Bare Trees

Well, except for the orange leaves of the beech trees and a few yellow ones on the birch, the forests are mostly bare now. I can see to the pond from the window where I write. And I can see all the dead wood lying on the ground, some of it in the same place as always, slowly dissolving back into the soil, eventually to become loam. I don’t believe in reincarnation, but there is something of it in respect to plant life, apart from the progeny that sprout from seed. Whatever springs up from the forest floor will carry with it the essence of the surrounding soil as it grows. What is terroir—in wine, or Parma ham, or Kentucky bourbon—if not some form of reincarnation?

There are also the new trees on the ground. More than a few were added to the detritus following the windstorms the past few weeks. So far, only one tree across the driveway, which I was able to drag and roll to the side by hand. But from the same vantage point, looking out my window, the top half of a large hemlock has snapped, and its spire thrust into the ground. I don’t like looking at it. It looks like a pulled thread in the woven fabric of limbs and branches. A particularly sour note in the midst of things. Unfortunately, the break is too high for me to do anything about it, and hacking away at what I can reach does not promise to spring the rest of the tree from where it hangs without the chance it falls on me. It may have to remain there, forever—my forever—or until more wind finishes the job.

Anyway, I am always a little stunned to confront the destruction on the forest floor after the leaves have come down, and the undergrowth has subsided. The snow will arrive and cover it up again until spring when the sensation will renew for me, briefly. For now, I walk or drive past the woods, and consider the fallen. According to the internet, it takes the average hardwood between forty-six and seventy-one years to decompose (an oddball estimate that could have been rounded to fifty and seventy years without misrepresenting the facts). At that rate of decomposition, and from the look of things, it stands to reason there is as much lumber on the ground as not.

This makes the scene of a forest laid bare unique within the broad canvas of nature, which does not usually confront us with the piled-up carcasses of once living things—not, at least, in the normal course of business. The coyotes are out there. I have never tripped over one left behind. I have never stooped to collect a former crow, or fox, or porcupine from our lawn. Or anything, unless it was alongside the road, destroyed by a car. Most of nature’s remains become food for those remaining. The trees also, of course, are eventually devoured by countless tiny eaters. Nature sweeps up after itself.

The unfiltered peek into the bare forest produces a certain comfort in me each time during the year. Evidence of the struggle spreads in every direction. I know nothing of the choices and politics of trees. But clearly, we are in the same fight together. To be in possession of a truth they do not know will not give me an outcome any different from theirs.