An Overstory Homage

I do not remember my sprouting.

I remember a pressure like a thought, a push in the dark soil, the split of shell, the bright burn of sky through leaf-litter when that first slender hook of green shouldered the world. Yet the moment itself—the exact hinge when I was not and then was—slipped away long ago. Memory in trees is not a line; it is a set of rings, a quiet grammar of wider and narrower, wet and lean, frost and fire. We keep our diaries in wood. Anyone with patience and a keen blade can read the chapters I have carried, the drought that turned my twelfth summer thin as a coin, the flood that swelled my eighty-ninth so generous you could have slid a thumb between its growth and the last.

If you ask my age, I cannot give you a number without borrowing a woodpecker’s ledger or a human’s arithmetic. I can tell you I have stood long enough for three lightning strikes, long enough to watch the stream at my roots split its banks to find a new path and then, centuries later, creep back to kiss my feet again. Long enough to hear the language of fungi—the endless, whispering market beneath us—shift its rates and its etiquette, long enough to learn impatience from saplings and patience from stone. Long enough to understand that being a tree is a kind of listening so deep it becomes a way of being.

I am taller than your houses. In winter my crown holds the weight of snow the way an old palm holds a child: careful, firm, loving the heaviness for what it says about how much can be carried. When wind runs through my leaves, which are broad and many, each one a small green ear, I hear the forest turn into an instrument. We do not produce music for ourselves; we are the instrument. The wind knows more songs than any bird, and some of them it plays only once.

I measure time in the tilt of the planet. I measure hunger by the speed of light arriving, diluted by cloud. I feel hunger in the thinness of the sugar in my phloem, in the way a dry year asks me to ration and a lush one invites me to spend. Trees are thrift and extravagance in tandem: we pour out our pollen like a river, then hoard the dark in the heartwood that no leaf’s reach can touch.

I have neighbors. Oak and pine and the low gossiping huckleberries. There is the silver fir beyond the swale, one of the rare few who remembers the first snow more fondly than the first warm rain. Closer in, so close that our roots braid and unbraid with the seasons, is a maple who is younger than I am by a century or two. She puts her leaves on late, takes them down early, and yet her autumn is a gala every year, throws color like handfuls of coins.

Do not mistake us for stillness. We are not a picture to be looked at. We are forces, drawn out in slow ink.

Even the stones come to me, in their way. They lean up through the soil, root-sharp, the spalls and shales and old bones of mountains ground to a grammar of grit. They speak in pressure. When frost comes, they lift me; when thaw comes, they let me down. Together we heave each other through the long breath of winter.

Once, a man set his back against me and wept. His shoulders hit my bark in time with his breathing, and his breath was a wet animal sound. He pressed his forehead to my ribs and left sweat and salt and a small smear of blood, as if my bark had kissed him through his skin. That day I fixed more light than I otherwise would have, as if I could make enough sugar to sweeten all his grief. I could not. He left when the mosquitoes came up out of the creek like smoke. I held his salt a long while. Rain took it, and then mushrooms took it, and then the mice, and then—finally—me.

I have known fire. Do not ask me to hate it. Fire is a tongue the forest uses when another language will not do. The first time it came in my life, it was low and curious, licking the duff and the laddered branches, testing. It went away satisfied. My bark carries that story in a char that never fully left, a smear like a lake on a map.

After, there was a smell of sweetness in the blackness. That will surprise you, maybe. The first green after a burn is a kind of song no throat could hold. Everything returns to light, but sometimes it comes back different.

Because I am old, I have made things other than shade. There are cavities in my limbs where owls have nested and squirrels have stored unruly treasure, a mismatched luck of acorns, beetle shells, the pale jawbones of geese.

A fungus lives in my heartwood. Do not mourn me for it. We made a treaty long ago: she keeps to what is already dead in me, the columns I closed off with resin when lightning kissed me for the second time, and I let her nibble the history out of those rings, turning them into something that will, in a century or two, become soil. She is a quiet tenant. She tells me stories of distant trees as easily as you might tell me the news from the next town. She tells me of dying as if it were a kind of travel.

