But is it alive?
The cost of a wild life; an ode to the tree that made this desk; and how I'm learning to ask my book better questions.
Some of you know that I’ve been writing a book for almost ten years. An adventure memoir about a walk across Finland’s Arctic Circle that I took in the footsteps of a legendary 89-year-old woman I met before she died. I know. It sounds bonkers, and it was.
It was also one of the best things to ever happen to me.
The book has been many things, but I think we’re rounding the corner into the truest thing she has come to say so far. She’s turning out to be about the wild parts of ourselves we give up, and how we realize what we’ve done and go get them back. About how we live in a system that makes us forget we are alive and connected, and how important it is—for ourselves, for each other, and for the world—that we remember.
Wild is a choice, I scribbled to myself on a piece of paper this week. The verdict’s still out on whether or not I believe that’s true, but if you’ve been reading these for a while, you know I love scribbling on pieces of paper. It’s my way of flying by the stars; how I lead myself to where I need to go. You also know that there are giant rolls of scribbled-on paper piled in the corner of my room, and sticky notes all over my computer. I’d be embarrassed to have you over. Right now, the sticky notes are red and yellow and orange and they say things like:
Hunt what you fear.
What calls you home?
And: Is it alive?
That’s my newest thing, to ask the book I’m writing if she’s alive. I ask it to each sentence, each paragraph, each section. I’m drafting new stuff again, which the inner perfectionist in me hates. She’d much rather edit. But she can go to hell for now. Is it alive? is a much better question than is it good?
That’s another thing I learned in Finland. I would trade good for alive any day.
I started writing this, as I start most Wild Stories, with the intention of writing about something else entirely. Hooray for me! That means I’m still listening, still giving up control, which is a good thing.
But I do want to tell you about my writing desk. I’ve been sitting on this story for almost a year now, since my friend made it for me with her own two hands out of an old maple on her property. My sister, who has been with me for this whole twisty book-writing ride, went in on it with me for Christmas last year. It’s my forever writing desk: smooth, and blonde, and heavy as all hell. It’s got one beam across the bottom that I bang my shins on most days, and two drawers that open quickly and close slowly because of those fancy drawer stoppers they make now. Waterfall edges and joinery that looks like it belongs in a tiny timber frame. It’s a fucking work of art, this desk. And I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that when I sit down to write here, it hums.
We’re partners now, in this work. My book is also about land, and extraction. It takes place in the gold fields of Lapland’s Lemmenjoki National Park, where I lived in the wilderness (in the backcountry sense, not the “pristine, untouched nature” sense) with a community of reclusive Finnish gold prospectors for three months. It’s about the cost of a wild life, and how we can never, when it comes to the earth, give more than we take. But we can honor what we keep.
From the book:
“These are people who live close to God, their god, the river. They bathe in her, scoop her up in containers to make coffee, drink her down. They skin ptarmigan and watch her current run red, then clear. They rake her bottom with their shovels, feed her through a sluice, collect her finest, densest soil in their pans, bottle up and pocket her gold. Each strike of the shovel sounds like ehkä. Maybe. At night they warm their hands around a potbelly stove and tell her stories. When the last birch leaves touch the ground they drive south; spend five frozen months dreaming of the sound of running water.
When the ground thaws, they’ll return to the river. They’ll tear up her banks, trap her in pools, block her path with great mounds of her own rocky soil. It might seem as though they do not love her, these men and women who gouge and pocket her riches, but look at the way they close their eyes to feel the breeze off her current. Pay attention to the tenderness of their hands as they cup her soil. Watch them watch their children play in her shallows. Sit with them as the midnight sun pretends to dip into Norway and rises again and they cry and talk about freedom.”
Christina Hassett, the craftswoman and old soul who built me this desk, wrote me a letter that she gave to me when she delivered it. I keep it in one of the drawers. It makes me weep every time I read it. I want to share a piece of it with you tonight:
Jenny,
It has given me so much to craft this desk for you. When we cleared the land for our house site, I felt a profound sadness. How predictably human of us to come in and begin our relationship with this place by first knocking down its resident giants—especially this particular tree. It was a magical old maple, somewhat gnarled and twisted with vast spreading branches. And down she came. I often reflect on this and wonder how we could’ve begun here in a more gentle way, but here we are.
Up until this winter, much of the wood we had milled up had just been sitting, drying, collecting dust. Until you approached me with the delicious idea of building a desk! The maple immediately came to mind. Over the past several weeks, working with (and sometimes it felt against…) this wood had me often reflecting on the tree that was. Studying the grain and color and pattern, deciding how I may be able to transform those boards, or rather transcend them, into desk form. And as I worked I thought of all the creatures that knew the tree. The birds, whose probable first view of the world was a sky dappled with maple leaves. The worms who moved, slept, ate and lived out their entire lives in its cambium. The squirlls squirell squirells, whose canopy highways criscrossed its branches. How many times she changed dresses from vibrant green to flaming red over the years.
It was all just so overwhelming as I thought about it and realized my own hands now entering the timeline. I am now, too, a creature whose life path has intersected with this tree—and it is my desperate hope that what I’ve made from the still strong bones (even in death) of this tree pays homage and tribute to that long and storied life.
The letter goes on to say how she sees, in my hands, the legacy of the tree continuing. How everyone who reads my words—which are literally held up by this desk—will become part of the life of this tree. That means you.
(Also, it took me until I read that letter to realize how ridiculous the word “squirrel” is.)
I didn’t plan out how to end this. I guess I just wanted to remind you and me both, in this season of gift-giving and overconsumption, that the song that sings through every single thing sings in us, too.
And when we remember to listen for it, it gets louder.
ooo--the description of the gold miners and how their love of the river shines past our ready condemnation of their work! So looking forward to your living book...