"Scalps will be taken"

All winter, as a way to update us on its progress, our neighbor has been emailing photos of the ongoing renovation of our island house. We’ve gotten to see where a wall has come down, another gone up, what the color of the new siding is and the trim of another recently installed window.  And of how masterfully our contractor erected plastic tenting around what has often seemed like the mere shell of a house so that work could continue throughout a particularly snowy Maine winter.  In one recent photo, however, our house seemed like mere backdrop to what, to my eye, was the true subject of the image – our big oak tree, its broad limbs and networking branches spread against a crisp blue sky.

At nearly 100 years old, this tree is a mighty, finest-kind specimen. On a granite island thinly cloaked with topsoil and proliferating with shallow-rooted and short-lived white spruce, we’re lucky to have it just steps from our door. At our house project’s start, in advance of impending excavators, forklifts, and large trucks, no instruction I gave our contractor could’ve been clearer: “Anything happens to that oak, scalps will be taken.”

Over many years, I’ve been lucky to live with special trees. The big buckeye in Barrington Hills with its picture book pyramidal shape, broad low branches, bright spangles in spring. The stooped apple trees behind the Indiana farmhouse where we visited my grandparents after my grandfather retired and before my grandmother was crippled by her stroke, a mere handful of happy summers. The shade-gifting elms on Oakdale Avenue ravaged one summer by Dutch elm disease, chainsawed and trucked off by city workers indifferent to how our neighborhood suddenly looked stricken, painfully bare, every flaw blazing beneath the unrelenting sun. For weeks after, in the altered light, temperature and shadows on my bedroom walls, I awoke confused, convinced in those first few minutes that I’d fallen asleep the night before in someone else’s house.

One of the most important trees in my personal pantheon is the scraggly crabapple in the yard of my childhood house. What it lacked in looks, it more than made up for with mettle and tenacity, talents I failed to marvel at then – how that tree survived no matter how many twenty-penny nails I hammered into it and in spite of an inhospitable position behind the garage, wedged between sidewalk, alley and the steel drums where, in the early 60s, we were still allowed to burn leaves and garbage. It was home to my treehouse, a simple, cobbled together enterprise of scrap lumber and old wooden fruit cartons with direct lineage to my early, cruder shelters of abandoned appliance cartons or blankets draped over chairs and porch railings. In that treehouse, many years before discovering Virginia Woolf’s Room of One’s Own, I first experienced the ying and yang of safety and freedom, the joys and necessities of an unshared space. In solitude, in light and shade and breeze through the branches, amidst the flutter of nearby sparrows and a raucous jay, I escaped chores and a crowded household, carrying with me an aching, inexplicable loneliness, a late summer afternoon’s boredom, the worry over whether boys are ever attracted to a plainish girl with bad bangs and eyeglasses

On the island a few summers ago, an unheralded microburst tore a swathe across our part of the island and, within the stunning span of just a few minutes, managed to uproot five large, healthy spruce trees, all of which fell against our house. After, most friends remarked, “Look at your view!” And it was true that the spruce’s removal did open up an unobstructed watery expanse pocked with small islands and, on the Bay’s far shore, the distant Camden Hills tacking down the horizon. Still, when I looked out at the view our spruce trees once framed, I saw only that they were gone. One entire side, half the frame, was missing. For many months, I saw only absence. Of rustle and dapple, of enclosure and embrace. Of birds and squirrels, the seep of sap. Of needles pelting the deck. Five healthy spruce trees no longer part of what I expected, had come to know.

Gone, too, was the hammock that swung between two of those trees, long the ideal place to settle in the afternoon shade. There, beneath a broad canopy of rustling limbs and an occasional plash of light, Bob and Ben napped, Michael read, I daydreamed, Craig sought solace after James’ death. A fixed place (or so I’d thought) that with the screen and protection of branches  formed the kind of physical shelter that philosopher Gaston Bachelard claimed was a requisite for reverie, where dreams and versions of our self blur, expand, grow more distinct.

