I don't want to die in the city

He was perhaps the last of the old-fashioned lumberjacks.

He worked through old and new and crippling pains, through vicious weather, through the irritants of weaker men, through loneliness.

He survived injury and trees that tried to kill him and dullards who dared to talk at the dinner table.

He befriended the forest, the wind, the horses and dogs.

He succumbed to narrow thinking and... temptation.

He soured in prison, aged in captivity, eroded in the city; a new prison: confined to the streets, the basement market and bookshops, an apartment in the sky with his bookshelves and little gardens. He stared out the windows for years at the grid of rooftops and grey horizons and never a forest in sight.

"I don't want to die in the city," he said, but it had to be inevitable.

He respected women and indigenous peoples and animals and tired drearily of men but he took to me for reasons I don't understand. And so I tolerated him for reasons I don't need to understand. I promised we'd take a trip when it became possible. We'd go see the trees (that tried to kill him). But then I too fell to physical ruin.

A new friend took up his cause. They won a reprieve. She had a car. They fled the city, saw the trees and the lakes.

They left the shore on a boat. He left the boat and in the water he was free of the tyranny of useless legs, but not of an old tired heart. "I don't feel good," he said suddenly to her; the woman on the boat. And the water moved over him and secured his escape from the city.

I haven't spared as much thought for the Lonely Lumberjack because Grandma passed away the same day and frankly she was dearer to me.

I remember that day when Carlos brightened and dropped a shield and declared a revelation; it's okay to ask for help. And soon thereafter he released this poem; my favourite.

My entire life
I have walked
Whatever path alone
Forged ahead
No matter what
Emotions not ever betraying
My stern face

Lately, I have made
A pleasant discovery
It sort of
Crept up on me

To always be alone
Is not
Who I have to be

To bend; accept help
Is to develop
A trust

Not to be like
An old machine
That gradually
Submits
To
Rust

- The Lonely Lumberjack