Iron Buddhas 4

- 4 -

STEFFI'S LIFE has become a bruised but happy blur.
    Mornings, she wakes easily; she's always been her own alarm clock. She picks a time and -- bim! -- her eyes pop open. The crew discovers this and they award her the role of bellringer.
    In the darkness her arm snakes forth from her sleeping bag and she feels assorted pants and shirts in a pile on Rocinante's truckbed floor for dampness. The least damp or mud-stiffened pants and shirt are nominated as today's dress code.
    Staggering outside in unlaced tennis shoes, she picks up by feel a cold, rained-slick hammer from a stump and with her other hand she bats around at the air till she finds a seventeen-inch long forged-steel hoedad blade hanging from a tree on a strand of baling twine. This she pounds on for thirty seconds until lamps and flashlights pop on all over the still-benighted camp.
    "Okay, okay, Stef! Cheezis fuggin' cries arready!"
    Someone stumbles over bodies in the entryway of the crew yurt, dodges pairs of sweating caulk boots hanging from the low rafters, lights the white-gas lantern and begins the invariable breakfast of eggs with broccoli.
    Steffi likes ketchup on hers.
    The sky rolls slowly over into an alloy of lead and silver as boots, dags, bags, raingear, and lunches are stuffed into the crummy, followed by eleven groaning bodies.
    The engine, feeling all of its two-hundred-twenty-seven thousand miles plus a night of near-freezing rain, mumbles and hiccups as water in the gas line is cleared away by sheer starter-motor power, and ultimately catches. The headlights take a stab at the darkness, firs, cedars, alders, hemlocks, stumps and Forest Service road signs appear and disappear at regular intervals, punctuated by the occasional spooked deer or even bear, and after many turns on hairpin curves over black gulfs of wet wilderness, the crummy sighs onto the landing as the day turns to as much day as it's going to.
    The wind shoves dead grasses around on the landing in the rain, but the clouds, rippling through like a fast freight, never part.
    Shrug into wet raingear, lace up caulk boots, slap on hard hat, bag up, discuss the unit strategy, step over the edge. Muscles still sore from yesterday complain at first, then oil themselves with their own internal residues and fall into the routine.
    Lunch, standing up, shivering. It's whatever you bring. Steffi's is baked potatoes sliced in half, with strips of bacon as the filling. She needs all the calories she can get to just to be here.
    She's also acquired a tiny pipe, a cheap Dr. Grabow of gnarled briar with a nickel band round the stem, which she fills with Flying Dutchman in the mornings, and smokes, bowl upside-down in the rain, crouched in the lee of the crummy, till lunch is over. It makes her spit a lot, but it helps. Seems to keep guys from hitting on her, too.
    The days are long, almost dark-to-dark. She's carrying three or four hundred trees in the morning and the same in the afternoon. Her hips are permanently bruised. But a tree is a dime. She's making seventy to eighty dollars a day in the middle of a high-unemployment recession and she's proud of herself.
    Crummy up, drive home. Headlights, deer eyes and glowing joints.

:::

A sunny day after what seems like months of rain. The crew puts in an eleven-hour day to finish the contract on time. As the crummy reaches camp, it's still light. The rain has already soaked into the porous earth and the grass looks inviting.
    Chuck parks the crummy, and for a moment no one moves. All eyes are on the transformed campsite. The setting sun, dropping down into a notch in the westward-trending canyon, illuminates the beaten trucks, cars, and buses, the sagging, bewildered tents, and the yurt with its rusting cap and chimney. Dogs run to the crummy, wagging almost cheerily.
    Chuck opens the door and and simply slumps to the earth. Bill and Mike crawl out and lie down on top of Chuck. Willard, Burt, and Jerry-Down pile out of the passenger side, take three steps, kneel and collapse on top of Bill and Mike. Amy, Juneen, Murray, Steffi, and Jerry-Up simply add themselves to the pile-on. The  heap of treeplanters lies there, like a colony of seals, with the dogs' inquiring tongues on their faces, for a good twenty minutes.
    The Magruders, who have stayed home today, noticing that no one has come to dinner yet, leave the comfort of the yurt fire and amble out to inspect the dazed herd. They pull their red wool crushers low over their eyes and hook their thumbs in their suspenders.
    "Uhhh, y'all want any macaroni and hamburger? Or doncha?" they ask.
    "Got coffee, too," they add. They turn around, as one, and stroll back to the yurt. The pile untangles, limb by groaning limb.

