Not Any Ist

By Velcrow Ripper

Got a ride with a logger’s boss on my way to a Sufi gathering

My chameleon self emerged
Took over

The veil dropped down
The armour went up


I accept his offering of a bottle of beer
“Where are you going?”

I cop out.
“To a drumming workshop…”

He puts on some reggae
“You’ll probably like this…”

His voice a trifle anxious
Trying to meet me halfway

Stopped off at his clearcut on the way down
Bumped through the rutted road gouged through the used to be forest
Lying on a pile of used to be trees were the loggers, sound asleep

The boss laughs: “those guys are always playing tricks on me…”

They jump to their feet as we pull up
Playing caught napping on the job

We get out of the truck
Laughter is exchanged

The fallers name is Roy
A little plump with rosy cheeks

An easy manner
A welcoming smile
A gentle soul

His father was a logger before him
The daredevil of the camp: a high rigger

The one who climbed three hundred feet up the spar tree
To chain on the skyline

Behead the giant
With his cross cut saw

Cling to the mad sway
As it creaked and groaned in helpless despair
And finally surrendered to a gentle wafting

The triumphant Lilliputan
Would chain the skyline to the naked tree
And return to earth.

“I’ve got a B.A. in pyschology,” says Roy
“But I like to work outside. I love the woods.”

But
Do the woods love him?

Just doing his job.
He knows what his job is doing to the land
He’d log better if he had the chance

If the company would let him

Just a foot soldier
But the questions arisen before:
Would there be wars
If there were no soldiers?

“What’s it like up in Canada?
I want to go up there to work.
You still got trees up there.”

“Only ten or fifteen more years of trees,
I’d say, and that’s it.”

“They’ll probably find one of them
spotted owls up there anyways.”

“Them environmentalists are probably up there right now,
painting spots on all the owls that don’t got any.”

They laugh and offer me a smoke.

I don’t mention that I’ve been called
One of them environmentalists

Though I insist
I’m not any ist at all

Just a human

A human
With epiphytes in my armpits
Moss and fern and lichen

The dust and heat and sadness and power of the blockades coursing and crackling
Through my nervous system.
Microreyzal fungi curling through my intestines.

Right now I’m one of the guys.
Shape shifter.

“Excuse me a minute,” says Roy, firing up his chainsaw.
He cuts down a tree.
It falls screaming to the ground.

I think of those native tribes that used to pierce their flesh
And hang
In days of ritual atonement
Before falling a great cedar

I imagine Roy
Pierced and hanging

He’d probably log a little more carefully.