Barkskins

by Annie Proulx

He noticed the fine layer of dust on everything in Dieter’s office—globe, bookshelves, chair rungs, window ledges. There was dust on Dieter’s ideas.

And I wish you could understand that there are hidden complexities in the managed forest of which you know nothing.”

“A pity you cannot grow barkless planks. It is no use, Father—I have seen what I have seen and cannot accept tree plantations as a greater good.”

“Forgive me, Charley.” He swallowed some whiskey. Sighed. “I had ideas and feelings similar to yours when I was young but over the years I learned that the entrepreneurial spirit of this country could not be dampened. We can’t be wild animals. We are humans. We live in a world that is a certain way and forests must adapt to the overwhelming tide of men with axes, not the reverse. I came to believe that planting trees was a kind of forest continuation, not perfect but better than stumpland. We call such plots ‘forest’ and we believe that is what they are. Also, I have never thought that German management could be less than superior.”

“Father, it reeks of the eighteenth century. It no longer fits. It is also true that there is too much cutting. The old forests are going and once they are gone we will have to wait a thousand years or more to see their like. Though nothing will be allowed such a generous measure of time to grow. Most wild American woodlands have already been savaged.”

“You ask me about the company’s cut in New Zealand. Where once a grove of the noble kauri grew I came upon acres of devastation. The killing ground could only be differentiated from the gum fields by the fresher stumps.”

“Why, northern New England is a world of denuded mountains scarred by railroad tracks and erosion. Slash, charred logs, millions of stumps and endless miles of washed-out roads. I don’t see how fish can live in New England waters unless they can breathe silt. Large fires every summer, and still the rivers carry log drives—pitifully small sticks for the pulp mills and pressed-wood fabricators.”

“Yes. I did. Brazil has the most profoundly diverse forests on earth!” For the first time since his return there was enthusiasm in Charley’s voice. “The striking feature is the mix of species rather than large groves or aggregates of dominant trees.

“It is in the tropics, not only in Brazil but in Colombia, Costa Rica, Venezuela, in India and Malaysia—forests filled with mangoes, guava, passionfruit, starfruit, coconuts, bananas. The tropical forests are the most wondrous forests I ever saw.

“I would very much like to see these forests. But let me say that I heard the same complacent remarks about the Maine and New Hampshire woods, about the Michigan pine forest—too large to be irrecoverably harmed. And I saw them fall. There is no such thing as being too large to fall. They all go down when men come.”

“I’ll do what I personally can to help you,” said Dieter, “but you seem destined to observe, perhaps write a book—I do not see you holding a regular job or making a business success.” “There is no job that I have ever heard of that would be as honorable and interesting as going about and observing the lives of the trees and noting their peculiarities.”

the great 1910 fires in Montana, Idaho and eastern Washington burned more than three million acres of prime timber and settlements in two days, a raging blowup crown fire jumping and leapfrogging over hundreds of miles, a fire such as no human had ever seen. The country was shocked by headlines describing how the remote heart of America had been destroyed in forty-eight hours, for people believed that the wild essence of the country existed in its great forests somewhere out west. And now they had burned.

“Charley, here’s a cause for you—help rejuvenate the spoiled lands. I am meeting this evening at the house with James Bardawulf and Andrew to discuss possible salvage of some of the burned timber. I hope you will join us.” He did not think Charley could resist the battle to heal the wrecked forest. “It will just happen again,” said Charley in a dismissive tone, “until the yahoos have burned the country clear. You are pleading with men who just don’t care. As for salvage, it seems a bit like rifling the pockets of a corpse.” He left the door ajar as he went out.

“Stop, Charley. What has got into you?” She tried to push him away, but he was not having it and he was not playing her flirting game tonight. He pulled her to the garden bench. It took a few moments of sweet flattery and blandishment to ease her into position and gradually ruck high the green dress. He did this almost stealthily, not roughly, eased into her hot and responsive flesh and at the moment of discharge heard James Bardawulf’s voice say, “Why, Charley, how thoughtful of you to drop in,” and there was a tremendous concussive sound that his damaged brain told him was a moon bolt, very like being struck full force with a Zulu knobkerrie.

“Father,” he said to Dieter, whom he knew again, “what happened to me?” “Something heavy fell on you in James Bardawulf’s garden.” A glass with a residue of sleeping powder stood on the night table. “In James Bardawulf’s garden? Why!” He turned the glass in his fingers. “I see no point in keeping the information from you. You did something schlecht. You tried to—you ravished Caroline in the garden and James Bardawulf discovered you in the act. Your own brother’s wife! He struck you.” “This is extremely painful to hear. I do not remember this. I think you must be mistaken.”

Through intermediaries Dieter arranged the purchase of a small house for him in Lugar da Barra do Rio Negro, or Manaós, the city of the forest, where the wild tropical trees would be waiting for him. The house and a modest monthly sum of money were all he could do for this child he had long ago foretold, under the silver maple in Lavinia’s park, would be a man of the trees.

