Beetles on May's breeze

Crash land between fingers

I pop one

Then another

Flick wings into the wind

When it hit sixty degrees for the third day, beetles filled the air, landed randomly, tangled in my long hair, whirred past my sunglasses, spun suicidally in a Behr Oil can. They landed on my children's sandwiches. The kids squished as many of them as they could after we coached them with a little forest ecology lesson. Later in summer I heard the stereo sound of beetles killing spruce trees on our land and watched the trees bleed amber pitch through ladybug-sized holes. The bark beetle's hum made an even sound like granular snow melting in a forest on a sunny day, butsinister.

In 1997 our evenly aged forest died a simultaneous death; the year we bought land to build a house out East End Road. It was no surprise that our densely wooded land was infested with bark beetles. The first few years when the spruce trees on our land snapped in winter winds, my kids and I counted casualties like a math problem. During one storm three or four snapped trees landed near our driveway and one blocked it completely. I was not there to hear the crack then whoosh of the boughs falling to the ground. It was better that way. After chainsawing the trunk and limbs, we transformed the branches from tree to jagged burn pile. We left the spruce pole across our stream like a fat tightrope. My son and daughter dared each other to cross. After one storm my kids and I counted trees to the high twenties before we gave up. Now there are few trees remaining for beetles to eat. Their flight last year was a half breath.

Fingers of burn piles

Break through glazed April snow

Charred into ash

Yet another circular scar

Each year in late winter I burn. I anticipate long April light when branch tips pierce crusty snow, leaving ice circle indentations. When a pile is visible, I toss the Homer News, the Daily News, and odd pieces of two-by-fours on top and douse the pile with diesel. I carry matches in my work coat and stash a shovel nearby. I hurl branch after branch after branch onto my pyre. Sometimes I use a small chainsaw to limb trees, hoping to miss my leg. Pull cords give me trouble. I can't start my saw until my husband gets it running the first time. Then he leaves.

I like to burn alone. I work until I am exhausted and my cracked lips bleed. I watch to see that flames don't leap too high and wait for dragonfire sparks to vanish. When I pause to lean on a log, I scavenge for branch relics, even when I am letting the fire burn out. Just one more branch and the forest will look better. In the afternoon my legs tire from breaking through spring snow and I throw off my work coat. It is dotted with black-edged burn holes. I should label each hole with the fire of its origin. My coat is a cemetery of sorts.

Sometimes my straight hair singes into crisp curls that smell like charred skin. If touched, the curls disintegrate. I gulp from a Nalgene water bottle stuck in the snow and inhale trail mix with chocolates. I fall into bed in the sleep of the dead, never connecting bark beetles to my day's labor. The extent of the dead trees is overwhelming. If I choose to think about the amount of work involved in finding the earth again, I will stop burning and cry.

EARTH

Fallow homestead potato fields

Grow into new forest

Old forest trees snap

At ungraceful angles

I can no longer walk

Across my own land

What will our land look like in thirty years when I gaze out my window at seventy-two? Will our dead spruce choke out saplings? Will the logged land to the east regrow more rapidly than our land? Will a forest fire make our careful logging irrelevant? When a woman with long gray hair looks across Kachemak Bay at Portlock and Dixon glaciers, what will her foreground be?

One spring I peeled spruce log poles for my children's swing set. As I pulled the drawknife toward me, white beetle grubs stuck thick to the tree. They'd left twisted trails and tracks of lighter color that made the wood interesting. Sometimes the bark slipped off easily, as the beetle goo caused the tree's skin to slough off. When we milled it, pink or blue fungus stained the wood. We have used the wood to build portions of our new house, some exposed posts. It seemed right.

Each spring we noticed rusty-needled limbs fade to silver-gray, and discussed the death of individual trees. The tallest spruce on the eastern edge of our land lingered in its green-needled stage, then turned to rust several years after its neighbors. I hoped it had special powers protecting it, but it didn't. It fell last winter and hung up in another tree, stripping branches from neighboring green trees on the way down. We hoped for the remaining tallest trees, and watched most die, leaving circular litters of needles. Some died with branches upturned as though pleading. I spotted two rust-colored trees near our fenced young willows last spring; it isn't over. At our springbox there is still one very tall green tree. I avoid looking at its bark for signs of clotted pitch and the telltale cracks in its gray bark.

The uncertainty of our land's future disturbs me. In the past, I have worried about human development. The impoverished mill town in New Hampshire where I used to live won't change much in the next thirty years, nor will the land near the oceanside cabin I rented on Maine's coast. Houses will be built, roads will be repaved, more stores will open, and fail or not, but it won't look much different than when I left. There is so much human imposition on the land where I lived that the earth itself isn't visible. Here, some of us have logged, some have reforested, some have moved away, and some have chosen to do nothing. There are so many acres of dead spruce forest across the Kenai Peninsula and no one really knows what will replace our mature forest, or what the effect will be of the different practices we have imposed upon the land.

