AT THE FIRE LINE

BY TRACY SCHLAPP WITH THE HECATE'S LANTERN GROUP

The PonyXpress editors are in San Francisco this week talking about the online journal and the writing workshops with folks inside and out. This is the title piece for Roots Meet Below the Crossroads.

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For the past few months, I have carried tags handwritten by the women in our group with messages they wrote for the trees. Bound with an orange elastic hair tie, the packet of tags bounced from bag to bag until I could travel to the right spot to release them.

I asked the women to read Kristin Kaye’s Tree Dreams, a novel I selected to accompany the Hecate’s Lantern project. The book’s young protagonist, Jade, makes a deep connection to the redwoods as they transfer their knowledge to her. Jade must reconcile her upbringing in a lumber town with this enlightened perspective from the natural world. She has reached her crossroads and needs to find footing as she stands at the center of a battle between Northern California tree sitters and her own logging community.

When Kristin finished writing the book, she wanted to further engage readers with a tree-tagging activity and build a place online to gather the images. She imagined people connecting with one another across continents. Together we designed a field guide, as well as the biodegradable tags (reclaimed chipboard scraps from my studio art work); all were printed on my 1928 letterpress. People took photos of their messages attached to trees around the globe, and uploaded them on treedreams.net.

Our character grows stronger,
roots travel deeper, the tree
is more fruitful, and so are we.

Finally in May 2023, I tucked the bundle in my car’s glove box, as Danny and I prepared to drive around rural Oregon in an effort to extend Bridgeworks’ writing workshops to a few far-flung prisons. Living in the soft gray light of the Willamette Valley, I always feel a jolt of excitement to get under those high desert skies — bright blue in the day and miles upon miles away from the light pollution at night. As we drove south to Lakeview, Danny and I recalled the previous fall during which we shared the roads with fire crews.

Wildfire smoke has become as familiar as the transition from lush forest thick with ferns to the scrubby high-desert landscape. The fire’s story etches itself along the roadside. Even at sixty miles an hour, the distinctive black licks left on the golden-brown tree trunks made a striking contrast. I couldn’t help but find the scars beautiful. Later, I learned that ponderosa pines grow bark as much as three inches thick to protect the stand from the eventuality of fire.

  There would be no
  butterfly
  without change.

We stopped at a pullout to look more closely. Along the roadside, we found remnants of a party with beer cans cast aside. Seeing this evidence of humans near the logging road, I felt less self-conscious about releasing the tags. The sun will bleach the words, and the chipboard will fall to the ground to join the wood chips among the yellowed pine needles and finally feed the soil. The pine cones have opened wide to release their store. As I walk, I sort through the tags, slowly reading
each one for the first time. The forest compels me to walk farther from the road, to find the right place for each dream.

The living conditions at Coffee Creek grew especially difficult these last few years. Covid and staffing shortages limited programs, volunteer access, and activities. Hecate’s Lantern was a respite from the day-to-day, providing our group a space to get to know one another outside the social constraints of the prison units. Starting with the concept of the crossroads, we coaxed stories from the past in order to write forward. With Hecate as a guide, we considered her tools of reflection, illumination, binding, and finally cutting away. In addition to the deep work of presentation and discussion, we added games to our sessions. These low-stakes writing opportunities let ink flow, quieting the internal editor. One morning, I grabbed a fistful of tags before I left for our session; I had a loose plan to ask the participants to jot something down in response to Tree Dreams. After the women wrote on the tags, I asked if they would like to keep them or if they would like me to take them outside and tie them to the trees in Forest Park. I remember the look on one woman’s face; I interpreted it as a kind of longing. At Coffee Creek time outside is limited to a yard devoid of trees, a landscape akin to the blacktop of schoolyards with any plant growth regulated for the guard tower’s sight lines.

Portlanders can access twenty-eight mile of trails in our urban oasis, Forest Park. A few hours forest bathing is an all-season restorative for body and mind. The dense wall of firs, cedars, and maples is powerful enough to deaden sound, closing off the city. A friend who grew up in the desert once told me that he felt tricked by the forests in the Pacific Northwest. As he hiked higher and higher, he expected to reach a spot where he would finally be able to see the view. Each time he came around a bend, he just saw more evergreens. He hurried back to the mesas of New Mexico. Similarly, I know people who see nothing growing in the desert — their eyes are trained for particular signs of life, so they see emptiness rather than space. It is a reminder that we love what we know that we learn a landscape and that once we can read a land’s history, we find our story in the place.

With this in mind, what does it mean to learn a prison landscape? How do you soften your gaze in a world that has been leached of the life-giving evergreen, the satisfying sage that blurs the edges of high desert hills? The people in our group have lived most of their lives outside this institution. They find themselves trying to adapt to extreme living conditions that can be hostile and disquieting. From this place, we step into the story. From here, we search for signs of life.

As I move through this burned forest, I look closely at a tree and pair it with a message. The soft smell of sage lingers in the air. I am learning how to read the space, taking my time and looking closely. The nurse log has become home to a fluorescent green moss that vibrates against the bleached gray of its trunk. I see broken branches and the dying remains of trees that will rejoin the floor. The women who have written these tags have been tasked with sharing a piece of themselves with the world. They have trusted me to carry their messages —  much like those pine cones holding dense and tight until the right moment cracks them open to release their seeds of life and hope and rebirth. And so it is here, this spot between living and dying, this place where fire crews held a line. This is a crossroads. Dried yellow pine needles cover a hard-fired crust protecting a network of tree roots that continue to sing their ancient songs to one another. I stand among the ponderosas and listen. | TDS