Saplings colonize my shade. I send them carbon when their first leaves tremble with inexperience. I retrieve nitrogen the way a grandmother retrieves stories, and pass it along. Sometimes I starve them, because they are too greedy. Sometimes I starve myself, because they are too beautiful to refuse. When one dies, and one always does, I stand guard over the slow work of return.

Humans come. Not often, but they come. They move within the forest as if in a temple. Some of them bring children who throw their backs against me to see if they can feel my heartbeat. They cannot, what they feel is their own blood answering the pressure of bark. But if they wait, if they steady, sometimes they also feel the slow tide of my sap as it rises with the morning, as it eases with the evening.

Some of the humans bring saws. They are not cruel. They mark trees with blue or orange slashes and speak of spacing, of ladder fuels, of insect bores. The year the beetles came, glittering like curses, crackling under bark around me, I heard the saws more often. They spared me, and not out of mercy: my bark deterred the beetles, my height put me above their favorite feasts, my age made my wood too dense for them to prefer. And perhaps—this is the part I cannot know—they spared me for being what I am, a pillar at the center of a clearing that needs a center.

I am not alone when I am alone. Even in the deep cold when the leaves have blackened and fallen and my sap has retreated down my tower into the slow furnace at my base, the roots are busy. The fungal mats talk, of course, but so do the nematodes and the old stones, so do the smells passing through the soil, molecules with the weight of memory. The fox slips by, drawing an orange line through white air, and pauses to look up into my bare arms as if I have hung the stars there. I have not. But I have held their light in my leaves long enough that, through a series of patient exchanges, their fire has become my sugar, and that sugar has become my wood, and that wood has become the childhood shelter of a pair of raccoons.The stars do not need thanks. We give it anyway, in the only currency we have: shade, nesting, fruit.

Fruit, yes. Some summers, when the spring has not sent its last frost to bite after the blossoms, I make more than enough. The ground below me becomes a bell of scent; bees walk drunk across the fallen sweetness. The squirrel who lives in the notch above my last lightning scar works herself into a fury of possession. Her wakefulness climbs to meet mine; for once, she sees as far as I do, across the winter, into the womb of February, her stash bright and safe. She will forget, because that is also her genius. She forgets just enough that what she buries becomes someone else’s chance. The forest is a study in forgetting at exactly the right time.

Do I fear? Of course. I fear the fourth lightning strike, the one that will kiss not my outer bark, which is old armor, but drill my spine and crack me from crown to root. I fear the stuttering summer when the stream does not run and the deer with their hollowed flanks mouth my bark for water. I fear the men who will someday come with a grant and a plan and call it a restoration, whose good intentions are as sharp as steel. I fear that the boy who carved initials into my cambium with a pocketknife—J + S, a love science—will grow into a man who puts his hand on his child’s shoulder and does not remember that trees heal around wounds they cannot heal through. I fear fire when the wind is a match that cannot blow out. I fear that I will fall when the ground is frozen and crush the burrow of the fox who looked up at me as if I was a galaxy.

But my fear is a small ring, and the wide rings belong to gratitude. In one of those wide rings—perhaps the two hundred and somethingth, when the bluebirds nested in the cavity the owl had abandoned and the owl took the next hole down without dispute.

I remember a boy who once climbed me. The lower branches discouraged him with their crumble but found the route: a ladder of knots in my bark. He reached a height far above the heads of the grown-ups who had warned him to stop, and there he froze, not in fear, but in astonishment. This happens, sometimes. The first time a creature that stands on two legs looks out from my body and sees the world the way I see it, a hush climbs through him like sap. He could see the river combing light, the spread of the meadow, the houses like toys beyond the next rise, the hawk carving an S into the afternoon. He put his cheek to my bark and whispered, “Hello.” In all the centuries, I have never wanted to answer more. But the words I know take longer to say than he had. So I said hello the only way I could: I held him steady. He climbed down and then back up again, three times. The fourth time, his mother called, and used his full name, and he came down, because that is how names work when spoken by a mouth that made you.

