"If a tree falls in a forest…

 …and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" A popular philosophical thought that raises questions regarding observation and perception.

Well, does it make a sound? That’s absolute nonsense! I am a tree and I live in a forest. I’m 50 years old and I know these things. You can’t live in a tight social circle and not know the answers to simple questions.

Trees hear trees. They hear them loud and clear. When a tree falls, in a forest or in any other place, what you hear is normally heard by humans on the waterfront where sailors are loading cargo and a piano falls from thirty feet and lands on someone’s toe. We trees blush at the language and so would you. So when a tree falls in a forest and you think there is no one around to hear it, believe me, it is heard by trees for miles around. Falling is a painful business. For you humans an arm breaks; and for us trees a branch breaks. When a back breaks on a human in a fall, the roots of a tree are ripped from the ground, snapping and tearing as they are torn from the earth.

I am a Pine tree. Tall and straight. And majestic. I stand in the middle of a group of about 40 pines, mainly relatives. We are the off-branch from seeds that fell from the same tree about 50 years ago. And that tree was probably a seed that fell from an earlier tree who is probably spending his or her after-life as a telephone pole somewhere. We are all pretty much alike. We reach the same heights, we spread our branches to touch the branches of our neighbors, and we speak the same language and sing the same songs when the wind blows. We are all friends with each other except for a couple of irritable and bad-tempered specimens.

A few years ago, on a bright, sunny day, a group of about 20 young people came into the forest and began examining the trees. They wandered around for a while, looking us up and down, running their hands over our bark, and then 3 or 4 of them surrounded a tree, encircled it, joined hands, sang and danced and hugged the tree. Then they moved on to other trees and their friends began doing the same thing. We were puzzled but felt no danger. They were not carrying metal tools of any kind. It was clear that there was no intention to cut us down. Maybe they were a new cult – tree huggers.

I was one of the trees they chose. The singing and dancing were great and made me excited. The hugging was incredible. It went right through me. A feeling of care and affection. Every one of my branches felt the hug and my leaves shivered in a moment of bliss. My sap ran right through me as it had never done before. The tree huggers came back the next week and then the week after that. It soon turned into a man-love-tree and tree-love-man affair.

The tree-hugging led to an offshoot. The tree-huggers started to fall in love with each other. Instead of random men and women joining hands and hugging, it was couples. Now the hugging was tighter and took place as couples kissed and stroked in their own private love affair. I didn’t mind this open display of affection, but my tenants did. Tenants? Sure I’ve got tenants. What self-respecting tree hasn’t got whole communities living in their branches and leaves? Soon enough the huggers’ actions became more serious. Here they were, in a forest, all of them in the same group, no outsiders and no spectators. It was so easy to lie down on the forest ferns and grass and continue their hugging and other activities. From there it led to dancing, drunkenness and drugs, ancient orgy style.

We trees were aghast. Word spread from tree to tree and soon the entire forest was up in arms.

And then the tenants arrived. I was confronted by birds like owls, songbirds and parrots; by flying squirrels and opossums. A string of insects and snakes arrived to see me.

“We’re raising our young here! You can’t allow this!”

“I’ll deal with it,” I promised.

“How?” they yelled.

“Um…, er…,” I stammered, trying to imagine how I would deal with it.

“I’ll let you know! Give me time to think!” I pleaded.

“Make it quick,” they grumbled.

I went into a kind of hypnosis. How would I, a simple, peace-loving Pine tree tell the human tree-huggers to go and hug somewhere else? You are upsetting us! You are exposing our offspring to scenes they are not ready to see!  

I consulted with a couple of very senior trees. They had been members of this forest for almost a century.

“What can I do?” I asked. They hummed and hawed. And finally gave an answer.

“Bring on an early winter. A mid-winter. Icy winds, icy rains. Sacrifice leaves, as many as you can to make trees look dead. You may have to sacrifice a few trees as well. It will all be in the effort of returning respectability to our forest.”

“All right,” I answered gloomily. “If that’s what it takes, we’ll do it.”

And that’s what we did. From being an upright, green and happy and welcoming forest we became a drooping, miserable, inhospitable, brown place. The tree-huggers fled to greener pastures. We waited a complete year of 4 seasons and then in spring, returned to our past with the most beautiful display we could manage.

One day a man arrived on his own. He wandered among the trees and finally sat down in the grass under the shade I was producing. He closed his eyes and dozed for a while. Then he pulled a small notebook from his hip pocket and a pencil from his shirt pocket and began to write. After a couple of hours, he stood up, tore a sheet from the notebook and dropped it. Then he walked off.

After he left we found that piece of paper: He had written a poem about us:

TREES

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

He had signed it: Joyce Kilmer