Fill my car with baby photos

Pop's pocket watches

I'd rather wait this side of the fire

With the arching dead grasses of last fall

Oh, it is spring again

We could lose everything

Or nothing

Each year

Before green-up a few years ago, a forest fire several miles from our road closed the only road connecting us to the rest of Alaska. I stood on my deck and spotted smoke to the west. The house we live in sits in an open meadow, with no nearby trees to pose a fire danger. We are building a new house in the dead forest. I leaned over my deck railing and decided that a car had caught fire on the big road above us. I called my husband up from the basement. We watched the smoke increase and switched on the radio. They closed East End Road, leaving parts of families on the Homer side of the closure. Neighbors from the forested land below gathered at our house at the top of our road and watched smoke choke deep McNeil Canyon. We wondered if the fire would jump the canyon, burn our forest, and then burn our homes. I wondered if the old forest around the house we were building would catch fire from airborne sparks blown over the canyon. The wind picked up. Some considered how to reach the ocean through the tangled dead trees. We didn't have a lot of options should the fire run our way, as the road ends not far east of our house.

Most of the children gathered in our playroom, but not all. One child gazed out a window toward the fire. Several neighbors stuffed their cars with sleeping bags and other important gear; others listened to telephoned instructions of partners and spouses on the Homer side of the closure. Two jumped onto our four-wheeler and drove up the road only to be turned back. The adults split two beers and fed the children Saltines from the snack drawer. One person brought his girlfriend's cats and dogs and left them in the car. I gathered two canvas bags; my deceased mother's leather journals from the 1930's, gold pocket watches from both grandfathers, a Zip disk of my writing, baby photos and baby journals and a photo of the grandmother after whom I was named, but never met. I almost remember that my husband packed a signed Ted Williams baseball card, but I probably packed it for him. And it will be spring again.

EARTH

Broken grasses litter

Melting earth

A cris-crossed mess

Land untouched

Not mud without human footprints

We selectively cut around our new house, carefully leaving the small surviving spruce. We try to pretend that we live in a green forest. The scars from the places where I burn in the spring are mostly covered with stunted vegetation by mid-summer. The blocky charcoal remnants disintegrate a little each season. We chose to let the trees beyond our immediate house-clearing tangle into an increasingly jackstrawed mess, though the lanky summer grasses keep it mostly hidden. It is ugly in the in-between seasons of fall and spring; it looks like a place you would not want to inhabit. Stumps, burn piles, scattered branches, remnant scars of burn circles. Walking in our forest is exhausting, despite the forest gaps that have lately increased.

In spring, land touched by humans is mud. As the snow melts at our new house, I watch the driveway's top migrate toward our parking area below. Winter-melt carries earth chunks, carving deep ruts in our driveway that I fill in each year, and watch as the spring snow carries the fill away. Until breakup is over, we do not drive to our new house. My boot prints are evident in the driveway, and I listen to my suction-cup walk in the thick mud. The plywood floors at the new house are littered with mud dust.

We are clearing trails for moose, other wildlife and our family, selectively cutting individual trees, and then recutting the tree-littered trails with each big storm. We lose the trails, we cut, we re-find the trails. It storms again and we lose the trails. Green trees pull up at their roots and tip over. And we burn. The stumps rot and their nutrients ease back into the land. The beetles will leave. Young trees will snap as their elders crush them, and we will wish we'd cut the old dead trees which we'd planned to fell, but didn't. There are too many. We will move saplings that grow densely in our old potato fields into our former forest and, for a while, we will cage young birches from the moose, and the moose will knock the fences down. I will grow old on this land.

WATER

Algae's first bloom

Along the dirt driveway

Above our silver culvert

Sunlight is bad

In a place once dark

Maybe it's just change

It surprised us when the tiny pool in our almost-stream filled with algae. A twisted ribbon of water seeps out from a thick alder patch and runs through the former forested land. We cleared enough trees that our pool now lies in sunlight. Sun on the stream caused an ugly skin of algae to bloom. Each year we clear the area around the stream of the winter's debris and I imagine resting on a not-yet built bench at the pool's edge. My children and I carefully replace an erratic path of rocks and log rounds across the stream. My young daughter floats handfuls of sawdust from our sawmill into the stream and watches as swirls of sawdust pass through the culvert and vanish. She runs to the sawmill for another handful and, I think, she never notices that a dead forest surrounds her.

A Midwestern friend who flew from Anchorage to Homer asked the name of the sea of rust colored trees covering the Kenai Peninsula. Sometimes I forget it's not just the dead trees and me; it is all of us, and it is big and we are coping as though we are alone. I know that I must keep my eyes close to the ground. If I look up, the dead forest overwhelms me. My ribbon stream is an oasis. Kachemak Bay is an oasis. I try to imagine how this change could be good.