About Trees



Think of photographic equipment as a kind of gym apparatus for bulking up what neurologists call Theory of Mind—or the perception that others have subjectivities equal to but different from yours. This seems hard enough to realize fully with “others” who are people; perhaps still harder, is to feel it of “others” that are animals or (harder yet) things. In “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman wrote that “Everything soft is the hub of the wheeled universe”—a line that gets one musing; elsewhere in that poem Whitman included hard minerals as well.

Over the course of a few years, I tried this exercise again and again with the wooded ridge of a mountain where I lived.

The Dryad

One twilight, I was walking through the familiar woods; went round a bend in the trail; and came face to face with something that astonished me. A strange wholly new tree appeared where nothing like it seemed to have existed before. It had the likeness of a woman many times my size. As remarkable, I seemed to have encountered her in the middle of a swaying dance. Her copper-tinged skin, naked in the chilly air, she was totally unconscious of me. I understood then why classical literature was full of Dryads. This was one that had survived.

I remembered the theory that the earliest form of prehuman communication was not based on sound deployed in some kind of proto-language but on gesture and dance. That seemed totally plausible to me now. Also the possibility that the art of dance came to humans from trees, moving gently rhythmically or wildly ecstatically in the wind.

This tree continued to live for a week only. A night of powerful wind felled her—and it was even hard at first to pick her body out from the rubble of trunks and branches. Her formerly glowing skin now seemed simply diseased; in fact, her copper color came from the fact she had mostly shed her bark. Her sinuous form came from thinning and loss in her upper stories. But the memory of my first impression remained. It is sweet to have seen it.

Prophecy

The first time I ever walked in the woods at night during a winter storm was amazing. Night walks in the woods often made for an uncommon feeling of intimacy. You can’t orient yourself by sight, but only by a combination of intuition, memory, and sensation: by feel, in short. Sight typically distances things from you; hearing, and the subtle tactile sense that reaches beyond the body, bring things close, even intimately so.

This night wasn’t, however, quite pitch dark; it was silently, robustly snowing from clouds that must have been backed by an invisible moon, which yielded only a snow-veiled, diffused, wan light. The complex configuration of the mountain’s tall oaks and numerous twisting old grapevine stalks, chunks of rocks, hunched hills and soft clefts all somehow dimly stood out. The snow then made that effect seem all the more uncommonly intimate by completely hushing everything. No distant echoing of dog barks. No trace of sound from a climbing truck on a distant upgrade, and nothing but whisper-quiet from every jet crossing overhead (I knew they had to be up there, though tonight invisible, unheard, as they made their regular turns and powered down while they approached Kennedy or Newark, 75 or so miles distant.)

A touch of anxiety (coyotes and bear do live here) only heightened the quiet as I listened for any telltale crunching of the snow around them. I looked one way, and I thought I saw through a vine-ringed gateway into a nineteenth century only slightly veiled with falling snow, to a time when the landscape around held only a few fire-lit Victorian houses and smaller cabins.

A few large mostly oak trees stood out like dark stripes among smaller, recent ones—the small mountains here had been nearly totally deforested by the early twentieth century, used as woodlots by the surrounding farms.

But after wandering about, I remember turning my head and seeing what became this picture. I was able to capture with my camera what I still sincerely feel leapt into existence when I turned. It seemed to me then and still seems to me now that the illuminated, downed trees on the center of that hilltop were imaging a prophecy.

Standing there, I thought that the woods had seen something, something terrible. It was as if the woods saw something they knew was coming: a change that would make them as vulnerable and temporary as the previous growth had been. Climate change seemed the obvious possibility. Doubtless what added to this uncanny feeling was that they and the top of the hill they rested on resembled, I thought, a powerful 19th century painting—Theodore Gericault'‘s “The Raft of the Medusa”—a painting of a raft from a famous shipwreck. The scattered, fallen trees seemed lifting up desperate signals for help while flung about on a turbulent and merciless sea, with no likelihood of rescue.

Wood WideWeb


Another time I walked in the woods—again after a snowfall—I saw what looked like an interesting and unusual composition. Only later did I speculate that it was an above-ground and visible manifestation of a new, more informed, subterranean wisdom.

Scientists and foresters have increasingly made it clear that trees are not at all like what most of us thought they were. They are not essentially above-ground growths in clusters of varied species, all individually interesting, some supple and appealing, others ancient, grand and noble. They are not individuals. There is, in a forest, no longer such a thing as an individual entity. Ecologists, foresters and nature writers have explored how the forest as a whole is interconnected by fungi that create a dense and complicated underground network of fine threads that link up a forest’s trees. Thus joined, they share information and even pass along nutrients to each other to sustain ailing individuals (including trees not of their own species). The network—widely dubbed the Wood Wide Web—operates over considerable distances. Molecules from a salmon thrown into the edge of a forest have been found inside trees thousands of yards away.

But perhaps every time one of us talks about the new forestry and uses the term “Wood Wide Web” to describe it, forests everywhere wince. Their complex, muli-species, biological-chemical web is, after all, far more refined, intricate, and original than ours. Graciously, however, their above-ground image of it for us to see is dumbed-down into a tangle of industrial-era wiring.

Matrix

My last photograph of trees (for now) is of Wistman’s Wood in Dartmoor, Devon, England. This woods is supposed to be the last remnant of a forest that once covered all of ancient Britain. Encountering it on a wind- and cloud-swept day on the (otherwise deforested) moors, my wife and I found trees whose lofts above ground did not depart from, but sinuously and muscularly replicated the dynamism of their root systems underneath the ground. .

The trees webbed equally dynamically above as they did below, and they made one imagine trees differently than before. They seemed to make us look directly into the depths of the many-armed ancient goddess Kali. But they appeared equally as a postmodern icon for forests today.

In both some myth and much science, people have routinely used trees to represent their beliefs about cosmological structure and their understandings of the evolution of biological species. In these “trees of life,” humans or human-like gods are always high up on top, right next to the open sky. From that position, people can easily imagine that just above them is the bolt-hole to heaven, transcendence, and escape from the death that all organic life experiences. Imagining this way out of the web makes people feel ultimately safely superior to it.

But Wistman’s Wood provides a more essential metaphor for a “big view” of everything. It is, perhaps, an emblem that makes everything that exists seem part of a great, exfoliating, wildly fanciful and infinitely imaginative root system.

Perhaps this photograph, then, is of a tree we should really pay attention to, the very tree of very trees. It is, perhaps, the symbol of the great, creative vitality infused in the cosmos; into geology and biology; into everything both non- and pre-human; into human bloodstreams, neuro- and endocrine systems; and, finally into the large and small twists, turns, and curlicues of human history—an immensely creative and destructive vitality from which there is no way out.

It is, perhaps, an image of our world without transcendence.