A year and a half ago, as we bathed in spectacular fall colors in our little corner of the Central Adirondacks, I had a
nausée moment.
we were thrilling to leaves and colors just as the trees to whom they belonged were letting them go. Although we were constantly applauding, nobody was putting on a show for us. The pigments that gave us colors we deliriously grasped for names for (claret? pink grapefruit? rhubarb? blood?) had served some other purpose once. At that chlorophyl-filled time, the leaves were green because they absorbed reds and yellows. Titillating the likes of us by bouncing the golds and scarlets back at us was never the point! By the time the trees elicit gasps from tree peepers like us, the leaves' work is done - except decomposing on the forest floor. It was like showing up for the curtain call of a theatrical performance, or indeed at the stage door, unaware of and incurious about the play that had just concluded.
That's part of why I felt the need to witness spring unfold in a deciduous forest, something accomplished so joyfully during our Appalachian
sojourn last month. I learned the truth of lands for which, in Joan Maloof's
words,
Forest is our land’s natural calling, and if you leave just about any spot here alone for long enough it will become forest
The virtuosity of all those seeds, twigs, saplings, trees! This was the show, surely, whose curtain call alone I knew. But by the end of our stay I'd also started to experience the
harsher side of spring. Many a leaf was munched by animals or blemished by parasites or throttled by twining vines, but, more fatally, some of the spry young tree shoots were already wasting away as the canopy closed off their access to sunlight. There was no way all these little treelets would be able to mature anyway; a select few might make it for a few years. Reaching the canopy would require one of the mature trees' falling and opening a space, and would involve a competition to the death among adolescent trees seizing their chance.
In the Dacks this time, attending more to forest than to individual tree, I was struck by the glittering waves of broadleaf leaves, most still radiant with spring thinness. This was all to the good: the cast members assembling for the show! What gave me pause, somehow, were other familiars: red maples, many of whose crowns were so full of samaras they already anticipated fall colors - golds, oranges, browns. Some seemed festooned with bunches of reddest cherries (every bit as red as
those I marveled at in North Carolina).
What would become of all these seeds? Twirling in the wind when the time was ripe, they'd skitter about. A few might land and put down roots. The roadsides were already mobbed with crowds of young maples from last year. But the canopy here, too, was already full. There were no vacancies. What would become of all the seeds? Nothing. Somehow this seemed appalling. My fall vertigo was nothing compared to this. The leaves of fall were all meeting the same fate, having each had the chance to contribute to their tree. I found myself thinking of the final verse of the hymn "
Come, labor on":
Come, labor on!
No time for rest, till glows the western sky,
till the long shadows o'er our pathway lie,
and a glad sound comes with the setting sun:
"Servants, well done."
But the spring seeds? Most never get a chance to labor. Their story is over almost as soon as it begins. Thinking forest-scale here, I was overwhelmed by what seemed an incredible wantonness, a waste. I recalled Annie Dillard's discussion of "
Fecundity," which notes the prodigious scale of reproduction in most kingdoms of life, a prodigality required since the odds were so very much against success.
I haven't tired you with my views on the well-meaning children's book
Big Tree by Brian Selznick. It's the story of two sycamore seedling siblings, Merwin and Louise. They're among the hundreds of seeds jammed into one seedball among hundreds on their mama.
After many beautifully drawn adventures (they're living at the very end of the age of the dinosaurs), they are reunited. Louise's a grown tree by now (she will - spoiler - clairvoyantly coordinate the response when the meteorite approaches). Merwin, who'd been stuck in a crack in a rock for a long time, finds a spot near her to grow. At the end, Merwin grows freely to Louise's size in the convenient clearing next to her, and their branches reach out to touch each other.
Sycamore seeds can't see or talk or move but I found I could make my peace with the anthropomorphism. It is is a (human) children's book, after all, if quite American - the protagonists save the world! - and it teaches rather delightfully about the interconnections of nature, offering us a place in an ongoing story that reaches back far far beyond our arrival. But what I couldn't accept: of the other tens of thousands of sycamore siblings (just from mother tree), not a word. This seemed fundamentally dishonest to me. Every oak was once an acorn but most acorns...
Selznick's challenge was waiting for this trip to put down roots. Can we think about trees without anthropomorphizing them? Trees - the ones that make it - seem to us to have lives and personalities in meaningful ways like our own, resonant with our deepest aspirations. Yet...
In the Dacks this time, aware in a new way of the vast number of seeds (and
pollen...!) put out by each of these millions of trees, and of the certainty that very near none of them would ever even come close to becoming trees, or even shoots, I found myself thinking anew of the incommensurability of tree lives and human lives. And human religion? Jesus tells his disciples that, just as every hair on their heads is counted, nothing in creation happens unwitnessed by God.
Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. (Matthew 10:29)
Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? (Luke 12:6)
Does not one maple key fall on the ground unmourned?
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