Pack Creek Ranch, San Juan County, Utah

Written in early July, 2008

Just a note to tell you that the production process for the English language version of my novel, Third Wish, is in high gear. The actual publication date is not yet firm, but as soon as I know, I will publish the details here. Meanwhile:

THE CLOSING OF THE MILL

This is an invisible slide show.
A mental power-point presentation.
Imagine.

1. On your screen is a photograph of an active sawmill in south central Oregon near the whimsically named little town of Drain. A blue-highway, blue-collar crossroads in the valley of the Uumpqua River where it winds through the Coast Range before emptying into the Pacific Ocean at Reedsport. This is the setting for Ken Kesey’s fine novel, Sometime A Great Notion. The photograph was taken 30 years ago.

As you can see, the mill yard is full of machinery – D-8 Cat tractors, logging trucks, log loaders, and the randomly parked collection of pickup trucks belonging to the workers. Across the way, logs are being rolled from trucks into the mill pond. Men with spiked boots and long poles are moving the logs toward the chain-way that pulls the logs up into the mill, where they are debarked and shoved forward into giant gang-saws. Somewhere inside the mill, finished boards are stacked, then lifted up by fork lift and hauled out to the huge drying yard that extends far out of this picture.

The smoke you see is steam from the boiler that drives the machinery. If you could smell the scene, your nose would tell you the wood is fir.  The great mounds of chips and sawdust in the foreground are used to fire the mill’s boilers.

2. Here’s a second slide – taken ten years later. The mill is active, but not today. All is still. No workers in sight. I don’t know why. Holiday? Strike? Shortage of logs, perhaps? The pond is only half full. The stacks of drying lumber seem fewer in number.

3. Here’s a third slide. A sign says: “Mill Closed – No Trespassing”. The mill is not only closed, but seemingly abandoned. No stacks of lumber. No sign of life. The glass windows in the mill office are broken. Only rust and weeds are at work. And there are no logs in the pond. The nearby woods are clear-cut of trees. The mill’s days are over.

4. A last slide. The sawmill has been torn down, the machinery scrapped, the land bulldozed flat and seeded with green grass. Wild flowers bloom, and ducks inhabit the now-quiet pond.

These pictures are not a nostalgic documentary of the coming and going of the timber industry. Not an environmental impact statement, either. Nor an elegy for the human depredation of the earth.

What I’ve written is an elaborate metaphor. About writing. Mine. Only time will tell how accurate the analogy may be.

For as long as I can remember stories have been dumped into the millpond of my mind in endless supply. The idea-logs have been hauled up into my sawmill, cut into word-boards and assembled into structures to be used by others. It seemed out of the question that I could not go on forever. I could not not write. Writer’s block had never been an issue. To the contrary, I assumed I had a permanent case of logorrhea – an inability not to babble on.

This June, at the end of my 70th year I realized, I was no longer writing.
The mill seemed to be shut down – at least temporarily – as it has before from time to time. As the days and weeks have passed on by, I notice that the urge to produce words had stopped. The mill seems to have closed.

When I checked the mill pond. There were no logs floating in it.

Instead, the desire to make art again came as a flood. On the spur of the moment I came down here to southeastern Utah to my studio to do nothing but paint.

Come. I’ll show you. Follow me down the hallway stairs.

On the entrance wall you see that I’ve written Green! Green! Green!
Further on you see that three work tables are covered with scraps of the color green – cuttings from magazines, sample cards from paint stores, and paper smeared with the greens I’ve mixed up for a palette.

In the next room you will see nine canvasses of three sizes – the dominant color on each is green. I don’t know why. I don’t care why. I’ve never painted much green before. My green period seems to have come. The content of each painting is still in progress. As is the wordless conversation between me and the paint and the canvas.

This making of visual art is a private affair for me. Not for a show or for sale. For sanity and pleasure and a special kind of joy not unlike what a kindergartner feels when recklessly splashing color around on an easel. Remember?

The only thinking I’ve done is about some words pinned to one of my easels.

“The grass is not greener on the other side of the fence.
The grass is greener where it is watered.
When crossing over fences, carry water.
Or stay where you are and tend the grass there.”

So there you have a round about answer to the questions from readers of this website: Where’s Fulghum? What’s he doing? Where’s the writing?

He’s into green - watering his grass.
The sawmill may be closed.
Meanwhile, he’s very happy.