I’ve always found it easy and so could be accused of sentimentality in seeing the human in trees. But I’m in good company. The perception of physical characteristics shared by trees and humans has a long history. According to Lisa Knopp in The Nature of Home, such perceptions led many ancient civilizations to believe trees had souls, were living, conscious beings that created the weather, gave voice to oracles, allowed crops to grow and women to reproduce. Later, she writes, civilizations believed deities more closely resembled the human body and weren’t actual trees but resident spirits within them, with the ability and freedom to depart their leafy abodes whenever they wished.  Though the direct links between trees and deities may have lessened over the years, trees are everywhere present – Moses and the burning bush, for example. Abraham and the oak. Buddha and a bo tree.

Of more recent vintage, Sarah Orne Jewett, in writing about a Maine maritime village in The Country of the Pointed Firs, saw soldiers in the great army of fir trees that “seemed to march seaward, going steadily over the heights and down to the water’s edge.” Elsewhere, poet William Carolos Williams wrote: “…the wise trees/stand sleeping in the cold”.

In literature and art, we’re still in the business of finding the human in a tree, be it a face on a trunk, the toss of hair in high wind-pitched branches. With mere adjectives we often project onto trees our human emotions. As was evidenced, I can’t help but note, by my leading role in our third grade theatrical production, “Weeping Willow’s Happy Day.”

And so I don’t consider it overreach when, in post-microburst amazement, I saw the surprisingly minimal damage done to our house by the felled spruce trees and recognized how they’d not given up in the wind’s fury and heaved themselves at our house but seemed to try to protect it. From the rain-blasted window, I had watched those trees hold ground, fight the wind head on. And how the first tree, the biggest and closest, didn’t so much pitch or fall as lean, slowly, against the deck and house, upending, but only in a final slump, its roots. As did the others soon after. One by one, they, too, surrendered to the storm’s might, went down as they were forced to, but gently, kindly, causing the least possible damage. As old friends would. 

Nor do I find it the least bit odd when now I press hand or forehead to the staved trunk of our big, broad-armed, house-anchoring oak after it bears the brunt of another howling storm that sucks at my house’s windows, tears at its roof. A gesture that could be translated into “Thanks” or “I’m glad you made it, too.”

In “Mind in the Forest,” Scott Russell Sanders asks, “How can I know a tree’s inwardness?” We can’t of course, even those of us who might recognize such a thing exists. Even if we acknowledge there’s a certain kind of intelligence in the capacity of exchanging information and responding appropriately to circumstances as in a forest trees do – when, for example, a Sitka willow attacked by insect infestation somehow communicates so that neighboring trees through quick chemical modification become newly unpalatable to an impending siege of hungry bugs. As Sanders observes, “the only intelligence I can examine is my own.” Indeed, for all our meaning-making capacities and our comfort in hanging out with abstractions, as if that is the sole form of intelligence, access is limited. We may observe and listen, note and draw conclusions, but we cannot get into another’s inwardness, or another’s head, including that of our fellow humans. Suggestions that animals can think (crows using tools, apes solving puzzles) or that they feel or emote (a fur seal bleating as her bludgeoned pup is hauled across the ice, elephants circling and milling for days over their dead) have never been scientifically proven.

And still, so easily and often, guilty of the anthropomorphism scientists warn us against, we look for the sisters and hunters among the stars. We say creeks speak rather than burble. Boulders in a river bed seem somehow to have intended looking like the backs of hippos. Doves in their callings mourn. In spruce tree, I recognized friends.

And I continue to believe our big old oak welcomes me back each time I turn into the drive. That like a magnet, it draws me home. Or that, in late August, it signals me to get ready for the end of another summer season, as its acorns, loosened by their own ripeness or with the helpful assists of wind or red squirrels industrious beyond any relationship to their size, pelt the hood of my parked car, thwump against our roof. The oak reminds me again of how much noise a small acorn can make falling, returning to earth, to where the whole thing began. In each the seed of possibility. Of another oak like the beauty that shelters our house, protects it against the wind’s assault, paints its walls with dapple and shadow, extends to my body-memory its cool shade, its sounds of squirrel and crow, falling acorn and wind-tossed branch. This mother oak already secure in my pantheon of loved trees.