Zen
EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is an abridged version of Chapter 41 of “Adrift in America: Diary of a Minimalist Mariner,” a work found in the nonfiction section:
Old Orchard Beach, Maine. August 24, 1986.
There was a zen to my stepfather, but I don’t recognize it until today, a few months after the 10th anniversary of his death. Today is my 46th birthday, and I have had a few beers at lunch with some old friends in Biddeford to celebrate the occasion. I am making a left turn off Saco Avenue into the campground at Old Orchard Beach when I see his hands on my steering wheel.
Years of working in the woods made my stepfather’s hands thick and rough, but they held a steering wheel with the grace of a violist’s hands on the neck of his instrument, turning the wheel delicately, as if seeking a harmony in it.
I don’t know if my stepfather had always driven that way. By the time I first knew him, he was nearly as old as I am when I discover myself driving my truck the same way he did his. Now it is my hands that are thicker and rougher – age takes nearly as great a toll as work – and they are turning the wheel with the same soft deliberation I saw in his hands.
He drove everything like that – trucks, cars, horses. He worked most of his years in the woods with horses. There was always a pair, if he was working for himself, sometimes several teams if he was working for a lumber company. They were usually big muscular geldings of Belgian, Clydesdale and Percheron bloodlines with monosyllabic names like Bob, Dick or Tom.
Logging is dangerous work involving cumbersome weights and intricate entanglements. Without subtlety as well as strength, a logging operation can leave ugly scars on both loggers and forest. I know it sounds fanciful, but trees give themselves up more easily to some people than to others. As much as I worked in the woods as a young man, I remember the struggle of dropping and cutting up a tree, sweating and swearing as I tried to remove the pieces from the forest while branches whipped my face and twigs grabbed my feet. It was different with my stepfather. He and his horses moved through the woods with solicitude and respect, leaving the ground untorn, the limbs and brush in neat piles, the remaining trees in air and sunlight that would nourish their growth in years to come.
My stepfather treated us kids with care, keeping us in line with a gentle sort of humor that sometimes chided but rarely insulted. I remember as a 10-year-old learning how to play a plastic ukelele someone had given me. I don’t think the gift had been my stepfather’s idea. After one particularly long session of plucking and twanging, he came in from the next room: “You’re getting pretty good at that. You know, there’s a lot of people outdoors who’ve been asking to hear you play.”
There was wisdom, too, although I wouldn’t understand some of it until years later. In our first summer together at a small logging camp on Kennebunk Pond, Maine, I told him I wanted to grow up to be a logger, too, just like him. “No,” he said, “the only kind of wood you want to push around is the stuff they put in pencils.”
A few years later, when we had moved from Maine back into New Hampshire, I got up for my newspaper route one morning and noticed that the weather was cold and blustery, although not harsh enough to keep my stepfather and his crew from going into the woods and certainly not harsh enough to keep newspapers from being delivered.
“You know, life ain’t so complicated,” my stepfather told me as he headed for the outdoors. “It’s just damned hard sometimes.”
One of the pithiest lessons he taught me was how to split wood with an axe: “You throw the axehead where you want it,” he said. That was it. No fancy stuff about arcs and angles and axe handles. Oh sure, there was the advice about keeping the axe sharp and my feet out of the way, but what he wanted me to understand was that only two things mattered in splitting wood – the wood and the thing that split it. Concentrate on putting them together, and it will happen. By god, it worked. As long as my mind saw the axehead going into the wood where I wanted, my body knew how to do it.
I will split wood for my grandmother one day and think about the zen archer, his bow drawn and his face turned away from the target, knowing not in his eyes but in his mind, perhaps in his soul, where the arrow must go.
– Sid Leavitt
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