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Burning Willows
High Desert Journal, Fall 2005

Neither the thought of apocalypse nor institutional caution has stopped me from setting the willows on fire. Old-growth willows sit on decades of dead shoots, and there’s something euphoric abut seeing all that deadwood rising up in flames and ash and carbon dioxide, and then, a few months later, seeing new grass rise up from the blackened soil. And once the grass gets going, burning the fields just as the snow goes off kills new willow shoots. Here and there I’ve left the new growth alone. I’ve tried to protect lodgepole wherever they’ve volunteered, so when I burn I pour water in a donut-shape around new ones. Most of those little lodgepoles have willows growing beside them. Add elephant’s head or fireweed to their spindly bases, and you have an encouraging tableau of new life, even if it does include a willow.
A number of years ago, cleaning out one of my father’s many storage sheds after his death, I discovered a couple of gallons of 2,4-D stored in glass communion-wine jugs. My father was in the habit of bringing chemicals home that no one wanted in whatever containers were handy, and it has often been up to me to get rid of them. In this case, I sprayed the 2,4-D on the willows. It was the year of Willow Mega-Death, and I would come in from spraying, doff my Cold War-surplus rubber suit—it had been designed for Titan rocket crews—take a shower, and try not to think about the chlorinated hydrocarbons-cum-dioxins I had breathed whenever the breeze had taken a wrong swirl.
When I burned the fields the next spring, I could still smell 2,4-D. It is not a happy smell, and I know enough about its effects to worry about the unnatural molecules that have undoubtedly attached themselves to crucial telomeres in my cells, like bombs on railroad tracks. I also know what chlorinated hydrocarbons do to birds and frogs and insects. They tear holes in the web of life. I won’t use 2,4-D again, unless I find another cache of it my father has left behind.
If you’re horrified by my ethical lethargy in this matter, you should probably subject your supermarket-bought vegetables to gas chromatography. Or your lawn, if you have a lawn service. Or your roadside, if you live on a road. Or your children’s blood. Or your blood. Your tax dollars are probably spraying 2,4-D right now in your city park. Whenever I think about this matter, I always wonder what happened to the ambitious young Dow Chemical vice-president who drank a cup of 2,4-D on national TV to demonstrate that it was harmless. His was a kind of fossil behavior, too.
So this spring I burned the rubber suit in the middle of a willow bush. Thick black smoke drifted up the valley and over my neighbor’s place, and I was thankful that she wasn’t home. The suit had been reinforced with fiberglass webbing, making tearing it nearly impossible—an essential safety feature, as plutonium wasn’t the only lethal stuff they put into Titan rockets. After the suit burned, the ash heap drifted around a praying human shape defined by a gridwork of iridescent glass fiber.

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