He almost understood how the incomprehensible richness of Amazonia made humans clutch and rend in maenadic frenzies of destruction. Such a forest was an affront, standing there smirking, aloof from its destiny of improving men’s lives.

Charley wrote everything down in his notebooks. There were many species of mahogany, Brazilian rosewood, teak, bloodwood, exotic zebrawood, ipe and cambara woods, anigre and bubinga, cumaru and jatoba, lacewood and makore. And hundreds more without names. He felt fortunate if he could attach a name to one tree each week, draw its general shape, list some of its epiphytes and strangler vines.

At the end of his first year Charley had sent the notebook to Dieter as he would every year until he learned of Conrad. He heard nothing back and wondered if Dieter had abandoned him. In fact, Dieter had abandoned everyone.

Not long after Charley’s departure from Chicago, Dieter, the old pine, had gone down. “Mrs. Garfield,” he said wearily on a Monday noon, “I’m going home early. I have a headache and think I need a night’s sleep.” Mrs. Garfield, who had replaced Miss Heinrich when she retired, clucked and said, “I hope you feel better tomorrow.” But the next morning the headache was bad and he had a stiff neck. By the end of the week he was half-paralyzed, and the doctor diagnosed polio.

don’t care what it takes, we’ve got to find him,” said James Bardawulf, striding to the grimy window and back. “He’s a major heir in the will. The situation is crazy enough. That we don’t know where the hell he is makes it worse. I’m going to get a private detective on it.”

The young lawyer, excited by the journey to the tropics (though after seeing dead monkeys in the market he wanted to be back in Chicago), had no trouble finding Charley Breitsprecher, disheveled and rather yellow, in the muddy river town. He told him Dieter had “passed” and handed him the envelope of documents. Charley sent the young man back to his hotel and arranged to meet him for dinner.

Dear Charley. We both have very much to regret and resolve. I am deeply, deeply sorry for attacking you. I have suffered pangs of conscience ever since that night. And Caroline who blames herself for all. But as they say, there is no wind so ill that it does not bring some good. The good is our son Conrad. We love him. Our father, Dieter, taught me that holding on to anger is a great evil. If you return someday to your family in Chicago you will be received with affection. Your brother, James Bardawulf Breitsprecher “None more sorry than I am, James Bardawulf,” said Charley to the letter.

“Dear Sir,” he wrote to Mr. Grey. He disclaimed most of his portion of Dieter’s estate, saying, “I would like it to go to my brother, James Bardawulf Breitsprecher, and his wife, Caroline Breitsprecher, for reasons they know.” A month later, when Dieter’s will and Charley’s letter were read, James Bardawulf caught his breath. How Charley had changed, down there in the jungle. But then, he, too, had altered.

In Brazil for the next seven or eight years Charley sent his notebooks not to Dieter but to the boy, Conrad Breitsprecher, often with a letter and a sketch of some comic tropical insect. His malaria attacks increased in ferocity. His fortieth birthday had brought him his mother’s legacy, but he chose to stay in his little house. The work—which he would not leave even for an hour—was everything.

“Leopardwood. Not same like lacewood but look almost—a little.” Charley swayed, put his hand out to take his twig and dropped to the floor, convulsed. Senhor Fagundes, shocked and afraid, hoping the man did not have a pestilent disease, called the hospital for an ambulance. Charley Duke Breitsprecher, ever a man of contradictions, died a week later of Plasmodium falciparum in Manaós, after writing in his last notebook:

Nothing in the natural world, no forest, no river, no insect nor leaf has any intrinsic value to men. All is worthless, utterly dispensable unless we discover some benefit to ourselves in it—even the most ardent forest lover thinks this way. Men behave as overlords. They decide what will flourish and what will die. I believe that humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I am sorry that I am one of them.

The final sentence was his will—a scrawled request that this last notebook be sent to Conrad and all that he possessed, his fortune inherited from Lavinia, and Dieter’s seedling nursery, be h...

“We got them where we want them,” said Andrew Harkiss, recovered from the Spanish flu that had killed Chicagoans like chickens. Great rollers of change beat on national shores: newly independent but poor countries, once the colonial holdings of the great European powers, struggled to join the global scuffle. “What these countries have is the raw materials—forests and minerals and oil. We’d be fools not to get in on this, South America, Asia—all kinds of hardwood. It’s our chance.”

James Bardawulf, curious one day about the notebooks Charley had sent to Conrad, looked into them and found them filled with useful information on the qualities of tropical trees. He showed them to Andrew.

The company, now Breitsprecher-Duke, in league with banks, other timber outfits, the mining industry, coffee, cocoa, banana and mango importers, became part of the new colonialism. When the great onslaught on tropical forests began, they were in the van, taking all they could. Charley Breitsprecher’s notebooks were used to plunder his forest.