:::

That night, the rains return with force. Rocinante's roof sounds like she's been parked under a waterfall.
    Steffi digs deeper into her sleeping bag, with just her nose sticking out. She puzzles over the treeplanter heap -- that felt nice, there were no barriers and no one seemed to mind being napped on top of by everyone else -- and tries to figure out how much she's made this week, and reminds herself to sharpen the scalping blade on the back of her hoe.
    With a sharp blade, you can quietly even up the dangly roots that run over ten inches on your seedling, prevent J-roots and loss of income to disgruntled inspection. Some let you trim, some don't. With the ones that don't, you might go to their superiors about the catch-22 of hoe-trimming versus J-roots and the boss tells them to bring scissors and do the pruning for you on request. So when you do that, they hate you and things just go from bad to worse.     Better you just look around, and as soon as they are preoccupied with something or someone else, schwick! splop! -- it's pruned and planted.
    There's an inspector standing by Steffi's bunk, which is strange because the roof is only three feet away.
    "So, Stef!" he says, smiling wickedly. "I have to ding you or you won't pay any attention!"
    "Uhh, 'scuze me? Tryna sleep here?"
    "I know you are; that's just the problem. Lookit your line!"
    With a sweep of his arm, Tatum clipboard in hand, the inspector's gesture takes in the soggy, slash-befouled hillside. All along Steffi's line the meticulously mineral-soil-scalped planting spots contain baked potato-and-bacon sandwiches, planted up to their waists and properly tamped.
    Steffi can't see what's wrong with her sandwiches, and turns to the inspector to say so. But the inspector is now standing, arms akimbo, with his mouth open impossibly wide. From it there comes the sound of branches slipping past other branches, slapping faster and faster through larger branches: crackings, smashings, roarings.
    Steffi's suddenly wide awake, and somehow she knows what the sound is. A tree is coming down, a fir, huge, old-growth. It's going to hit the truck and obliterate her little life from the earth.
    There's nowhere to go. No time to wriggle out of the sleeping bag. The forest hulk, shedding tons of moss, lichens, limbs, branches, twigs, and rudely wakened birds, brushing aside hemlocks and alders as it comes, is here -- here now -- surely here now, to crush the yellow truck and its sweat-bemired occupant, oh-too-young-to-die. Now it strikes, splintering millions of, five hundred years' worth of, fibers --
    -- and, umm, has missed the truck. The impact actually causes Rocinante to leap, perhaps a quarter of an inch, rocking on her axle springs. But there is, in here, no death.
    In the morning:
    "D'ja, uhhh, hear anything last night?"
    Amy, sleepy-eyed, regards the newbie, almost amused.
    "Blowdown, somewhere, maybe."
    Steffi's obsessed with the derailed freight train of broken timber that interrupted her strange dream. In two days is her day off. She reconnoiters upstream from camp, following the creek till the trail threads out, snaggling her way through viney maples and thimbleberry until she comes to it: a trunk seven feet thick, that has broken its neck among the boulders, leaving wracked hemlocks and cedars in a gap in the forest canopy just beneath the clouds.
    It's more than a quarter of a mile from camp.

:::

Burt and Chuck spend a good part of the next morning coaxing the crew-bus crummy to life. Chuck cranks the motor over while Burt fills a mayonnaise jar from the gas line, separates the gas from the water by slowly pouring gas off the top of the water into a battered fuel can, then pouring the gas back into the truck's fuel tank. Then Burt sprays lighter fluid on the air filter, Chuck cranks the engine over again with the twelve-volt's last gasp, and the engine catches.
    "Town. Gotta call in," says Burt to Steffi's raised eyebrow. Most of the crew, all the men anyway, pile in.
    "Beer run!"
    Oh, the joy.
    Steffi's not that into beer. She spends the day wandering around the mountainside, poking her nose into boomer holes and tree hollows.
    Amy and Juneen, also not very into beer, are packing the yurt's furnishings into a couple of galvanized trash cans.
    Amy is twenty-three, pretty except for a broken front tooth, is round like a muscular apple, always wears overalls. She speculates a lot without saying much of it aloud. Juneen is nineteen, taller than Amy, not nearly as strong but so focused she outproduces her. Juneen is, or was, a few years back, a runaway; ordinarily she would have wound up living under a bridge in Portland and dying of dirtied needles, but lucked into hard work in the woods instead. They both love being here.
    Amy spots a blue hole in the sky and brings all the caulk boots out to dry in the sun, arranged in semicircles on old growth fir stumps. She keeps pushing the boots back and forth on the stumps.
    "What are you doing?" asks Juneen, in the yurt doorway with a dented aluminum pitcher in one hand.
    "Porkypines." Amy dreamily rearranges the last pair, and chums it together with a gigantic pair of wet sneakers.
    "Come again?"
    "In th' winter th' porkypines got cold, see? So they, they got together and one of 'em said, 'Look, we're all freezin' our butts off out here, how about we circle up and we'll all be warm.'"
    "I can see a problem with that."
    "Hush, that's th' point of th' story. So they circled up and they went to stickin' each other, on accident, an', like, 'Ooh.' an' 'Owie.' an' such, so they they spread out some -- "
    "In the snow?"
    Amy looks crushed. "Sooo, y'know this one, huh?"
    "Not really, but you tell it so I can really see it."
    "Uh-huh, well, so there they was freezin' again, so they went back 'n forth till they got some body heat but not stickery. And that's called The Origin of Manners or somethin' like that."
    "Wow."
    "Yeah. This crew, it's like that, everybody gives a little 'n takes a little. Even the new girl. So -- I guess I like it here."
    "The new girl is nuts."
    "We're all nuts, Juneen; you think any girl with any sense would be happy in this much mud?"

