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2.09.2007
My family believed in trees, Christmas, and the land.
We Campbells grew Christmas trees on two hundred acres of lush rain-soaked Oregon farmland. We wholesaled them in a mammoth cutting operation that ran all autumn, and managed a U-cut business complete with hotdog stand and gift shop during the months of November and December. I knew our land as well as I knew my husband Dalton’s body—every muddy dip and hillock of the acreage, every inch of the roads that intersected it, every name of each neatly maintained field of trees. I knew where the Doug Firs grew, where the nobles were planted, where the Scotch pines and Grand Firs—Daddy’s favorites—prospered. Even after my two sisters and I grew up and moved to Portland to raise families instead of trees, even after Mama died, even as Daddy took a less active role in the business, the farm remained the center of our lives.
Daddy believed in the land so fervently it ruled his life. The farm required hard labor to keep it running: back-breaking spring planting, shoulder-shattering trimming in summer, a wearying autumn-long harvest. Beyond that, Daddy believed the trees talked to him.
Auguries, omens, portents. Call them what you will, the trees dispensed wisdom, and through the years Daddy and the trees predicted storms, foretold sickness, presaged promotions. The firs told him my first born child would be a daughter, my sister Veronica’s marriage wouldn’t last, our other sister Helen would encounter her future husband while hiking Cascade Head.
And even before I knew of it, the trees whispered of my departure to my father.
On a sunny morning in early June I drove to the farm to take pictures of my father for a photographic essay called, Portrait: People of the Earth. My students (presumptuous as it felt to call them “my” students, since I was only substituting for the summer at a small art college, it still thrilled me) were studying documentary photography and I wanted to set an example for them about photographing their passions.
Daddy toiled in the greenhouse. It perched on the ridge of a wild forested hill, which sloped all the way down to the Sandy River and was one of the few areas of uncultivated land on our property. Long ago Dad had quit raising trees from seed, and now bought two-year old stock to plant. But he used the greenhouse to nurture seedlings for the vast vegetable and flower gardens he tended. My father had become a vegetarian despite his sturdy Scottish mother’s meat and potato meals, cultivated compost before it became a household word, and ran five miles a day even now, as he approached his eightieth birthday.
Droplets of dew hung inside the greenhouse windows and the air smelled of rich loam and strong fishy fertilizer. Daddy stood at the far end of the long center aisle, which was flanked by broad counters mostly holding empty plant crates.
“Hi, Dad.”
He grunted but he didn’t look up.
“Daddy? I came to take some pictures, remember?”
He raised his head then. Eyes black as a crow’s wing gored me. His gray hair, a wee bit shaggy around the ears, framed a lean weather-beaten face. Wrinkles rutted his cheeks and forehead. He wore a plain white T-shirt and dirt-covered jeans, his summer uniform for as long as I could remember. But I didn’t recognize the expression on his face.
“The trees say you are leaving.”
“What?”
“The trees foretell a leave taking. And they say it will be you.”
“Daddy! I’d never leave Oregon.”
My father shook his head. “Trees don’t lie.”
I laughed. “You must have misunderstood them. I’m not going anywhere. I love it here. Why would I leave?”
“The trees say you are going, Collie. I don’t make things happen. I simply listen to what the trees tell me will happen.”
The greenhouse air stiffened around me, stifling my efforts to breathe. There wasn’t a single thing that would lure me away from this beloved home. Leave Oregon? Leave Daddy, my sisters, the land, the trees? Not a chance. And yet, Daddy’s auguries were never yet wrong. I examined his face, foraging for a sign of hope. But only sorrow pooled in Daddy’s eyes.
“I need some fresh air,” I said. “Let’s go take the pictures.”
“Don’t feel like having my picture taken,” my father grumbled. “You always have to take my damn picture.”
“Its because I’m a photographer and you have the best face of anyone I know. Anyway, you promised.”
Daddy growled and muttered but he went outside with me. The sky was so blue it made my heart hurt because I couldn’t take all the beauty in, and the air smelled like Christmas. One of the best things about the farm was constantly being surrounded by that smell.
Daddy posed beside a Douglas fir, next to the baler, unwrapped from its summer hibernation for the occasion, and checking on a recently planted seedling. We worked quietly, talking only when I asked him to move this way or that. While I took pictures, I thought only about the shot: Daddy’s grim face, his lanky body, his long-fingered tanned hands. And the trees, sunlight on their rough bark that made such lovely patterns, the pleasing geometry of their needles, the wavery shadows the swaying branches formed.
A subtle shift slashed the air.
“Storm’s coming,” Daddy said. He pointed to the line of black clouds that rimmed the western horizon, and tried to hide the relief on his face. None too soon for the photo session to be over, as far as he was concerned. It wasn’t that Daddy didn’t like my photography. On the contrary. He’d been one of my biggest supporters, buying me film when I was too broke to get it myself, paying for a membership at a commercial darkroom so I could print my own pictures, giving me Susan Sontag’s On Photography for Christmas many years ago, and Ruth Bernhard’s biography, Between Art and Life, for my birthday. Daddy would have made a good photographer himself—like me, he was far happier viewing the world than being a subject in it. He was always uncomfortable being the focus of attention. I guess maybe I was, too. Thunder rumbled and a few fat drops of rain fell. We ran for the greenhouse and made shelter just as the first lighting flashed.
My father lit the flame on his Coleman burner and set a kettle of water on it, then pulled a canister of tea from a cupboard beneath the counter and offered it to me. Beyond the partially opened greenhouse door, water dripped and pooled, turning the dirt path into mud. Raindrops hammered on the glass ceiling and steam fogged the windows. The only thing visible through them was water.
“This must be what its like beneath the ocean,” I said.
“Like floating in a glass boat in the middle of a storm-tossed sea,” Daddy said, lapsing easily into a game we’d played when I was little. His eyes flashed with happiness. “All alone, just the two of us charting our course. Where would you like me to steer us to, little one?”
“Home. Steer us home.”
“You always said that. Veronica wanted to travel to Paris, and Helen always wished to see the Amazonian rain forest. But you, Collie, you just wanted to stay at home on the farm.”
“I still do.”
A flash lit the sky.
“Legend says lightning hits a tree, the owner of that tree soon dies,” Daddy said.
I shivered. “Don’t say that.”
My father sipped his tea. “Don’t worry. That lightning is far away. And you know we don’t own this land, not really. We are only its stewards. Some day it will no longer be ours.”
“The farm will always be ours!”
“It doesn’t really belong to us.” Daddy laid the tips of his fingers on my knee and stared into my eyes. “Child of my heart. You especially will need to understand this. You will need to understand.”
Charlotte Rains Dixon is a freelance writer living in Portland, Oregon, who considers both Nashville and LA her second homes. She writes copy for the internet and print media, teaches creative writing at Middle Tennessee State University and privately, does ghost writing, and also writes fiction and screenplays. She received her MFA in creative writing from Spalding University in 2003. Charlotte blogs about all of these endeavors and more at www.wordstrumpet.com.
October 28th, 2007 at 7:01 am
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November 4th, 2007 at 1:23 am
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November 4th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Very nice!