A Rusted Root

I stumbled. “Clumsy me,” I muttered.

My foot was snagged and twisted by a root in the ground; a firm, unyielding obstacle sending my eager, boy-self careening face down, felled like a tree into the fecund earth. I lay in the autumn leaves, the groundcover about me crunching noisily and lying listlessly about, like toast crumbs around a breakfast plate. A bit of dirt marked my cheek as I turned my face away, glancing around nervously for any sign of bugs, because I had a deep dislike of bugs, even if captured in a jar.  The leaf-crumbs clung to my hair, and I quickly ran my hand through it and shook my head, wiping the dirt from my cheek with my sleeve and thoughts from my mind.

I looked down and saw the rusted fence wire protruding from the earth, like a root whose rusty bark had been scraped clean by my shoe, where it glittered in the sun. How strange to see a wire in the woods. Then I realized it came from a lifetime long since buried. Even as a boy, I could measure the passage of time in the growth of trees. Here there was a boundary, set among the elms and birches and oaks; this side younger and shorter, that side, older and grayer and taller, clad in deeply furrowed bark and wading among in place among the fallen stumps of traumas past.

The wire held my foot as if it were a hand on my leg, firm and insistent, as if pleading with me to stay and hear its song and story, imploring me to share the experience of that time. Once in a distant sweet Spring the newly felled trees yielded fence posts which were strapped to the ground pointing skyward, like sentinels along the pasture, steady, straight, purposefully replanted, and proud to bear the line that held me. Now, it lay hidden beneath the forest floor, whose moist, dark skin concealed memories that were not mine, but those of ancestors untold, unknowable. Like the fence line, their histories were buried somewhere below. I could almost sense their presence in the dark earth. Voices called out to me, murmuring in a language unrecognizable. Why had they strung this line? To mark a field or garden or stake a boundary; or more likely, to confine cows or sheep. A whisper of wall against their gypsied spirit.

A cow might have come against this barrier and pause, and gnaw upon the grass there, neither happy nor sad, unflustered, resigned to time and place and calmly chew and chew and chew, perhaps looking past the fence line and not caring whether it should continue, to not dream of what lay beyond, not strain against this impediment, but being a cow, would simply stand and acquiesce. “This far and no farther” it would muddle think and turn and munch along the fence line content with the ends of its world, unworried, fettered, yet not unhappy.

I sat up then and stared at the exposed, unbarbed length of rusted steel, protruding like a careworn root, but could see no sponsor to its unearthing because it lay hidden below the surface extending underfoot in each direction. Why had this short length been thrust toward the sky and no other? What story could its time wish to tell? Of other souls who had tilled this land with bean rows or potatoes, or simply as the border for its livestock?  I wondered how much time had passed since Nature had reclaimed this place and stowed its hold of produce or held firm its occupants? How many memories were clad in time and soil here where I might stumble upon them?

I came upon this thinly wooded spot with no more care than by aimless wandering, thoughtless, on a warm, fall day redolent with the musty scent of earth and rotting leaves. A light breeze brushed my skin while above, listless clouds played hide-and-seek with the sun. Long before my time, in an era past, it was the labor of the men who felled these trees, and the strung the fruit of its posts, with the weight of wire and so corral its prey within, beasts destined to be fattened and sacrificed for sustenance. Their masters, the men who worked this farm, were now gone, forgotten. These men were likewise planted in these fields, buried in the shallow earth which held the line that snared my foot and sent me sprawling.

And so I sat, a child who had wandered among the trees, which hid the long-rotted posts beneath and dreamt what would become of me. Like the wire, I would one day be buried here or somewhere close, perhaps not to reach up from the earth to trip another trespasser, but simply spent, an old man gone, my tale told and done.

The autumn breeze swept along the earth and my imagination with it. I lay on my back closing my eyes and found myself embedded in a cocoon of sound, a cacophony of wind in rustling leaves, loosely branched or skittering along the forest floor. I could hear the twitter of birdsong and somewhere, out of sight, I heard the soft lowing of a cow. I lay unaware of the battle above me, the futile, straining crackle of dry leaves on trees stubbornly grasping onto their weathered branches, afraid of being lost to the greedy gasps of wind tearing, tugging, and twisting. The sere-veined stems of each leaf vainly clung to the mother branch, which now abandoned its children to this inevitable cycle of birth and death, until finally exhausted, were rent and sent twirling into the sky like butterflies flitting and dancing upon the wind up, up, and out of sight. How glad was I that I could not hear the wails of abandon, pied pages shorn by their somnolent host, now yielding to winter and the long sleep of season.

There I lay, yawning, wide-mouthed and breathing in the scent and taste of autumn, my lips moistened and pursed like the beak of a young bird crying for food. I felt a furry bit of leaf upon my tongue, and tried to spit it out, its bitter florid taste taunting me, as If my mouth were some friendly, fertile egg which wanted to be fertilized. I, merely nine, knew little of such things, but Nature knew. I rolled over onto my side and spit into the earth, as I hauled myself back into a sitting position. I wanted to stand, then, and move on. The day and I were both young and wished to go. Rest was for the weary, not the young. I had fallen but had not given it a second thought.

Now, many years that have passed since that far gone stumble. I rock in my chair on the cabin porch. My knees creak like the curved wood beneath. My feet are planted firmly on the floor. My thickly veined hands grip the armrests, solid, firm, connected to the chair as if the mere memory of that child’s day could do me harm. Any stumble now causes me terror. Every time I bend to pick up something from the floor, I grip something with a free hand, a three-pointed stance to steady myself. Gravity being such a demanding force, that I fear to teeter or sway and come crashing to the earth. To hazard such a thing as imbalance, is to surrender. I can no longer be safely felled like a tree, or a boy.

But firmly moored in place, I smile wistfully as the memory floods over me, of a boy’s tumble onto the ground in the sepia tinted palette of those autumn leaves. Then, I could lie there, not caring, not fearing, not thinking that one day I may shudder at the risk of such a fall. I consider fallen trees, not as decaying denizens on the forest floor, but as loved ones gone, fading into memory. I mourn those supple trees, which once bent careless in the breeze, then stood tall and arrogant and spread their roots like profligate tendrils in the earth. Until they too lie horizontal on the ground, their sap no longer running in swollen veins, like these.