Two Roads Converged in a Wood : A simple life, communing with and communicating through nature, is a quiet man’s road less traveled by.

It was easy to choose a card for Mother’s Day. I knew the one my mother would like because I’m like my mother. Now, I stand perplexed in front of the Father’s Day display.

My father, Joy La Belle, was a meter reader for 25 years. Most meter readers finally move into office positions, but my father liked being outdoors. He retired in 1976. By that time, he figured he’d walked around the world twice (more than 50,000 miles) on his job. He weighed 125 pounds when he started, 125 when he stopped. He was bitten by dogs only four times. You can still see German shepherd teeth marks on his right arm.

Once he retired, my father could turn his full attention to his real career. Almost 60 years ago, he bought a tract of wooded land near Olympia, Wash. He began building a house on a hill overlooking a waterfall. But a winter storm crushed the unfinished frame. My newly married parents moved into a tiny cabin and lived there for several years without electricity or running water. When my brother and I were born, my father added rooms and handcrafted furniture. Eventually, my father built five dwellings in the woods. For each, he cleared just enough for construction. The green light of the forest filters through the windows. Since several houses have walls of glass, the woods almost move into the living rooms. My father has no use for curtains. Like Thoreau at Walden, he has “no gazers to shut out but the sun and moon.” What they gaze in on is beautiful and true, in harmony with nature.

I came to appreciate my father’s life more fully when I met him in literature. I found him in Robert Frost’s poems and Thomas Hardy’s novels--a straightforward, hard-working man with a quiet wisdom deeper than that of more articulate men. My father watches and waits. He doesn’t talk much, but his silence is wonderful to listen to.

I work with words, my father with wood. And yet we communicate. He doesn’t write me letters, but sometimes in the fall I receive a large envelope full of yellow maple leaves. When my favorite madrona tree died, he carved from it a “writer’s block” to keep on my desk. In days when no words come, I pick it up, feel its smoothness and know that somewhere my father is driving nails or patiently planing and sanding. These are also ways of giving form to ideas.

What is unspoken is not unexpressed. One morning when he thought I was asleep, I heard my father walk softly into the kitchen near my room and begin slowly unloading the dishwasher. I lay in bed, listening to how gently he lifted out each pan, each glass. Like the stealthiest thief in reverse, he returned the silverware to its drawer. He took 20 minutes to do what he could have done in five, just to let me dream. Once in a while, we are lucky enough to be awake when love performs its silent testaments.

My father is 81. Not only do he and my mother still live quietly in the woods; they belong to it. Slender as is his frame, my father remains a powerful man. His arms are sinewy from years of chopping trees and raising roof beams. He works every day, digging stumps, laying a brick floor with precision, repairing the steps to the waterfalls, creating a bridge from a white fir that had fallen over the creek.

Knowing what to leave alone is as important as knowing what to do. Every few months, someone offers my father a small fortune to timber his forest. “Why would I want to cut down the trees?” my father asks. A doctor tells him about an operation for his fingers, which have become gnarled into a fist. “I can still hold a hammer,” my father says. And he can.

My father is a happy man--not from trying to be, but because he lives at the center. He understands how to simplify the complexities of life. He does something each day toward clearing his own path through the wilderness, within and without. There is at the core of his being a mysterious strength I will never fully comprehend, nor to which any greeting card can speak.