:::

Steffi, meanwhile, deep in the shade of some big-leaf maples on the hillside, has knelt among the sword ferns, remembering a way of playing that she had in her childhood. She breaks fallen twigs so that each one is about the size of a new pencil, and sticks then in the ground side by side, until she's made a little pioneer stockade, complete with cabins and furniture inside the cabins --
    "Steff-f-f-f-f-f-f!"
    Woops. How long has she been out here?

:::

Juneen and Amy want help with the yurt poles.
    To dismantle a crew yurt, first remove the polyethylene walls, with their rips and burn holes all covered with duct tape, and roll them up. Take the shortest rafter, a ten-foot-long debarked and sun-dried lodgepole sapling, the one with no eyebolt holding it tensioned against the upper cable, and worry it till it comes loose in the interior of the yurt in your hands. It becomes a tool. With it, you can push up on the canvas roof from beneath, then walk the roof off to one side, exposing all the other poles to daylight. 
    Fold the roof so that its steel cap, which is also the flashing for the woodstove pipe, rests on top. Remove the other poles from the top of  the upper cable, all but the four that have the cable threaded through them. Stack the rafter poles on the roof rack of the crummy, hanging out beyond the headlights and the taillights. 
    Now loosen the turnbuckle on the upper cable, unthread it, take the remaining four poles that are still jammed in the plywood donut ring that held the cap and stovepipe, and walk them over to the side, dumping the donut ring on the ground. 
    Next you undo the bottom cable's turnbuckle, gather up both cables, unbolt the door frame from the wall lattice, walk the lattice up flat, and place the remaining rafters, the door and door frame, the rolled-up plastic, the lattice, and the folded canvas roof on the crummy's roof rack and tie down the load with scraps of rope. It's tempting to use the wall cables, but you don't want to kink the wire rope.
    Sounds complicated, but once you've done it you can get it down to twenty minutes with three women and two dogs.
    Now this sounds like a strikingly ugly vehicle, and it is, but this is the Seventies -- cops won't pull the crummy over unless it actually dumps something on the freeway. Live and let live, more or less -- that was then.
    Y'all don't know what I'm talking about, do ya?

:::
  
Steffi likes working with the women way better than working with the men, though she's not articulate about it. Amy and Juneen like the guys and feel safe with them, and they know she does too, but she seems not to know much difference between how you talk to a guy and how you talk to a girl. Everybody feels it. So, none of the guys have "asked her out" -- invited them over to their tent or camper.
    To Juneen, in private, Amy queries: "D'ya think she's lezzie?"
    "No, she's just in-between some way or other. She ain't gonna hit on the guys and she ain't gonna hit on you."
    "Oh."

:::

After the kitchen is packed away in and on and behind the crummy, the rain starts up again, and they gather all the boots that have been drying in the yurt and stash them under the owners' assorted vehicles.
    "Hey," says Amy. "Y'know that warm spring we heard about? I found it on the district map."
    "Yeah?" Juneen pushes her hair out of her eyes. She can feel it's stiff, gnarly, no shower for three weeks.
    "Whaddya think? Stef, you got gas in your truck?"
    Pay is by the job, and the jobs are three, six, eight weeks long. No one's been paid since the last time the crew went to Eugene, a hundred miles north. The next paycheck is probably a week away. Resources are slim. Gas for the trip to the next job will come into camp with Burt and Chuck in a fifty-five gallon drum.
    "Umm, got some sawgas. Maybe a half gallon."
    "Cool! Wanna go hot tubbin'?"
    Rocinante gets a drink of the dark gasoline mixture and they're off.

