A FEW DAYS LATER, an old man—a carpenter—came and chopped down the fig tree. It took the better part of an afternoon. The bark and outer layer of wood easily flaked away, but the core of the trunk was almost rock hard. The rotten, withered branches rained powdery shreds of wood, as his axe chiseled its way through.

      By the time he finished, the axe had dulled, and the sun embraced the horizon. His son-in-law came to call for dinner, and they dragged the tree home. 

      The next morning, the old man cut off the remaining, scraggly branches and rasped away layers of trunk until only the heavy core remained. When he finished, the piece of wood measured two arm lengths and three hands in diameter. The wood was darker than fig wood usually is; its grain tight and mottled.

      The old man let the wood sit for weeks in a corner of his workshop.  But then, after his daughter’s latest disappointment, a thought entered his mind, a thought he couldn’t let go of even though it filled him with horror and awe.

      He planked the wood and joined the boards to make a rectangular box. He cut two green branches from an olive tree and began the slow process of curving them. When they were fully cured, he trimmed and sanded their edges. He fitted the bottom of the box with four short posts and added the runners. He sanded it and rubbed it with oil and resin until the oddly dark fig wood took on an almost silvery glow.

      When it was done, he set it down. The cradle rocked ever so slightly, slyly mocking his talents. His daughter was old, almost past childbearing years. He moaned, brushed at his eyes and held his palms to his temples in disbelief. This thing he created was a beautiful abomination, a piece of devilish craftsmanship borne of unrighteous yearnings and a cursed tree.

      He could not bear the thought of giving it to her. The look on her face. The look that would be filled with pain and that fierce hope that he might know something, that some small prophecy had been burned into his mind and heart.

      He buried it beneath a pile of scrap wood in a corner of his shop. Two months later he died.

      Six months after that, his granddaughter came into the world, crying, her skin dark and rosy, eyes deep and thirsty, hair thick and black. Her mother rocked her in her arms—her movements slow and tender; her rhythm even and precise.

___________________________________________________________

The elusive William Morris is the benevolent dictator-genius behind the Mormon arts and culture blog A Motley Vision and, truth to tell, WIZ as well.  He lives in suburban Minneapolis with his wife and daughter. Refugees from the insanely-priced, but lovely San Francisco Bay Area, the Morrises love their new life in the frozen north. And don’t pity them, William still takes public transportation to his work* (a position in higher education marketing/pr at a college in Minneapolis). William’s professional career has caught up with him and he now serves in a public affairs calling for the LDS Church. Which is great, but he misses teaching.

*This is very important because it a) keeps his blood pressure low, b) means that the Morrises can remain a one car family, and c) gives him time to read and write.

“Speculations: Trees” won honorable mention in 2006 Irreantum Fiction contest and was published in Irreantum (Winter 2007/Spring 2008–double volume), 93-96.

Then two years ago, members of that same storytelling festival committee recruited me to participate.  I was assigned to write an introduction for the festival, a preamble that would signal to visitors that the storytelling was about to begin.  Another purpose for the introduction: To support the opening ceremony during which each of the evening’s participants carried a lit candle into the auditorium as they entered single file.  The candles symbolized the intentional passing of stories–heirloom narrative valuables–from generation to generation. 

I decided to write a story–a faux folktale–explaining where the old stories came from.  It was an interesting process, composing a story that all the cultures involved found acceptable.  I had included a reference to the German story about the wolf who ate a family of goats.  One of the Navajo committee members asked that I take that out because, as she said, “Navajos can’t hear about bad things happening to their animals.”  Navajos, of course, herd goats and sheep.

Through this revising process and that, I worked up a story that all approved of.  It’s just a light thing, addressing an audience containing children, meant to support the festival’s theme and to work in the significance of the candles.  But the festival committee liked it so much that they used it for two years in a row and plan to use it every year.  So my dream of releasing a story into the common narrative environment, free and open to effects of use, came true.

I tell about this here at WIZ because I consider language to be part of the natural world and human language to be something creation has given rise to for purposes perhaps beyond our ken and certainly beyond our grasp.   To my thinking, the condition of this planet is deeply dependent now upon the quality of human language giving rise to expression.  One of narrative’s most important energies: creating and communicating the range of possibilities from which other beings in the world might choose to create their own prospects.

Here’s the story:

Pass the Flame

A long time ago, a man and woman had many children.  They taught their children how to walk, wear clothing, and eat food to stay alive. 

But they didn’t know how to teach their children to be wise.  So the children made the same mistakes over and over, which caused everyone a lot of trouble.

The man said to the woman, “The things we taught our children aren’t enough.  We must teach them to be wise.  But how?”

“We have nothing of ourselves we can do this with,” said the woman.  “We must look for a way.” 

