After hours of driving, they park at a forested pull-off near a river in central Washington to camp for the night. Willow simmers brown rice on the van’s propane burner while reading Swallows and Amazons aloud, a book she loved as a girl despite it being “terminally bourgeois.” Later, Liam lies sleepless in the Westfalia’s rooftop tent, nauseous with worry that the State Patrol will knock on the van’s fogged-up windows with their chrome flashlights, find the weed and the bags of sugar, then drag his mother to jail and whisk him off to some American orphanage where the kids all carry switchblades. Willow’s worries, however, assume a wider focus. She makes flashlit notes about her newest ploys to halt the ongoing genocide of the great heritage forests of the Pacific Northwest while drinking her fancy tea.
Outwardly, his mother is ecologically devout, but Liam knows her secrets. Her weed and mushrooms are kept mostly in the open, but she has caches of opulence squirreled around the Westfalia. A bottle of Chanel No. 5 tucked into a slit in the mouldering seats. Bags of fine English teas buried deep in the glove box. Little do her fellow eco-warriors know that his mother was raised rich: an estate; a live-in gardener; equestrian classes; private schools; tartan uniforms—the works. Her father, Harris Greenwood, founded Greenwood Timber in 1919 and amassed a fortune in the manner fortunes were amassed in Canada in those days: by chewing up the natural world and selling the spoils at great profit. Though he died when Liam was a baby, Harris is a person Liam has admired from an early age, if only secretly. At least he built real, tangible things, rather than Willow’s goal of “building awareness”—a phrase that Liam has never understood.
Despite their strained relationship, Harris left his entire fortune to Willow when he died: a mountain of cash, a mansion in Vancouver’s exclusive Shaughnessy neighbourhood, and a private island—all of which his mother then proceeded to donate to an environmental group concerned with global forest protection. Willow often re-enacts this selfless gesture for Liam in the Westfalia over tin bowls of her lightly sea-salted chickpeas: “Will that be all?”—gulp—“Ms. Greenwood?” she’ll say, impersonating the shell-shocked bank manager who drew up the drafts. “Yes, that’s it,” she’ll reply, playing the character of herself with a bland smile, before she bursts into manic laughter.
When Liam wakes the next morning, he finds a birthday present wrapped in newsprint on the table in the van. For a moment he pretends it’s from his father, who went by the name Sage and who hailed from Oceanside, California, and was some kind of surfer poet who trolled the Oregon coast, converting women like Willow to a religion he’d invented while listening to the album Pet Sounds. But Sage was left in the Westfalia’s dust long before Liam was born, and Liam has never met him.
Liam takes the gift in his hands. Because money is always tight, he knows not to get his hopes up. To finance their lean existence, they harvest wild chanterelles once yearly. In late summer, they hike to Willow’s secret spots—her “faerie farms”—hidden in the deepest old-growth woods. Liam is always amazed whenever they come upon hundreds of chanterelles, entire orchestras of miniature yellow trumpets poking up amongst the roots of the trees. How Willow remembers their location each year, with neither map nor compass, baffles him. They fill five baskets each, then thread the mushrooms on fishing lines hung around the van to cure. Afterwards, she fries some in butter and serves them on a bed of brown rice, but Liam always picks his off. Chanterelles taste too much like the forest, too much like how his mother smells—of faint peach and nuts and dirt. When the curing is done, Willow drives to high-end French restaurants in Seattle, Vancouver, and San Francisco and sells them by the bagful at cut rates to the elated chefs who meet them in the alley during their cigarette breaks. But after they buy food and replenish Willow’s sabotage supplies, there’s never much left over.
Liam tears the paper back to reveal a dream catcher, identical to the one he got last year, woven by Willow with colourful threads crisscrossing a few thin boughs of cypress. Noting his limited enthusiasm, Willow launches into a familiar tirade on modern toys and comic books, “Which were invented by media corporations and plastic death merchants.” Liam mumbles his thanks and sets about packing the van. Before they set off, he claims he has to pee and sneaks off into the trees, where he viciously stomps the dream catcher to bits upon the mossy forest floor.
It’s his first betrayal. His first rebellion. One she doesn’t even notice. Though she talks constantly of Liam’s bright future and worries aloud about whether there’ll be any unspoiled woodland left for him to enjoy as an adult, he counts weeks between the times that she actually focuses her green eyes on his face or listens to what he says. For this reason, every Halloween (a holiday she actually observes, dragging him to the same party at the Earth Now! Collective house in Vancouver each year) Liam has dressed up as a tree—a Douglas fir, in fact, her favourite species, wrapping himself in grey cardboard bark and branches, adorning himself with pinecones carved from her wine corks and with construction-paper needles that he’s painstakingly cut out himself. He wears the costume in the hopes that his mother will finally see him. It’s never worked.
And so that year, Liam decides to start dressing up as a lumberjack.
LIVE AUTHENTICALLY
TO HIS RELIEF, a noise rescues him from the quicksand of memory: his air compressor, set near the scaffolding ten feet to his right, roaring to replenish its tank pressure. It’s his machine—this Liam confirms by its unique patina of dents and scuffs. But why is it here? he thinks. Did I bring it? Yes. He and his helper Alvarez carried it from his van to the house this morning. Then where’s Alvarez? Hadn’t they raised the scaffolding together? Put rubber booties on its feet to protect the floor’s finish?
When the compressor shuts off, Liam’s eyes follow the scaffolding up to the patches of exposed insulation high above him. He and Alvarez had been tearing out the teak tongue-and-groove ceiling—just imagine the jokes carpenters make—and replacing it with Liam’s signature reclaimed boards, despite the fact that the teak was flawless and only ten years old. Once every spring Liam places a small ad in The New Yorker—one of the strange, ill-designed ones near the back:
GREENWOOD CONTRACTING:
RECLAIMED WOOD. CUSTOM WORK.
LIVE AUTHENTICALLY.
Eight meaningless words that are enough to keep his phone buzzing as constantly as a pair of barber’s clippers. Who knew that the Olympian-rich crave the A-word as desperately as they do, that they want their houses to look like spaceships on the outside and Depression-era factories inside. Regardless of their reasons, Liam happily obliges them, and reclaimed wood has become his bread and butter. He’s strapped on his tool belt for 406 consecutive days, no days off, and sleeps on a thin foam mattress in his contractor’s van (his home since losing his house in Fort Greene in the lead-up to the housing market crash), which he parks near his current job site. Perhaps it was his rootless upbringing in Willow’s Westfalia, but Liam is most content in this itinerant state, living one step ahead of his past. And carpentry—with its endless measuring and hammering and cutting and sanding and moving on to the next job—leaves little opportunity for his memories to intrude upon him, which is just how he prefers it.