::: 

Amy navigates, shining a flashlight on the map in the gathering gloom, in Rocinante's cab. She sits in the middle, even though she's wide, because her legs are shorter than Juneen's.
    The headlights shine, through the windshield wipers, on one forest service sign, then another. The signs indicate intersections; the roads are numbered rather than named. Two or four digits means, roughly, paved trunk roads. Three digits is a gravel spur road. They find the spur road they want.
    "'Kay, Stef, slow down; we want to go one-and-a-half miles and there should be a wide spot and a trail off to the left."
    "How are we gonna see that? It's almost pitch black now."
    "Shhh! Look. There's a wideout on the left. See a trail?"
    "Not much. Looks like a piss-stop trail if anything."
    "That's gotta be it. Not a lot of people know this is here."
    Steffi pulls over and shuts off the engine. They push through the viney maples and ocean-spray at the roadside, getting wet through and cold, and, sure enough, it's a trail. Amy knows woods.
    A couple of hundred feet into the darkness, they come to a tiny clearing among second-growth firs. In the middle is a dark little hole, about five feet across, with water in it, surrounded by trampled grass.
    "This is a hot spring? It's not, umm, steaming or anything."
    "It's just a warm spring, silly, just hot enough for a good bath without cooking us. Touch the water."
    Steffi kneels down and, sure enough, just like a drawn bath. Warm, not scalding. In all this rain in the middle of nowhere.
    The fever for a washing up hits all three of them at once. Shoes, pants, overalls, shirts, and bras fall in a heap. Steffi can feel the cold pressure of the grass stems on her fanny and the heat of the water on her tired, scabbed shins. In moments, she's up to her neck, prone in the shallow and muddy water, lying with the back of her head pillowed on the bank.
    All any of them can think of is that their poor, long-suffering pores are opening to the heat of the water ... ah, paradise.
    Juneen sits up, washes her hair, lies down again, drawing the surface of the warm springs over her like a blanket.
    The rain falls on their closed eyelids. No one says anything for a very long time. They're so blissed out, they could die here and miss it completely.

:::

Back at camp, which would be around midnight, they discover that Burt and Chuck, along with the rest of Face Crew, have returned. There's a quick crew meeting by the light of the crummys' headlamps.
    "So," says Chuck. "Got word. We'll hit Eugene tomorrow, get groceries, and head up to the Olympics."
    "In ... in Washington?" asks Steffi, as if it were a long way away.
    Chuck looks at her in pity for a moment. Then he looks a bit closer, and at Juneen and Amy as well.
    "How'd you all get so clean?"


(To be continued)

 

