I had heard the word before. Alerce is the local term for the Fitzroya cupressoidies: the South American cousin of the Redwood tree. It grows slowly but nearly as tall, and has been protected in Chile since 1976. In 1993, Chileans named one of them El Gran Abuelo, the great grandfather. When he died, researchers split him open and counted 3,622 years of Chilean history in his rings. Looking at the trees rather than my wondering eyes, Nico explained how he must go in search of alerce that has died naturally, or dig down into the earth at the foot of the Andes mountains for roots abandoned by loggers decades ago. A petition to the government must be made for every load of wood, so he makes just a few trips a year, traveling east toward the Andes and the Alerce Andino National Park.
When I left, Nico did not yet have a name for his project. Today, he calls his work RaÃces de Alerce, by which, I am beginning to understand, he really means Chilean roots.
For every question I asked of Nico, he had one for me. As deeply as I wanted to breathe in the deep reds and browns of his alerce, to examine the creases of his hands and the curves of his sculptures, Nico wanted to hear about Ohio. For all his travels around southern Chile, he and his family had never come so far north. “What does your earth look like?†he asked me. “No, how does your earth feel?†It was hard to explain to this man – this man, just my age, but with hands that woke the bark of his country’s trees every morning, whose sun ran colors over his red roof every sunset – that I didn’t really know. That I had driven the plains a few times and gone running in state parks and had a poetry professor who held class on the creek bank sometimes – but that truly, I did not know. That I did not talk much about my wood or trees or earth, not because Ohio didn’t have them, but because I did not see them. Whatever answer I stumbled out, it sounded guilty. As I tucked Nico’s words to my chest, he rose to his feet and led me back inside, the curl of his alerce still sharp in my palm.
When I left, Nico did not yet have a name for his project. Today, he calls his work RaÃces de Alerce, by which, I am beginning to understand, he really means Chilean roots.
As soon as my plane touched down in Ohio, I ached to leave. I ached for red wood and the sharp smell of cigarettes over flowing river water. But it would be too simple to say this was only nostalgia for Chile. For the first time, I was feeling Ohio in my bones: all the years I had lived here and somehow learned even less about it than my temporary home across the equator. I could feel Nico and Orietta and my own mother’s words heavy across my chest, and what I really ached for was some way to reconcile them all.
It sounds like a joke to say that I found the answer in a Craigslist post. A charter school in town was desperate for a Spanish teacher: someone fluent and willing to teach grades six through eight, even just graduated, even without my degree in education. When I told my mother, she held that hand with the cigarette to her mouth and said, “Syd, if you have to be a teacher, just don’t teach middle school.†And then she laughed through her fingers, because we both finally understood that this was a joke but also not, and that I would take the job anyway. I wanted to know where my mother’s duende came from. I needed to learn about my town’s future, about the job that fed and clothed my own childhood. I needed to feel my feet beneath me in Ohio, to name the place they come from, before I would understand where I was going.
Three school years have passed since then, which is so much but mostly so little time. Teaching has sharpened me, has helped me to find my alerce here in Ohio. I have found, unexpectedly, what the duende flows up through me to teach: stories. My story and my student’s stories – I feel them take shape like rich red wood in my palms. Throughout the year, my students ask me to tell Nico’s story again. The first time, they listen. My students are eloquent and nomadic; they are children to the refugees of Gambia, Somalia, Eritrea, Bhutan, and they carry the memory of these homes with them to every class. They are anxious, hungry, demanding. They ask for photos of Nico and are slighted by his dark hair, so like theirs, and his gaze that won’t meet the camera. They ask me where Chile is, and how it can be so far away. Emmanuel in the third row wants me to bring the American Redwoods to him. I recognize in them that deep thirst. I want to give them the Calle Calle – not a taste, but the whole river. The whole wide river, the expanse of its channel and the slope of its banks and its great mouth opening to swallow all of the Pacific, to take us all the way to home.
The second or third time I tell Nico’s story, they begin to pick apart its strands, to wind them through their fingers. Last week, eleven-year-old Abena told me about a ceremony in her Ghanaian village where families come together and carve masks from Khaya anthotheca, that rich African mahogany. The language arts teacher says they are comparing and contrasting. I think they are doing more; I think they are playing games with the concept of home. I think that, like me, they are stringing together essays and searching for the duende needed to write them. I think they are beginning to understand what it means when I tell them that deep in the swirls of Nico’s ear, red alerce dust settles and colors everything he hears.
Sydney Tammarine is a Spanish teacher, translator, and writer currently pursuing her MFA at Hollins University. Her work has appeared or been accepted in Quiz & Quill and Cleaver, and her most recent book of literary translations, Diez Odas para Diez Grabados, is forthcoming in Santiago, Chile from Taller 99.
