“The landscape was our sacred text, and we listened to what it told us. Everywhere you looked, there were stories.” — Greg Sarris
The visions were always the same: Trees falling over, thick logs on a conveyor belt, speeding toward a huge sawblade. Somehow, this was all happening underground, hundreds of feet below the surface, deep in the Earth. I wanted to stop the loops, but I couldn’t, my mind trapped in the horror of falling trees and whirling blades. My breath sped up, too, until I hyperventilated, my heart raced and my body shook.
I was seven.
When the visions came, I would call out to my parents to help me calm down, but they didn’t answer. One time, I came out of my room, bare feet on hardwood and then linoleum, to find my mom sitting in her armchair, watching TV. She tried to soothe me with words, but when that didn’t work, she slapped me, like I was a hysterical person in a movie. It stunned me into another state, more shock than calm.
I learned something that night: I couldn’t trust her with my biggest emotions.
Instinctively, I knew that these frantic, looping images were a message — from a ghost or some other spirit. They started not long after my family moved into a new house in rural Forestville, California. And it’s not like I wasn't warned; soon after we moved in, a couple of neighborhood kids stood on the front lawn with me and told me, like a doctor delivering difficult news to a patient: “Your house is haunted.”
When the nighttime loops didn’t stop on their own, I wondered if switching bedrooms with my younger brother would help. I asked my parents, though I hid the real reason I wanted to trade.
They agreed and, in the new room, the visions and panic attacks stopped.
As an adult, I’ve shared these stories with trusted friends here and there, hoping someone might be able to explain them. They’ve grasped at straws: An alien intelligence? Angry ghosts? None felt right to me. Only now have I begun to understand the story, at least in part.
Before the late 18th century, before Russian and Spanish settlers claimed the land where I grew up, it was mostly a wild redwood forest, miles of auburn and evergreen giants from the Russian River to the Pacific Coast. Some of those men began harvesting and selling lumber, all with hand tools like adzes and whipsaws. It was slow, hard work.
In 1843, Juan Bautista Rogers Cooper, the brother-in-law of General Mariano Vallejo, planted a sawmill near the banks of the Russian River. But this was different: Driven by the waters of nearby Mark West Creek, Cooper’s mill was the first powered sawmill in California. It could easily do the work of 10 men, and it never got tired.
Cooper’s mill was destroyed by flooding in 1841. But by then, the lumber industry was well underway.
More than 2 million acres of redwoods once grew along the California coast. Logging destroyed about 95 percent of them. A hungry, expanding San Francisco, 70 miles to the south, devoured Sonoma County’s redwoods to build houses, even coffins.
Now, I realize that the land was trying to tell me this story. The terror of the whirling blade, the grief of falling trees, faster and faster, out of control. But why me? Maybe I was the only one sensitive enough to pick up the signal. But I was only seven, too young to be able to hold and process such a powerful message.
And I didn’t have anyone to help me. I wish I’d been able to grow up among adults who were spiritually aware and wise, who could have mentored and guided me, rather than shutting me down. Maybe then I could have understood what I was receiving.
Maybe then I could have grown up knowing what it’s like to live with the land as ancestor, as parent, as kin.
Interested in contributing to the Missing Witches Zine? Check out our submissions info and get in touch!
Beth Winegarner is a journalist, author, essayist and pop culture critic who has contributed to the New York Times, the New Yorker, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Wired, Mother Jones, and many others. She is the author of several books, most recently "San Francisco’s Forgotten Cemeteries: A Buried History," She is also the co-host of the Dead Reckoning podcast.
Find her on IG @bethwinegarner.