Iron Buddhas 3

 - 3 -

"HI, I'M Chuck, this is Willard, Amy, Juneen, Bill, Mike, Murray, Jerry-Up, Jerry-Down, Burt, and Marie. We're gonna pick up the MaGruders and go on up the hill."
    "Uh, hi, I'm Steffi Smith." 
    "Pleased to meet ya. Kinda crawl on to the back there, put yer stuff under the seat, and take a nap if ya want, it's a dark commute."
    Steffi has never seen a set-up like this before. As it pulled up, one headlight bright, the other dim, it looked, in the dark, like some kind of over-extended station wagon, but it seats twelve, plus the driver. Five forwards, two reverse. An unholy aroma of abused bodies, mud, long-dead food, and of the ashes of some kind of burning weed. She settles in next to a large form hunkered in the darkness.
    "Hey, I'm Burt. Ya remember, ya puked on my porch."
    "Sorry about that."
    "Well, things happen. Sleep tight."
    "Uh, yeah."
    Burt shifts around a bit, winds up with his massive head on Steffi's shoulder.
    Steffi shifts away a bit, till Burt's chin finds a less obtrusive purchase, and watches the darkness through the vehicle's interior toward the front window. Occasionally the crummy passes one or two deer, their eyes shining briefly into the mystery of human passage. A lighter flares, and something glowing is handed from seat to seat. Steffi waves it off when a hand appears.
    Lots of country miles, like driving through a snake's guts, later, Chuck pulls the crummy off onto a wideout, just as some daylight has begun to seep over the horizon. Two bushy-beards with Lennon glasses throw their caulks, lunch sacks and hardhats in and climb into the last front seats. They're twins. Must be the MaGruders. The gears rattle and grind a bit, then the rig turns onto a gravel road and starts climbing, in second gear, then low, then low-low. Steffi's ears are popping. Then the noise stops.
    "Piss stop!" yells the driver.
    Moaning, the crew crawl over one another and line up alongside the road, the men standing in front of the crummy, the women squatting behind it. No one looks at anyone else. There's something in front of them worth seeing, anyway.
    At her feet Steffi sees the world drop away, a sea of stumps almost at right angles downwards, receding into a cloud bank that stretches to the horizon. The sun is rising over the clouds, setting all their faces on fire, bright orange with morning's promise. The air is already so clear, above the cloud banks, that Steffi can see individual fir trees on islands of mountaintop three ridges away. The horizon actually seems curved, like an ocean's rim. Steffi has seen a lot of beauty already, done some hiking, been above clouds before, been out of sight of land, has watched the Mississippi and the Rockies and stuff roll by Rocinante's windows, but somehow none of it has prepared her for this.
    Like, the sun comes up and that's your basic C major chord like in the movies, but then, on the clouds, there are all these pastels, modulating into one mysterious minor key after another. There's a worshiping silence, and then somebody whispers, "Holy Shit." As though they'd seen this maybe a hundred times, yet it gets to be new all over again every time, because it's that good. With all the city folks still in bed. And suddenly Steffi knows this is what she wants to do, be here with these people and do what they do, so she can be in places like this for as long as she can get away with it.
    When the crummy starts up again, things begin to happen all through its innards. Feet squeeze into tall caulk boots, coffee is poured, low conversations, coughs, noses blowing. The MaGruders are eating identical oatmeal from identical wooden bowls. Hard hats are fished out from under seats. A wisp of smoke drifts back from the front, and another small soggy hand-rolled cigarette travels from hand to hand. By the time it gets to Burt, it's small and even soggier. He produces a tiny surgical clamp, clips it onto the brown paper along what's left of one side, inhales from the smaller, non-smoldering end, and offers it to Steffi, saying, in a curiously high-pitched voice, "want a hit?"
    Steffi's thinking of the fits of coughing some where up front. "Uh, no, but thanks."
    "Suit yourself. This stuff helps keep the rain outta your bones." He sips at the remainder of the glowing coal, lips pursed.
    They're arriving at a Scene of Destruction: upended stumps, raw boulders, rusted jerry cans, a cleared flat gravel space big enough to turn around a tractor-trailer truck, oil-slicked puddles, sawdust, deep tire tracks. A green pickup is standing there tilted in the giant tire tracks, with a pile of brown paper sacks the size of trash bags in the truck bed. Two men in rain gear walk over to the crummy.
    "Hey, Chuck." 
    "Hey." 
    "Got a full crew?" 
    "Yeah, twelve an' a newbie."
    "'K, well this one's all slash down the right hand side, 'bout five acres, then a rockpile, good ground below the rockpile, steep but good coming up the left side, twelve acres overall."
    "Well, we could do it in a day if you'll let us wide it out a bit."
    "Well, I might woulda, it's northeast aspect and we think it'll survive good, but the C.O. says  stick to the contract, so we gotta hold you to the nine-by."
    Steffi suddenly realizes she's listening to Greek or Chinese or something. Arrh, every new trade, a new language.
    "Hey, Steffi!" Chuck's waving, in one hand, a large rubberized canvas bag sewn to a heavy web belt, and in the other a wicked-looking tool the size of a pickax.
    "This here's a dag and bag. Mostly we own our own here, this'n's a spare. Yuh want to stick about eight bundles of trees in here -- " He demonstrates with twist-tied handfuls of green-topped, brown-rooted seedlings -- "these are fifties, so that's four hundred, and keep track of yer totals. This job's 'by-the-tree.'" Now grab yer dag, follow me."
