paradox of being anonymous there amongst the trees, and, at the same time, being so very visible, vulnerable and known, while being, in theory, a part of the community of wild animals and species that lived there so freely. At that point, I began living, consciously, a duel life: the life I lived when I was with my family, when I was in school, when I was at church--in short, the life I lived in and around the human community--and the life I lived on my own and when I was alone and in the woods.

When I think back on those years, I think that it has to be that pristine boyhood experience that has led me to these woods and this experience along the Green River here in Polk County. Why else would I be here? Why else would I have left northern California and the comraderie of kindred kind? The answer to these questions could be nothing other than: a kind of arcane, yet symbiotic, calling that has come, psycho-genetically, from my memories of wild youth spent not all that far from here. What other explanation could there be for my bizarre behavior?! For leaving behind community and a congenially pagan/pantheistic life for this hermit’s life in the woods of conservative Southern Baptist North Carolina.

When Gary Snyder told me to “go home,” at first I felt insulted, spurned. I took it to mean that he thought that I was out of place there in the San Juan community. That I wasn’t welcome. Didn’t fit in. An outsider--something that I’d felt most of my life after being uprooted from my Graham County home as a boy. So, I rebelled by burying that remark in my subconscious and ignoring it, or, at least, trying my best to--which was no easy thing to do, as it had come from someone whom I looked up to as a mentor and teacher. Yet, here I am. Back in the North Carolina mountains. Home. Where now I am sitting, thinking back in the other direction, over a time-bridge that from being months has lengthened to years, to when I lived on the site of an old Maidu ceremonial village, rich with old oaks (from which the people gathered acorns to make ooti--a kind of porridge from which they lived), artifacts, and spirits-of-place who, more often than not, made themselves known in all manner of unpredictable if not unsettling ways. Where I lived alongside a very different community of wildlife than what is familiar to me, here--that included coyote, cougar, condor, eagle, weasel and what seemed an overabundance of rattlesnake and deer.

I lived in this place in a Plains Indian tipi under a five-hundred-year-old cedar tree amidst a community of humans that included farmers, home-builders, moccasin-makers, river rafters, magazine editors and Zen meditators. In this community I was allowed to live a kind of Anglo-Indian fantasy, where I rode a wild stallion bareback and bare-breasted over and through the northern California hill country...coming home from these riding excursions to tend fields of comfrey, popcorn and garlic, and to make cheese and yogurt from the milk of goats.

As I sit here looking back on it, I can see that this period was not only something of a return to my past and the pristine connections I had made with the natural world here in western North Carolina as a boy, but served, after many years in-between of living in a variety of human-made urban settings, as an extension of those early years blood-brothered in childhood, with even deeper recesses of my own inner psychic and psychological wilderness. Having developed a more mature and objective eye by the time I arrived in the Sierra foothills, I was able, in this wild, yet nurturing environment wedding human with nature, to more clearly search for and see the Big Picture whereas the Natural Universe was concerned, and how it played off that of the micro-cosmic world in relative balance.

I sit here in my rocker, with the woodstove and the front door of the cabin wide open, in a warm womb, and think fondly of those Maidu village days and of the re-inhabitory community into which I was taken and accepted. And out of which I was thrown, gently and lovingly, in order that I might find my way back to my “true” home, here, in the Green River woods.

The years of experience and awareness garnered in the “back country” of the Sierras and earlier during my Graham County boyhood, I have brought back with me in-to this small one-room cabin that Walt Johnson and I built many years ago while I was still in college down in Greenville, South Carolina at the foot of the Greenville watershed, which has its headwaters just south and east of Saluda. For almost four years this has been my home, where I am back again amongst the familiar faunal faces of my youth: black bear, wild turkey, hedge-hog, peregrine falcon, gray fox, ruffed grouse, black snake, copperhead and the always-present crows. With the gift of a roof over my head, enough cleared land to garden and few interruptions or temptations from the outside world, I have set up house and garden to take Thoreau’s Walden experience more self-sufficiently into the deep woods. To try and discover, firsthand, the organic and natural rhythms of the god-given world, as well as the ritual essences of self-sufficiency, self-confidence, and the purging of psychological fear. Where, on full-moon nights I sit by the fire in deep thought contemplating a physics of wildness based on common sense familiarity and observation borne of a lifestyle lived at the (true) speed of life. A “speed” borne of wilderness. A life lived doing “the wild work.”

The wild work, like “the real work” Snyder talks about, is borne of necessity and caring. Caring for what lives around us and what sustains us. In this sense, caring implies protecting. For if we should not protect that which sustains us, then what are we left with but our own wits and clumsy devices that feign to approximate what the natural world does as a matter of course. The “real” and “wild” work is what we humans do with our intellect and efforts to organize and improvise ways of maintaining some modicum of balance with the natural world, allowing us a life of relative peace and possibility, in good times, even a sense of security. Without this inner peace that comes with a deep inner knowing that we are at one with the wild world around us, there can really be no sense of security and, therefore, we are not at rest--but, rather, rest-less, fearful, tired. And we know, from history, what havoc is reeked from fear and fatigue. So, while fear and fatigue are inherently present in those few of us who attempt to live, self-sufficiently, on the land, we do try to minimize those weakened and deluded states of body and mind by giving ourselves a fair chance at the noble life of living justly with and from the wild.

Snyder, himself, and more simply, defines “the real work” as being: “What we really do. And what our lives are. And if we can live the work we have to do, knowing that we are real, and that the world is real, then it becomes right. And that’s the ’real’ work: to make the world as real as it is, and to find ourselves as real as we are within it. It is what is to be done. To take the struggle on without the least hope of doing any good. To check the destruction of the interesting and necessary diversity of life on the planet so that the dance can go on a little better for a little longer.” Taking life one day at a time, is what I think he’s getting at here. For my part, I have taken and given, on this day, all that I have. I’ve fed the wild birds, created a five-day stew which I have simmering on the woodstove, chopped up a week’s worth of kindling and ‘night wood,’ sewed buttons back on my winter vest, walked to the top of the orchard hill and back after checking the spring, and written it all down in the detailed journal I am keeping of the seasonal transition from winter to spring. It’s all been done wildly, yet with love.

It’s past dark and time for bed. I stick one last round of ironwood into the small box woodstove, shut down the air vent and the damper for the night. My last act of “wild work” for the day.

OCCAM’S RAZOR

for Wendell Berry

“Work is the health of love.”

The best path.

Something as simple as wood.

As wild

as a tree. Or

the perfect essence of space --

These ways.

Like the magic of hands:

gone, without trace....

In a small world,

I live with the things I grow.

Careful of what comes.

Letting nothing go.