we were flanked with debris as we mounted the first rise. strangely localized, it littered only our immediate way, didn't flake like confetti in the fields or groves. here and there neatly shorn boughs off young aspen saplings, a fringe of crushed sage fronds, heady with scent, and the chunky paws off conifers. its precision was disarming until, of course, it registered that the trail maintenance crews must have forged ahead in the dimmer hours and neatened the scraggle and scruff of these manicured wild places. my heart fell a little- somehow a dimension of wholesomeness always present in these expeditions had been pared off; to think that everything was kept up with shear or blade and not because of the eager traveling of sandaled ladies or beasts.
but one thing the clipping crew had unlocked with their well intentioned savagery proved to be somewhat of a revelation: in the wake of the cuttings was an undeniably transcendent fragrance. its force and pungency stalled me to the very lobes of my heart. it rose and hovered, almost viscous in its presence and filled every of my eager cells with an electric snap. my hair stood on end, light rang behind my eyes. i reeled. later i learned the tree was a subalpine fir.abies lasiocarpa. a common conifer after all, prevalent on all our walks, abutting neighborhood streets, lined up in the dull polished cultivated yards of most everyone here. and so it was not that the tree itself leached all common sense momentarily from me, but its intimate inner workings. all its blood vessels, secrets, histories, sleep, dreams and essences utterly exposed. what kind of dreams do trees have?
it is useless to try to fasten words to the smell. clumsy, foolhardy. it was yes, as you can likely imagine, wincingly piney. but also unlike the smell of other pines or firs. lemony, or like the smell of wet terra cotta. it was a smell i had no right to Name, no right even to smell. when trees die and topple, or when lightning sears the the water into steamy departure, a tree's death has a familiar smell. sweet, like rot. one to which we are accustomed as we walk through any place with shade and water. and when a tree is cut down and the pulsing coin of its stump throbs, that smell too, is different. a defeat smell, a cauterized smell, heated over by the friction of a blade. this smell was different, it was the exact, tangible smell of secrets which will forever crackle in the foreparts of my brain when i summon the word. this tree's very living sluices seeped into the air and poured. even the dogs lifted their noses, froze, arched their necks hungrily. i picked up a piece of the neatening that laid in the path. kept it. felt a kind of green spread of gravelly pins and needles echo in my bones. i looked up at the tree, as one might look into the eyes of a lover, searching for an answer as to why, exactly, those eyes made one's heart leap and gallop so fiercely. and the tree. sighed. it sighed upwards. it arched back and filled the spaces between its branches. it most certainly sighed, took in air (or is it the other way around?) and, as if on some sort of hugely rolling cosmic cue, a breeze was stirred from the lowlands. the trees boughs shuffled and straightened. if i had ears enough to tip forward, tip they would. the tree sighed. i looked up in a swoon, and the tree sighed at me. a kind of resinous romance.
the walk home is absent for me. a block of something white. i spent some time admiring the appendage of the tree i had laid among the little nesting trinkets i have recently been reassembling. it is a kind of reliquary, i suppose. something profound but utterly recognizable. that windowsill hums.
after recovering i tried to line up my thoughts like paperclips in a saucer. after all it was a matter of the optics, probably. the swimming light, the moving wind, the height and spread of the tree. not so mysteriously it only water and hydraulics that hold up plants. even the diminutive among their species excel at drawing water tightly into their cells so they might hold their heads high. conifers drink an especially astounding amount of water, even for their slightly smaller stature. it is because their growth is so slow, so dense. Annie Dillard seems to have pinpointed the awesome quantitative data on the exceptional strengths of plants:
"There's real power here. It is amazing that trees can turn gravel and bitter salts into these soft-lipped lobes, as if I were to bite down on granite slab and start to swell, bud, and flower. Trees seem to do their feats so effortlessly. Ever year a given tree creates absolutely from scratch ninety-nine percent of its living parts. Water lifting up tree trunks can climb one hundred and fifty feet an hour; in full summer a tree can, and does, heave a ton of water every day." --Pilgrim at Tinker Crink.
Every day! Unabashedly and for the benefit of no admiring audience. The sighing tree and I in a kind of camaraderie, in agreement about undertaking to live like that weasel. With quiet and ferocious purpose. To do potently for the sake of the task. I undertook to lapse tree-like into the most regal silence I could muster. Cloaked myself in it like crimson and ermine. Moved little, listened and watched openly, took every opportunity to sigh upward, straining with all my electrified cells to adhere to whatever daunting mechanism moved the wind through the pine's needles and changed everything with the smallest effort.
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