    The tool has an ash handle a bit over three feet long, curved like a single-bitted axe handle. Steffi sees that it has a long flat blade at the end, at right angles, for punching into the ground at the end of a swing. The other crew members have curved blades, and theirs look sharper, too. This spare must be an older model, the one no one else wants. 
    Par for the course.
    The trees are heavy around her waist. The unpadded belt is cutting off circulation, bruising something. With the unfamiliar caulk boots, rain gear, hard hat, gloves and tree bag, Steffi feels like a deep-sea diver. She's sweating already, and she's not even off the landing.      
    Everyone else is already gone.
    Chuck disappears into thorn-covered brush ahead of her. There are seedlings everywhere, protruding from freshly upturned earth, and from the fog below, Steffi can hear matter-of -fact conversations mixed with the thunk of the crew's hoedads into the ground.
Chuck leads the way, half crawling in mud and rotting vegetation, till they come out into open ground downslope from the brush.
    "We are on what's called a clear-cut. Fir trees don't like t' grow in th' shade, so the loggers take 'em all an' leave this field of stumps. We put in th' next crop of trees an' they all grow up together in th' light."
    He waves his arm across the vista expansively. "It's all black 'cuz they have burnt up th' branches 'n such -- slash -- helps us get at it t'plant, 'fertilizes it some. S'just slash-'n-burn agriculture, s'all."
    Chuck points to the nearest people, who are thunking holes in the earth, among the stumps, and whipping little dabs of green from their bags to the holes. They're spread across the hillside on a diagonal. "This here's the 'line,' see? Trees above yuh, no trees below yuh. On the other side of th' creek, it'll be just th' opposite. So yuh go nine feet -- that's three hoe handles till yuh get yer eye -- put a tree in, then nine feet to th' next one, like a checkerboard. 'Course, stumps and stuff will mess up yer grid, so yuh gotta adjust to it."
    "Th' 'suspectors' -- " he nods toward the green hats, who are standing on stumps, leaning on shovels, chatting -- "are not yer friends, and they are going to be inspecting tight here. Ninety per cent quality pays a hundred on contract price, eighty pays ninety, seventy pays eighty, sixty-nine pays not a gahdam thing." 
    He looks over at them again, to make sure his voice hasn't carried.
    "They're under pressure from above to pay ninety or less, so we gotta keep our numbers up. That means planting tight-by, go eight feet instead of ten, when the logs and stuff'll let yuh."
    One of the inspectors ambles over to watch the lesson.
    Chuck chops at the mountainside upslope from his boots, with a two-handed grip on his 
dag.. But the point of the blade doesn't enter the ground. He's turned the blade sideways, and is chopping out a foot-square section of turf. Then he throws his right arm behind him, letting the tool handle slide in his hand till it reaches the end, and brings the dag over his head in a wide arc, burying the point of the blade all the way to the handle's bracket in the soft earth.
    "Y'open the hole with the hoedad at the bottom by pulling up on the handle, see? Then the top by pulling down. Now yuh've got a hole twelve inches deep and four across all the way down. Right? Now take yer tree and dangle the roots down; give 'em a shake so they'll hang loose and won't get caught upside down, see? 'Cuz roots upside down don't work -- they'll die on yuh; if all the roots are upside down the whole tree'll die. They only work one way. When it's sunny, keep it in yer shade, too, and don't hold it out in the wind too long. All that sun and air'll kill yer tree. Now yuh pack the dirt around the tree with yer hoedad blade, once, twice, like this, so there's no air pocket -- that air will kill yer tree in the ground just like it will in yer hand. Now press down with yer foot, but not too close to the stem and not too hard. There's hair roots, yuh can't see 'em, on every root that yuh can see, and if yuh get rough you'll strip those off at the base, and they'll die, and there goes yer tree, 'k.? They are babies. You are their mummy. Yah? Now on to the next spot."

:::

Steffi spends the next half hour fumbling around with the awkwardly heavy tool, the dirt and the pencil-sized seedlings, trying not to fall off the mountain. Chuck sticks with her, correcting her moves, commenting. The inspector watches, amused. A bald eagle flies overhead, resplendent even in the rain, but no one's watching. The hillside rings with tools hitting stones and pebbles, with hard hats smacking into slashed limbs and boulders. Spiked boots chuff into slick logs and clatter on rocks. Across the hillside, in the mild, soporific rain, she hears a constant refrain of heavy breathing and muttered curses.
    It's hard, it's uncomfortable, it's cold, it's wet, it hurts to be here. But Steffi's feeling a rising excitement, like she's singing inside. This activity seems to have limitless potential of some kind, for measuring one's self against one's self, like track and field. She hefts the hoe over her shoulder and punches it deep into the earth.
    "That's th' spirit," says Chuck. "Y'gotta be hard out here, tough like iron, but aware of absolutely everythin' -- yer next spot, th' next person, th' suspector, th' tree total, th' specs, th' strategy, loose rocks n' logs. everythin'."
    "Like an iron Buddha."
    "Uhh, yeah, like that. "


(To be continued)