So the man and women set out on a journey.  After walking many days, they came to a strange mountain.  On one side was a desert with sand dunes.  On another side was a tropical rainforest.  Yet another side was covered in fir and pine.  There was frozen tundra up there, too.  The sea lapped at the mountain’s foot.  On this mountain, summer, winter, fall, and spring happened all at the same time.

The man and woman climbed the mountain and sat down to wait.  “How will this place help us?” they wondered.

They saw shapes in the distance moving toward them.  The first one was a bear.  When the bear reached them, it said, “I will tell you why I have a short tail instead of a long tail, like I used to have.” 

Behind the bear was Coyote.

“This is what happened when I stole the sun and the moon,” said Coyote. 

Behind Coyote was an Eskimo.  “This is how mosquitoes came to us,” the Eskimo said. 

“This is why my tail is bald rather than bushy, like it used to be,” said Possum.

“This is why I have big eyes,” said Owl.

“This is how I taught Anansi not to be rude to guests,” said Turtle.

“This is how me and my blue ox Babe carved the Grand Canyon,” said Paul Bunyon.

“This is how I became a spider,” said Arachne.

“This is the sad story of how I became a weather cock,” said Half-a-chick.

“This is how I tricked Raven into dropping his cheese so that I could take it from him,” said Fox.

“This is how I defeated the dragon with my golden reed pipe, thereby saving my sister,” said a boy named Bayberry.

“This is how I learned not to speak to wolves in the woods,” said a girl in a red riding hood.

And so it went.  After many days, the man and woman were so filled with stories their eyes glowed with light.  The animals and flowers and trees and people who had told the stories said to the man and woman, “Now you have some wisdom to give your children.  But for the wisdom to work, your children must in turn tell the stories to their children, and they must tell them to theirs.  If they don’t, life will go back to the way it was, with everybody making the same mistakes over and over.”

The man and woman thanked the creatures that told the stories.  They went home and told their children all of the wonderful tales they had been taught.  When the children heard the stories, their eyes also glowed with light.  It was as if someone had touched a burning candle to an unlighted wick in each one, causing wonder and wisdom to leap up like flames.

Tonight, we who have inherited these stories and the love of storytelling honor those who taught us by doing our duty and bringing our tales to you like lighted candles.  We invite you to tip your candles toward us so that we may pass the flame.

By Tyler Chadwick

Day’s last reflections
catch on wind-swept ripples
as two geese throw shadows
across watered silence.
Embraced by echoes,
each circles the other.
Tracing this current,
I watch Hudson’s pair
venturing back
across the continent:
Her wings bear no scars
of hapless encounter
with fox or wolf or man;
his body carries
no hunter’s spray,
the lead that felled him
to the dogs. They bask
in this dusking plane,
watching the horizon
gather them, leaving
phantom indentations
in the eyes of those who
understood their love.

Tyler Chadwick is an academic refugee from Utah living in Idaho with his wife, their three daughters, and their Miniature Schnauzer, Bosley. He leapt into the Mormon blogging scene at A Motley Vision (his home away from home) when Theric Jepson’s post about Onan’s sin coaxed him to finally plant his rhetorical seed in the field of Mormon letters. His poetry has appeared in Metaphor, Dialogue, Irreantum, Salome Magazine, Black Rock & Sage, and on WIZ (here and here) and AMV (here and here) and many of his poems and his Mormon Poetry Project can be found on his personal blog. He enjoys chasing clouds and draws his natural philosophy from Whitman: “You air that serves me with breath to speak! / You objects that call from diffusion my meanings and give them shape! / You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers! / You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides! / I believe you are latent with unseen existences, you are so dear to me.”

“Hudson’s Geese: Reprise” was originally published in Irreantum: A Review of Mormon Literature and Film 8:1 (2006).  For Irreantum’s home page, go here.

If you would like to read Leslie Norris’ poem “Hudson’s Geese,” go here.

Why do we cityfolk so often imagine it necessary to leave the paved world to enjoy the natural world? I can remember one Sunday at Brigham Young University, walking from campus back to my apartment along the south border of a parking lot, just looking at the bushes. Some still had leaves, others were bare. Some had berries. One of the berried demanded my attention: each of this bush’s berries had three leaves growing in to and out of the berry. Perhaps they had once been petals from the flower? I don’t know, but it was new and fascinating and question-generating.

A neighboring bush was already naked of leaves in preparation for the coming winter, but the younger branches were covered in a soft, pleasant fuzz. The closer to the main trunk, the more likely a branch was to be bare, but those further afield had their own fur coats. Was this for winter protection? Was the fuzz there year round?

I ran my fingers along the fur-covered stems; they reminded me of velvet-covered antlers, though each individual hair was longer. Touching them, however, covered my fingers in a sickly, gray grime. I was sobered, forced to witness the contamination of the air, and as I tried to wipe clean my fingers, I was struck by the filth that I must be breathing, that I and the bush must be enveloped in.

