So we open here with a few moments of darkness after the close of the last scene, and then the sound of rain begins again. But if you were a careful listener, if your ears were strong, you would hear that it was the sound that rain would make in a forest, or against something that wasn't concrete, at least.
Forest rain, rather than city rain.
And as the scene fades view, the sound of rain is joined by an image of a vast clear-cut montainside, that seems to stretch on forever--impossibly enormous, rolling and uniformly green, and the whole sky grey above. Nothing but that and the sound the sound of rain falling.
A clear-cut was once a forest, of course, and in this shot you can see an actual real, uncut forest, somewhere off in the rain-blurry distance, rising up like a dark wall. But here, in the foreground of the shot, there are only massive overturned tree stumps, small shrubs, weeds, sticks and giant bits of log scattered and piled at random, rocks poking up across the clear-cut. It looked like something that had once been a forest, and then someone had dropped a bomb on it. Long enough ago that things had started to grow, but not long enough that the land looked healed yet--not by a damn stretch. That's what a clear-cut looked like. A forest that had been hit by a bomb last year, or hit by several bombs.
So here we have a wide-angle view of the rainy clear-cut, the camera low to the ground so that all we see is the scattered piles of dead tree stuff, rocks, and soil. Some greenery growing, and the rain falling over all of it, dripping off of everything.
And then, from opposite sides of the screen, two shovels slam down into the earth in halfway slow motion. Two human figures, clad entirely head to toe in raingear, move onto the screen. They're wearing large, heavy boots with spikes on the bottom, and they swing into view with shovels in their hands, shovels that were about the length of a thighbone, and as they drive the shovel into the wet ground, slow-motion spray flying all around them with every movement, you realized they were planting trees. You see them plant a few, and then the camera pulls back, then it pulls way back, and they're just two tiny figures on a vast clear-cut mountainside and everywhere, all around them, the scene just vanished into more mountains, more forest and clear-cuts, more openings of space, more river valleys far-away and lost in the mist, everything blending into one. This scene looks like it would in be northern Canada, somewhere in British Columbia, probably, so we'll say it was exactly 257 kms from the nearest town, which would've been Fort Mackenzie, which was hardly much of a town, and then 141 kms from there to the nearest major highway.
Pull back down to ground level, and the tree planters in slow motion. Then music begins for the first time, a mournful old religious hymn, something that immediately makes you think of the grand old cathedrals of Europe, monks chanting "pray for us now and in the hour of death amen". Something that at the same time manages to be incredibly sad, and yet, I don't know--uplifting, maybe? Transcendent? It's the way you feel staring at the ocean or at the prairies, or seeing the crowds of people in the cities, maybe, and you just feel so small, but you're okay with that? Like it's good to feel small for a moment, to be aware of how little you are, and how big the universe is, and to realize how our lives and strength and the flame of youth simply vanish into the common dark of all our deaths. And be okay with that.
In the theatre, almost everything vanishes beyond the two senses of sight and sound for us now, and we see these two people struggling along, see them digging their boots into the side of the mountain, slamming down into the wet earth with their shovels time and again, over and over and over in poetic slow motion. Soaking wet, exhausted, both of them utterly defeated, and yet going on nevertheless.
And a monk choir singing over it all, filling the theatre with their almost ghostly sound, pray for us now and in the hour of our death amen.
So have you ever been to a foreign country? That’s how my friend once phrased it. Because, if you have, you can understand a bit of what tree planting is like—a place with an entirely different set of rules than the place you came from.
Imagine it like that, then. A foreign country, with a whole other culture and a whole other language.
“SLASH!,"
The voice of Feral Danger MacDuff booms out over the rainy, wind-swept side of the clear-cut as the music evaporates and the regular sound returns, and the two people are working at normal speed again. We know that it's Feral Danger Macduff at least partly because he looks so impossibly different from Adam, the guy in the first scene, that we know it's not Adam. And of course most of the audience will be familiar with this whole story anyway, since they've heard the tale of Feral and Adam a thousand times before, but want to hear it again just once more, differently, and in a way that makes sense to them. Those familiar with this story, of course, will realize as well that Adam is now well into his career as a tree planter, experienced enough that he can share a piece of land with Feral all day.
“SLASH!" Feral Danger Macduff yells again, climbing over the giant husks of trees, over jumbled piles of dead branches and roots. "THERE'S WAY TOO MUCH SLASH HERE! THIS IS A BLOODY GONG SHOW! WHOEVER HEARD OF GETTING FOURTEEN CENTS FOR THIS? IT’S BULLSHIT!!!”
And then he laughs, chuckles lightly to himself, because he’s entirely alone here on the side of this clear-cut mountain. Or, he's not alone, but Adam is too far away to hear him, and Adam just keeps his head down, keeps planting as though nothing was ever said. Keeps struggling along through the rain.
Already on this steep clear-cut, even though it was only a year old, there was green again, knee high plants and weeds and shrubs and flowers and vines that made the whole mountainside a vivid jade-green colour like the eyes of some wise old Monkey-god from the east. The forest line, where the clear-cut ended and the trees rose up again like a gated wall, was jagged and unnatural, dark and forbidding. And the clear-cut, if you lay down in it, put your face at ground level, was already a full-blown ecosystem again.
“THERE'S WAY TOO MUCH FUCKING SLASH... THIS IS A TOTAL BULLSHIT GONG SHOW…” Feral shouts into the wind again before it tears the words from his mouth, flings them off the side of the mountain and sends them tumbling uselessly out over the ocean.
The wind doesn’t demand silence in nature, but it creates it, for when there's enough wind, there simply is no other sound-- no sound except what the wind makes as it howls across and around and through whatever is or isn’t there like the feeling of madness in the brain, or the spirits of the restless dead.
“BLLLAAAAAAAAHHHH!…” Feral shouts, waving his arms at the cloud-topped mountains that surround him, for he knows that the mountains will hear and understand, even if Adam can't. And Adam, far below him now, just keeps plodding along.
Prayforusnowandinthehourofourdeathamen...