He began to recover and in spring the doctor recommended three months rest at a hotel-sanatorium in the mountains of New Hampshire. There he experienced a day, never forgotten, that bound him forever to forests.

He fell in love with a local girl, Sally Shaw, a waitress in the dining room. Most of the visitors took breakfast in their rooms, but every morning he sat near his favorite east window and she brought him tea and the institution’s famous popovers. She spoke to him in a teasing voice about the weather, or the breakfast offerings, but he felt strangely happy when she came to his table with the teapot. Her hands were small but deft, her nails lacquered, her black straight hair cut fashionably short. Very red lipstick outlined the rosebud shape of her mouth. She flirted.

“I think you must know the best place to walk,” he said. “Say, do I ever! Tomorrow? I got the afternoon off.” She had heard he was a rich man’s son.

They walked up a steep trail, there was a clumsy kiss as they veered into sweet fern, her shrill laugh, then grappling and rolling on the ground. The perfume of crushed sweet fern fixed the experience. A light rain began. When he looked beyond her, he saw an army of perfect young white pine trees glistening in the wet mist, bursting with the urgency of growth. The rain, falling slant and silver, amplified their resinous fragrance. It was raining, the girl, her hair in ratty wet tails, was pulling at him to go back to the hotel, but he was happy. And somehow he was caught, not by the girl, but by the little pines.

After the crash of ’29 the country staggered under the weight of economic depression and the rage of striking workers. Breitsprecher-Duke began to lose its footing. James Bardawulf told Conrad, now finished with school and with a degree that fitted him for nothing, that the family company would employ him if he wished, but without salary; after all he had money he could live on and Breitsprecher-Duke was enduring hard times. Raphael was counting on his smooth good looks for a job in films, and Claude worked for a real estate company specializing in western ranch properties. Since Roosevelt, cattle ranching had been popular with those who still had wealth.

He thought instead of Dieter’s old seedling nursery business. Could anything be done with it? It had been more of a hobby for Dieter with very few clients, but over the years he had kept on a single employee, Alfred McErlane, who managed the greenhouses. Pe...

“Al, it looks like our customers are mostly local parks and private landscape concerns. And just spruce and pine seedlings? I see very few lumber company clients. Tell me how you think our position stands and if you think it might be improved.”

“Well, you know, we go along. Timbermen that want to replant just leave a few seed trees and let the trees do the job. Nobody’s got any money these hard times even if they believed in planting seedlings. Which they don’t. But a guy from Weyerhaeuser come around a month or two ago asking questions about how we set up, where we get the seeds and all. I think they might be planning to get their own nursery going. They have the money to do it—they are the only timber people making a profit.”

They talked and walked through the other glasshouses—there were five, all old and in poor shape. It didn’t take Conrad long to discover that McErlane was as ignorant of new research and knowledge on seedling propagation, cloning, forest genetics and site preparation as Conrad himself. He was putting his hands on a finicky complicated business that called for extensive knowledge on the part of both the seedling grower and the planter.

“I have to back up,” he said to McErlane. “I don’t know what I need to know. I have to go to forestry school. I think we can keep the greenhouses running as they are for the clients that still depend on us until I learn enough to map out a new plan. One thing is sure. Seedlings are the best way to keep forests alive.”

He enrolled in forestry school, and as he studied he saw more and more difficulties. The real knot was the timber industry. He would have to persuade logging companies and lumbermen that their future was linked to his; if they wanted trees to cut in the future, they would have to plant new seedlings among the stumps. They would have to learn to think in decades and hundreds of years. They could not depend on leaving a few wild trees to seed the barren cuts—experience showed there was poor regeneration.

site preparation was vital; timbermen had to see that doing the work and paying the costs was to their benefit. Conrad made a decision. Breitsprecher would offer site preparation as a service.

Finally, could the seedlings be priced to allow some profit or should he just hope to break even? For already he was inclining toward philanthropy, using his uncle Charley’s legacy.

By 1939 he knew enough to work out a long-range plan. He built new greenhouses and set up a seedling experiment with eleven tree species.

The Breitsprechers and Dukes had escaped military service for generations, but Conrad was called up. Both Raphael and Claude knew the right people. Conrad knew only Al McErlane and some forestry professors.

He came back from the South Pacific in 1945, face and body damaged and changed, thoughts changed, ideas and beliefs changed. And when once more he shook Al McErlane’s hand and walked through the seedling greenhouses, he thought that the rows of spiky, fresh green sturdy little pines were the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

Plywood and fiberboard kept Breitsprecher-Duke alive.

In the years after the war they caught the tail end of the building boom, but bigger companies supplied by cheaper Canadian wood sent them into decline, although the illusion of a productive, busy wood products company headed by two dynamic men—James Bardawulf Breitsprecher and Andrew Harkiss—persisted. Both men photographed well standing in front of a mountain of logs or the glittering rotary peeler, but like plywood these images were only a surface layer covering inferior material.

The younger generation of Breitsprechers wanted nothing to do with the plywood company.