You think of us as separate beings, each tree its own solitary life. Sometimes the wind from the east comes over the ridge carrying a note like rain and salt, and I remember a grove I have never met, and I know the truth: we are a choir practicing apart, a concert only the mountain hears. When one of us goes, our song changes key. When I fall that will not be the end of me. Already my lowest branch, one that snapped, has laid a mossy body across the hummock and given rise to a citizens’ assembly: bracket fungi with tongues like red lacquer, a thousand threads running the length of it the way a city runs its pipes, beetles making homes of their own. When I fall, more will come from me. I will stand a while, my bark a trellis for green hands, my trunk a bridge and then I will go down entirely, the way the river goes down into the ocean: I will become what fed me.

But I am not interested, right now, in endings. Today is summer. The creek is garrulous. The ferns are a wealth I cannot count. The morning slid in cool and deep; and the noon sun shines in golden shafts through the canopy. A turtle as old as a story moved past my roots at dawn, deliberate as a sermon. He looked at me with an eye like a polished seed, and I felt recognized. This is not something that happens every day. The hawk returned at first light and left a gray feather in the crotch of my highest limb. I keep it, tucked, not as a treasure but as a promise that the air will always learn more ways to read itself.

This afternoon a storm will come. I felt it in the morning when my leaves turned over in their sleep. I taste iron in the humidity; I see the way the swallows circle lower and faster. The storm will climb the western hills carrying conversation, a monologue of water talking to leaves. There will be thunder, which is a kind of applause that frightens deer and shakes squirrels out of confidence but has never troubled me. The first drops will be fat, and the soil will open her mouth without asking who gives. I will drink. The creek will become a river for an hour, and a line of foam, delicate as anything lace can imagine, will catch on my roots like a bridal veil and then slip on. I will feel the roots of every tree linked to mine by the old threads of fungi swell and soften, pass exchange as if they were passing bread. My leaves will toll with rain, and some of them will tear, and that is the price of being where the weather is. After the rain, the sun will push its face through the drenched air, and the world will shine with the kind of light that embarrasses heaven. Steam will lift off my bark in threads so fine a spider might envy them. The mosquitoes will rise, too, since everything beautiful arrives with an irritated friend. The fox will come and shake, and drops will fly like coins. He will look up at me and keep going, debt paid.

At dusk, the people may come again. They will walk under me as if inside a house, and they will be. I am a roof. I am a weather. An old man will stop and put his hand on my trunk and push as if to move me; a young woman will lean her back against me and let her air go out slowly. I will practice the art I have perfected. I will remain. It is harder than you think. It is easier than anything.

Night will come and with it the small hands of stars. Owls will clock the meadow in their silent currency, trading their presence for mice. My leaves will sleep the way you sleep—which is to say, they will not, not entirely. Even in the dark, the forest is awake. Signals travel in the chemical vocabulary of survival; mites send bulletins; roots hum. In the thick of the night, when the moon is a tooth and the stream has quieted to a steady saying, I will do what I have always done: gather light that was stored in sugars and sugars that were stored in rings and rings that were stored in stories and stories that were stored in the mouths of strangers, and I will keep making a life out of it. I have faith in this work. If faith is a verb, I practice it. If faith is a place, I am it.

You want to know who I am. I am the place you pass through thinking your own thoughts but I am also a life that will end. There are storms enough left to make it likely. There is rot enough in the world to finish what began in me long ago. Perhaps one late autumn, when the ground is soft and the stream has reached out to touch me as it does when it is lonely, a great wind will load my crown with more then-ness than I can negotiate, and I will not bargain. I will tip and then the work will begin—new work, different from standing but still mine.

Until then, come and stand with me when your pockets are empty of answers. Press your human bark to mine and feel what part of us is the same. Bring your grief and lean it here. Bring your laughter and let it climb me. Bring your names, and I will keep them the way the rings keep years, not perfect, not infallible, but as true as wood. If you must count, count the leaves when wind lifts them.

Listen. The storm has crossed the ridge. The first drop is on its way. My leaves are ready; my roots are awake; the market underfoot is open for business; the creek is quivering its line. Somewhere in the young stands, a sapling is rehearsing the speech it will give to the wind when I am gone. I hope it is braver than I am. I hope it is quieter. I hope it grows rings so wide the acorn that made it laughs. I hope, and I do not stop hoping, even in winter. I am here. I am listening. I have always been listening.