Needing to Know the Trees
This time of year, trees get more of our attention. While oaks are boinking our roofs and car hoods with acorns, and branches fill with migrating songbirds, the first hints of color emerge – usually maples smudged with orange. Now, too, is when wooded property owners survey and assess. Shall we thin new growth or remove the rest of last winter’s blowdowns? How many dying spruce will likely let go in this year’s gales? What are the odds those leaning, shallow-rooted firs along the road will take out a power line at least once when winter winds howl?
“One needs to know the trees of a place,” asserted poet Wallace Stevens about attachment to a physical place. Taking Stevens literally, I have, since first coming to the island, expanded my knowledge of the trees here, the largely conifer forests. Long a Midwestern student of deciduous trees, of oak and maple and elm, I’ve learned more about spruce, white pine, hemlock, and my favorite, the graceful larch, which, though a conifer is not evergreen and each autumn, in a final golden blaze, drops all its needles.
I can now distinguish a spruce by its square needles which can’t be rolled between fingers and a fir’s flat ones that can. And the way a spruce’s cones hang like beckoning piñatas at a child’s party and a fir’s sit as upright as attentive pupils at their desks. I’m learning better how to read the forest – not just in the identification of species but in the ways similar diameters of neighboring trunks say less about age than the fierce competition for the same limited moisture and light. Or how thin soil and shallow roots poorly attempt to camouflage unforgiving granite ledge. Though I remain largely powerless in the damage they inflict, I’m better able to recognize the signs of budworm, witches broom, wooly adelgid.
I’m still amazed how, particularly close to shore, spruce trees are apt to twist and bulge in fantastical shapes. Some are storm-bent and stooped like old men who, resigned to their canes, still, and with quiet resolve, get by. Others, lightning-gashed, testify to high drama and survival. Some balloon with goiter-like globes known as burls. Often created by storm-driven particles of salt embedded in bark, burls are the reaction to stressful irritant, a response to challenge and change. Just as a tree’s limbs adjust to prevailing winds, a tree’s burl is evidence of an accommodation that allows it to survive. In the bargain, the burl’s large knob or gnarly knot lends distinction to the trunk, makes of it a more interesting specimen in the way that the wrinkles and warts of our personalities in their growth and adjustments often become our most compelling features. A spruce grows at the sea’s edge and a salt particle blown into it becomes a burl, the spruce shaped by its physical location just as we are shaped by places where we’ve lived, no matter how shallowly rooted or how frequent the transplants.
Consider, too, “nurse stumps,” such as those on the island’s Shore Acres Preserve trail where a number of trees appear to perch almost magically mid-air. When, in the 1940s, this area was logged, new shoots grew from felled maple and ash stumps and over time, became the trunks of trees, some growing so close they intertwined. Later, after years of support, the original stumps that gave the new trees life, that nurtured and supported them, rotted back into the earth and disappeared. Those now empty spaces aren’t so much absence as evidence of what had once shaped the tree, a place from which it grew.
When writing of our attachment to a physical place, Stevens asserted we need to know its trees. Walden’s Henry David Thoreau, our American granddaddy in living-with-Nature instruction, suggested another direction. He claimed we need to know what kind of tree we are first and thus what kind of ecosystem we require to thrive. According to Thoreau then, I’ve gone about this enterprise a bit backwards. Having already determined that this island is where I best thrive, I now learn about the trees of this place. I may even have to ask myself which tree in it I might most resemble. (And here, let’s pause shall we, to consider the improbable: is it at all possible Barbara Walters got her inspirtation for her infamous and much ridiculed,“ If you were a tree, what kind would you be?” interview question from none other than our Walden super-hero Thoreau?)
All right then. But either way, I choose larch. Never mind this conifer is commonly found in New England and that I, a Midwesterner and long a deciduous devotee, am a transplant. Or that lithe of limb, with arch and drape, the larch resembles a graceful dancer. Forget, too, that I am only one in its legion of admirers and a recent acquaintance, a From Away late to the dance, one never likely to earn, as has larch, any accolades from the likes of Caesar or Pliny the Elder.
Though a conifer, larch possesses deciduous habits, and after its late show of remarkable color marking the season’s end, drops all its needles. Still, it’s as if the essence of larch hasn’t so much dropped away as gone elsewhere, like a migratory creature, one whose arrival in spring is announced again. A cycle I understand and in which, a little, I participate – even if I don’t sport a vivid emerald green come May nor am heralded by such commendable language as “when rosy plumelets tuft the Larch.”
Every autumn, about the time the larch is at its peak color, I return to Illinois. I reside in a familiar landscape, within a community of family, friends, neighbors and colleagues. Most days it nurtures and protects. I’m propped up by its networks, like roots that radiate from a secure base. I embrace the opportunities there, the work, diversity and pulse of city life that propelled me to it and which each fall compels me still. There, I embrace so much of what I left my childhood home to find, rediscovering, with some surprise, what has followed me, shaped as I was and remain by that small red brick ranch, a Midwestern neighborhood’s gridded streets and small swathe of woods, and in our yard, a lone crab apple tree, scraggly and battered, but the star in a personal pantheon of beloved trees, and in which an adolescent girl’s primitive treehouse once perched above an alley.
It’s said home is the “place the soul remembers.” I can’t say if my soul remembers that red brick ranch or if it resides in my tissues the way a bird’s or monarch’s migratory routes are remembered. Or like the osprey’s flight back to its nest of sticks each spring. I suppose it’s more likely that since leaving it, I’ve dwelled in a red brick ranch on Oakdale Avenue not with the soul but in memory only, longing for it to be such a place the soul remembers because we all must have – this has to be true, doesn’t it? – such a belonging, soul-remembered place.
Simone Weil wrote: “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul.” To lose such rootedness or to never possess it can mean we’re less able to move forward steadily, confidently into the world. Perhaps it remains a loss from which we never fully recover.
A place we have either chosen or were born to can be our foundation. We may change places, move, but we need such a base. Or as geographer Eric Dardel writes, “a here from which the world discloses itself, a there to which we can go.”
For the past several years, I leave this island in October and return in late May. I can’t go back to my birthplace that many years ago I left. It’s gone. Literally. But here, each year, I relive the act of leaving and from a place to which I can and still gladly return. A here that redefines there.
Over time, unknown-to-me-now-components will likely compel further distinction between here and there. Others may well propel me to hunker down longer over the roots I’ve sunk into this island soil. For now though, I yield to the away-from-here pull. Like a migratory species or in a nomadic cyclical journey, I leave and return, traveling the same routes of familiar landmarks and touchstones, all securely mapped in head and heart.
A journey where spruce and a stretch of canopy-making maples line either side of the road leading from the island’s bridge. Where, when I turn from there, more trees – spruce mostly and a few broad-branching oaks or occasional tamaracks in fields, clearings and yards – border the road. And where, in the final leg, our lane curves among and around white and red spruce, a stand of new birch, a few young maples, and, of course, in the dooryard, our sheltering oak.
All along the route, trees guide me home.