A forest, drowning.
“Beneath our feet,” he says, “there is a forest. Nearly four hundred trees sunk in the cold mud, bearing up the weight of this end of the bridge.” He looks back to her, over his shoulder. “Stripped of leaves,” he says. “Shorn of branches. She may have granted you an office, Gallowglas, and charged you with a duty, but she is no more the Queen, nor has been, for many months.”
There’s a feeling, a notion, a risk that you take, when you’re writing about a specific place, which is when you mention something that exists in that place at the time you’re writing, and it’s there, and it’s fixed, and you go on, writing more, perhaps, but time’s passing, as it does, and as it does that something changes. Write enough, often enough, and mention enough specific things, and you’ll end up unable to escape this notion that your pen is cursed, that to write something into what you write, to take notice of it and try to fix it in this way, is to doom it. —Mention the Danmoore Hotel in the background of a long walk home; it’s demolished to make way for a church’s parking garage. Carefully site a camp out by the airport based on satellite photos and on-foot reconnaissance; the threatened development suddenly finds a buyer and sets to laying out and walling up its 157,185 square feet. Set a scene in the downtown Meier & Frank; the brand’s bought out by Macy’s, the building’s gutted, turned into a hotel, and a minimalist Japanese retailer sets up shop on the ground floor. Mary’s Club wasn’t gutted by a fire, but it did have to hustle across the street to what’s effectively another part of town, and the Wesson brothers drive through a famously confusing intersection that doesn’t exist anymore. Shadow Unit shoots its television pilot in a food cart pod that’s now just another luxury high-rise. And that drowned forest beneath the Burnside Bridge?
When the bridge was first built in 1926, the two piers in the river were placed on 380 tree trunks, driven into the mud. They’ve held up remarkably well. But in an earthquake, the soil could liquefy and make the trunks fall over like pick-up sticks. The trunks will be replaced by several 10-foot-diameter concrete, steel-reinforced columns sunk into bedrock.
One more metaphor unmoored, and onward marches heedless time. —And yes, yes, there’s all the stuff gets mentioned that doesn’t change, or fade, or die, but not yet whispers the notion, and sure, there’s all the stuff that’s dead and gone that you never even thought to write down in your little story, but somehow, whispers the notion, that’s worse, don’t you see? Who will care, now, if you ever do manage to figure out how and why and when to work in a magical night at La Luna? —And there’s even the fact that you can work this curse against itself, tear down the Goat Blocks as if they’d never been, undo a suspiciously timed fire, let a grocers’ warehouse live at least a few years longer, give John Varley’s apartment to some other writer, unroll a lawn on the roof of it, but it’s all in the end just words, only words, I mean, words.
Such a terrible, awful notion. Unwanted. Unsought. And yet.
—posted 156 days ago
