Treehugger

Matt saw himself standing at the outskirts of the logging camp twenty years earlier, looking back at the land they had just cleared in the previous weeks. He held his saw with the four-foot bar down by his waist, the motor resting on his thighs and the bar pointed across his body. There were men behind him on their lunch break, talking about finding a whore to have sent into camp that night. A helicopter was headed away from the camp, the last traces of its hurricane winds rustling the tops of the redwoods.

He was positioned on the crest of a steep hill and could see for what appeared to be miles back in the direction from which they’d come. And all across that land there was nothing. There was no life there. It was dead. All that remained were stumps, sawdust, tire tracks, and flattened clumps of underbrush. He could see it all exactly, down to the most minute detail, even the way the tips of the leaves on the underbrush closest to him were wilted brown; ready to die and blend in with the rest of the carnage.

He remembered this moment so clearly because it was one of the only moments of clarity in his drug and alcohol-crazed, outside-the-land-of-the-law years he spent in the Oregon wilderness. It was like a switch was flipped inside his brain. It was the first time in his life that he had ever wondered if what he was doing was right. The thought had simply never occurred to him before. It was work. Work was work. And this was bad-ass work. But now, looking back over the wreckage of his labor, he wondered how long it would take that forest to grow back. He wondered if it would ever be capable of getting back to where it was. 1400 years. That’s how old they said some of these trees were. That was a long time. That was---

“Mr. Largess? Matt! Are you with me?” came the sound of the developer’s voice, snapping Matt back into the present.

“Am I with you?” he asked.

“Yeah,” responded Jim, with a strange smile. “You weren’t saying anything. Seems like I lost you, there for a second.”

“Nah. You’re fine. Let me ask you something, though,” said Matt.

“Sure. Go ahead.”

Matt looked down at the ground and played with some of the matted beech leaves on the path with the tip of his boot. He thought one more time about the thousands of dollars he was about to piss away with his next comment, thought better of it, and then resigned because he knew his mind was made up already.

“You ever thought about saving this place?” he asked.