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I have realized that it is the fire-scarring, the chunks of carbonized wood structure, that, for me, are the visual essence of forest fire impact. I was struck by the folded and corrugated surface of this tree on the West Rim Trail during my residency in Zion National Park. At right is a poem written in response to the painting during its exhibit at Art Port Townsend's annual competition.
Painting Details
Watercolor on shaped Arches watercolor paper |
Truncated after a watercolor by Suze Woolf
A wounded trunk of scorched bark prods a bumpy adhesion on your heart still tender after twelve years.
Forced from your retirement sanctuary by a juggernaut of flame-laced smoke ad searing heat exploding through the forest across Arizona’s high country
When the hissing and roaring departed you return after two weeks to your house surrounded by charred spires leaning above the mounds of gray ash
A bereft, empty sky above the silence where ravens once crisscrossed through the green canopy stretch miles of blackened, burned-out ridges
After running from that wildfire, you landed in a moist corner of Puget Sound but can’t forget that cremation of your naïve dream of safe, green retirement
You now accept life is never nailed down at all four corners and transformation defines this world ever since the universe was fired in the kiln of a Big Bang
Twelve years.
The smell of charcoal no longer hangs in the air blackened trees were felled and shipped to Japan for chopsticks scattered ash nourished new seeds prised open by conflagration bright green understory swathes the valleys and ridges
So heal your singed heart like an elder shaman: Cut a limb from this truncated trunk carve symbols onto to it, paint it, attach raven feathers with a leather thong
Don’t squirm at the archaic flavor of this idea give that hillside you abandoned some spirit food jam your prayer stick in the ashes at the foot of this charred snag make an offering, not so much logical as geological,
In reluctant reverence salute the huge dispensations of this place called Earth larger than your retirement dreams
Take that feeling home. It will sustain you.
-Bill Mawhinney, 2014
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