Really, it should not be necessary to travel to a National Park to experience the joys of nature. All we need to do is experience it at the micro-level. In her essay, “The Sense of Wonder,” Rachel Carson said, “we can escape the limitations of the human size scale.” I think about this. The summer before I met those bushes, I met the Grand Canyon. And although I had seen hundreds, perhaps thousands, of photographs of the Canyon in my life, when I first saw it with my own eyes I couldn’t breathe. I’m lucky I didn’t fall in, wide-eyed, too enraptured to notice my doom. The only natural vista I can imagine that could be more powerful in terms of scale would be seeing the Earth from space.

But there’s another scale of beauty equally intense. Beauty on a small scale. Remember the mayfly? Small, transparent and fragile. Yet infinitely complex. Purple and green at the same time. The endlessly intertwining veins in its wings a lesson in simple beauty—the complexity of the universe captured in microcosm—in a flitting life that lasts one day. And what of the mayfly’s shimmering eyes? Or its cotton-candy legs? This is the natural beauty of the small that is always with us.

Another time at BYU as I was walking from my car to my apartment, I spotted a small bit of cotton floating through the air. I caught it and examined it, but it wasn’t a piece of cotton at all: it was a tiny gnat-like creature dressed to the nines in its own mink coat. The fine, white fibers surrounding its body were a lesson in gentility, and I stopped, frozen on asphalt, to gaze upon this tiny, exquisite creature. It had a black body like any gnat’s I had ever seen, but the addition of its fine white coat made it a thing of rare grace.

Beauty is all-around and ever-present. And though I enjoy going somewhere lonesome—just me and the natural world—Nature does not abandoned its lovers when they reenter their lands of concrete and steel. The world is a beautiful place, and even when we are far from the Grand Canyon, the simple beauties of a mayfly, a becoated gnat, or the whorls of our own fingertips are always available to those who look, who take the time to see.

Anyway, there’s something that I get.

It isn’t a sense of satisfaction, exactly, though there’s some of that, especially if while you were out there you survived an accident (minor landslide?) or precarious encounter (yikes, a skunk!) or witnessed the wrenching beauty or drama of some scene or event that jimmied your soul.  A good bit of what I feel when I come back is excitement about what I’m bringing to my family or to other interested parties: stories about what I saw, what happened, what has changed.  Stories about what’s possible. 

I don’t think of nature stories as being different in kind from or as having any higher quality than tales I bring away from adventures with other human beings—say, students in my English classes or my own kids—or from what are broadly termed “spiritual experiences.”  I carry these stories out of the wild contained in the same vessels of hope with which I tote ripe tomatoes from garden to kitchen or explore scriptural terrain in church classrooms: Look at this!  What does it open to us?

It all seems pretty wild to me.

It’s in the spirit of swapping  good tales that we’ve built a fire ring, a traditional seat of storytelling, here at Wilderness Interface Zone.  We do not aim to exalt the nature “experience” over the temple or chapel “experience” or to elevate nature’s concerns over human ones.  Literature that romanticizes nature and in process vilifies people is self-limiting.  Speaking for myself, I find events erupting in any of these elements—the spiritual, the natural, the human—and in overlapping zones between them completely immersed in the unbounded moment, containing ripple after ripple of engagement.  This suggests to me that the potential quality of human experience need not be located wholly “out there,” in the assumed character of an environment or setting for relation, but depends a great deal upon the spiritual brio we bring to any given moment. 

We launch Wilderness Interface Zone knowing nature literature is something of a spiritual and artistic frontier for Mormons…and yet not.  With Joseph Smith’s First Vision, Mormonism certainly stakes a defensible claim in the tradition of finding God in the wilderness.  Couple this claim with belief in eternal progression, add the central role repentance plays in Mormons’ lives, and Mormons really have quite the lenses for gazing upon the grandeur of the Mystery.  With growing LDS scientific and cultural communities, Mormon literary nature writers ought to abound.  Concern does seem to be mounting in the church for taking a different stance toward how we live in this world, for re-imagining our stewardship in the Creation.  One of WIZ’s raisons d’etre is to support stewardship through story.

Before we start, I want to express deepest thanks to the wiz at A Motley Vision, the inestimable William Morris, for helping me build this space and try something I’ve ached to do since I began blogging over three years ago.   

And I want to make a promise: Nature is sufficiently extravagant that one need not embellish to tell the tale straight.  I don’t take the Annie Dillard’s cat approach to nature writing.  If I say a white-throated swift approached me of its own will, it did.  If  I tell you that a coyote shadowed me and my dog up a canyon, that’s what happened.   My thinking on what such incidents mean might wander, but the overall narrative trail will run true.

Okay then.  Here we are.  Let’s go see what’s out there.