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eccentricities: Terry wet the bed and bit her nails to bloody stubs; Linda was a Jehovah’s Witness, worse than any religion I could imagine, since they didn’t celebrate birthdays or Christmas; Gordon’s father was a drunk; Janet’s mother cried at the PTA meetings, but no one knew why. Whatever group designations and boundaries might later form were not yet present my last year in the woods, when I met my sixth-grade friends at the monkey bars, tied my sweater around the steel pipe, and twirled myself into a dizzy freedom I have not known since.
    I, like my friends, was the child of a logger, that was all. We did not have neighborhoods. We did not have blocks. We had
in-town
and
out-of-town
. We had camps and settlements and a new development built by Potlatch Forest Industries to house its workers. Some of our parents stayed home at night; some went to the bars, where they drank and danced and, more than once, shot one another to death in fits of jealous rage. Some were Protestant, some Catholic, some knew no religion at all. My schoolmates did not care that I had beengifted with the power of healing, that the visiting evangelist had announced it to the congregation, that I felt the heat come rushing to my hands whenever I touched the sick.
    Everyone was struggling to get by, keep up, stay ahead. Simple survival bound us together, and when the sheriff or supervisor knocked on the front door with his hat in his hands, each wife felt her heart leave her. Injury and death came too often, brothers and sons and husbands caught by a barber-chaired hemlock, crushed by a loader, cut by a saw. My great-uncle was killed by a felled tree; the sawyer did not know he was near. When my grandmother remarried, it was to a man known as the Little Giant, a Norwegian logger who, only months after the wedding, was crushed by a load of logs. Although he survived, the damage to his brain left him doddering and disabled. My father ruptured a vertebra after tripping backward over a half-hidden stump, then endured several operations and months in a body cast before returning to the woods. Yet he loved his life there, and my mother loved him, and so we stayed, ferrying our meager belongings from one camp to the next, sometimes renting a house in Pierce, until 1969, when we took up residence in Dogpatch, in the line shack of my dead uncle.
    It was there, in the spring of 1970, in that hollow where I turned twelve, that a brilliant light roused my father from sleep—the presence and voice of God, he believed, telling him we must go and never come back, away from that land in which we had made for ourselves a good life. It was the answer my father had been questing for: what could he offer his god? He had no desire for money or material things. He didn’t drink or dance or lust after other women. He was poor in the eyes of men but rich with happiness in the life he hadchosen: he had a lovely wife who shared his bed and beliefs; his children were strong and healthy; he rose each morning pleased with the light, savoring his work in the woods. What then? What could he give up as a token of his commitment to God?
    He locked himself in the root cellar, intending to fast and pray for forty days and forty nights. It was his quest, his spiritual journey inward toward greater understanding. I often wonder what would have happened if he hadn’t been interrupted by the surprise arrival of my youngest uncle and his family, who could only interpret my father’s actions as verging on insane. He’d gone too far, some people thought, alarmed by my father’s self-dependency and direction.
    What I’ve come to understand is that it was his life in the woods that my father loved more than anything—more, even, than his wife and children; he has told me so. He had found his haven there, his safety and his comfort—the very things my father believed he must sacrifice.
    Within days, we had left it all behind: the elk, the coyotes who wove their song through the