About This Life: Journeys On The Threshold Of Memory - Plot & Excerpts
The man called here Jack is not named Jack. He does not live near Chinook, which town doesn’t exist in the Coast Range of Oregon. But this story is truthfully set in that country, and what I am about to write down—people’s emotions, a natural history of the region, the description of a wood-fired kiln, an aesthetic of anagama ceramics—is as true to what I witnessed as I can make it. If the story that follows is flawed by my tactic, I can’t help it. I know no other way to protect the people and the place in their privacy, without which there would be no story for me to tell. I’VE WALKED IN the Quartz Creek drainage near my home in the Cascade Mountains for almost thirty years, and recently have begun to feel I’ve reached a kind of agreement with the beaver living on its lower stretch, despite obvious manifold gaps in my understanding of their lives. For these years and longer, until he was incapacitated by a stroke, my downriver neighbor has trapped and killed them and sold their pelts, a tactic of life that never arrived for me, though I, too, have sought something from them.
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