Pine Tree State & Co.

Pine Tree State & Co.

Such a beautiful evening. Too warm for late April in Maine. Glad I decided to walk, though. The trees, they’re so black with the clear sky and full moon. Trees? Pines. The pine trees that are always after me like a playful cat looking for attention. Here I am in Maine, a grown woman and they’re after me. The pines, not cats. After all, this is just a casual walk through the town square to meet up with a friend. Just me and the trees, but it’s never really just me and the trees ever since that first time, is it? So young, in a sleeping bag on the edge of town, not alone. looking up at the branches and suddenly knowing what adults do but not wanting to know yet. The pine trees should have been watching over me, but all they did was glare, I’m sure. They ignored my fear and he got away with it. They didn’t even tell me I had a right to say no. That I could find myself in hot water by acting recklessly or listening to someone else. They betrayed me, so indifferent, cold, tall, unsmiling. I knew then they were not to be trusted. They let me arrive an innocent girl and leave with a burden of fear and guilt that I haven’t been able to put down despite the years that have passed. It’s so wrong to stand back and let somebody walk into a pit like that, to let them turn into one of those sinners in the hands of an angry God as Jonathan Edwards described them in the eighteenth century. Can’t we move past that puritanical garbage? Who am I kidding? I’ve certainly proven I’m not able to shake the memory. Nobody else cares about this angry God shame allowed to happen by those pine trees, but I will take the memory of their cold stare with me to the grave.

Those cruel and evil and uncaring pine trees that were on the edge of my town in western New York weren’t at all the same trees I’d see every year when we went up to the St. Lawrence River, to our primitive little fishing camp. Now those were trees, trees that gave no shade but instead played games with evening shadows cast by the hissing Coleman lantern when Dad and I went to clean the fish we’d caught that day when we went out in our 14-foot boat. Or maybe the trees didn’t dare harm me when my father was there, since he was the best father in the world and would never let anybody touch a hair on my head. He would never have had me go with him to that dark area, feeling our way over rock outcroppings slippery with fish scales and guts, their stench somehow not disgusting because the dark was intimate and, after all, fish had to be cleaned so they could be wrapped and frozen for eating at a later date. No, there was nothing to fear on those walks, and the indifferent pines of the night in the sleeping bag would regain their stature, their role as guardians. Extensions of the father image, most likely. Dad was fearless, like many people who’ve been in wartime combat. He knew pine trees weren’t ever going to be the enemy. People were, definitely not trees or slippery rocks or even the snapping turtles waiting at water’s edge for the guts we tossed into the river. Dad said they were snapping turtles, but try as I might, I could never quite make out their snip-snip-snip just beneath the surface. Now those nights are long gone and I always try really hard to hang onto the kinder pines, the ones that walked with us from camp to fish-gutting area back to camp. Buzzing flies and mosquitoes be damned! It was magic, intimate - not in the wrong way, like with the sleeping bag pines - and the path as well as the old worn table might still be there for all I know, except now I’d be terrified of going, because my father is no longer around.

Where is he? We were supposed to meet by the gazebo but he’s not here. The pine trees are, though. There’s a really big one here in the middle of the green, and they put lights on it during the holidays. It’s big and nice, but it’s really just a tree in downtown Brunswick. I wish I were waiting for him along the shore, with those rocks like in upstate New York, with moss and shadows and moonlight that feeds the silent grass so it will grow in the morning and sprinkles its innards along the mica beaches so people can find the gleaming chips when they go to forage the next day. Those pines have a huge task because they have to watch out for ships and small boats, for the ones trying to reach the shore. Those pines face the opposite ocean shore and mirror what is on the other side. The main difference is the two shores speak different languages and their branches move with slightly different accents because on one side the wind attacks from the west and has crossed a whole ocean, while on the other side the trees are buffeted by western winds that have blustered across miles of prairies or have circled down from the Arctic. The trees know this, but still I think they look across the ocean and know what they should do. They aren’t unaware of humans, but when you need to survive on the edge of the sea, you think differently, you grow in a way only things that grow up on a coast can, you are more independent. Which doesn’t mean indifferent, like those sleeping bag pines were. Cruel and utterly indifferent. Those pines should have helped me, should have said no, should have fought him off, kept him from hurting me. Those pines are the ones I don’t love and can never ever forgive. They’re the ones that show up in my nightmares as stalkers or at least as some sort of predators. They’re cold and stiff and they hurt. I don’t want to think about them.

I want to love them, but I can’t. Not after what they did. I used to feel safe, sure of myself, able to do things like going out in the dark to where snapping turtles lived and feeding them the detritus of well-scaled and gutted bass, perch, and sunfish, or even the skins off the prized black bullheads. (I always wondered if the turtles could chomp safely on the barbs that were on the bullheads just behind the gills.) It was easy to ignore the buzzing insects and to happily slosh back to the warm interior of the camp with a bucket of fish flesh and the empty metal stringer. The sleeping bag pines are even trying to ruin my admiration for the ones that live along both the eastern and the western shores of the Atlantic, lovely, tall, their branches wind-woven into delicate as well as brawny poses. The shore pines might be my only chance of survival, however, if they will just agree to come and protect me a little from the nightmares of the sleeping bag night. Their shapes are written against an open sky and maybe they could teach me their language, both eastern and western. Maybe I could go down to the sea again, like Masefield in his poem, and stand as if I were a tree, one of the good ones. I could let the harsh winds and the soft breezes shape me safely, in their name, not according to the desire of one I didn’t love.

He’s not here now. The one I didn’t love. My father. My friend. Nobody is here but me.