Old Growth

Spread out a map of the United States and trace your finger down the border of North Dakota and Minnesota. Let your finger drift to the west a little as to comes down through South Dakota, across eastern Nebraska, through the middle of Kansas, and down from Wichita Falls, Texas to the border in Laredo. This line you have just drawn separates The East from The West.

There’s no real consensus on this line. You’ll have to give a couple hundred miles of gray area in either direction to make everyone happy, but by and large this is where two things happen as you move west: the humidity drops and the forest stops.

Trinidad, Texas, where we spent the summer, is just to the east of this line, but still mostly out of the great hardwood forests of the east. When we decided to stick around Athens for a bit it had been well over a year since we’d spent any amount of time around trees. Well over a year since we’d had our horizon raised by leaves.

I was born out west, and the wide open spaces and skies of the west will always feel more like home to me than the forests of the east, but my people come from forests. I think there are trees in my blood, somewhere back there. I don’t know everything about my ancestors, but what stories I do know are of people who would have lived in the primeval beech forests of the southern Carpathians on one side, and the ancient hemlock and white pine forests of eastern United States on the other. For me, going back into the woods will always be a kind of homecoming.

I feel relaxed in forests. But also sharper. All the leaves require more visual acuity, sharpen the senses. After a few days in the trees I start to feel more what might be called poise, that balance point between relaxation and tension.

Maybe it’s the extra oxygen. It would make senses to me that the more trees around, the more oxygen you have and the more oxygen the clearer and sharper you feel. I’m not particularly interested in the science behind it though, just the experience of it. And interestingly, I get the same feeling of clarity, sharpness, and overall well-being walking in the desert, above timberline, and other places without trees, so maybe it’s not that at all.

Perhaps its not strictly trees, but the entirety of the ecosystem around me. The wholeness of it. The way everything is continuous, intertwined, uninterrupted.

The words we have for these things somehow fail to capture them well though. Our language is better at separating out and dividing up than it is in joining together or describing connections. We often talk about forests, trees, deserts as though these things were somehow separate. We say “ecosystem,” or more often “nature,” as if this were something other than the world we live in.

It’s not though. We are part of nature, part of the ecosystem, part of the world. We are never separated from anything else on this planet. But I do understand what people mean when they say they want to “get out in nature” as opposed to where they live.

I think what we seek when we seek “nature” is part of something where all the connections between all the parts remain intact, where hard edges of modern human ideas do not exist. Where everything flows into everything else. Where the connectedness of life has not been severed to serve human purposes. Where roads and sidewalks to not keep the earth hidden away, the grass divided, the trees encased. Where power lines do not bisect the sky into segments, where hedges are not trimmed, grounds not neatly swept.

We seek places away from the order we have attempted to impose on the world because our imposition fundamentally does not work. Drawing lines between things does not work. The worst part is all the lines we draw around ourselves, as if we were not part of all this.

We are creations of earth. We come from here. We are part of this planet. No more and no less than any other part of it. And like every other species we shape it, it shapes us. We seem to have lost sight of that. We see ourselves on one hand as special snowflakes, exceptions, immune to laws of this planet. We are not. We cannot continue to draw everything out for ourselves without also drawing everything down on ourselves.

On the other hand I think it’s just as naive to think the world, “nature,” needs to be protected from us. The world does not need to be protected from us, it needs respect from us. It needs us to recognize it for what it is, rather than how it’s “useful” to us. It needs us to treat it with dignity and respect, like a brother, sister, mother, father. Like family.

Thanks to science our current perception of the world is more nuanced and detailed than any culture we’re aware of in history. This has opened a million doorways into the how the world works. But it’s also left us cut off from the world in ways that no other culture we’re aware of has ever been. We know so much and understand so little¹.

It seems to me that this has happened because our stories, our ways of understanding the world, have seriously diverged from the way the world actually is. This is the source of our problems: on the one hand self-destruction, and the other self-loathing. Vicious cycles repeat.

I think we are slowly coming to realize that we need different stories. We need stories that better reflect the world as it is, not the world as we think it should be, but it will be a slow walk down a long road to get back from here.

I don’t have a solution. This is a problem with one solution. It is not even a problem we will solve. Not you and I. We will play our parts, whatever they may be. We can show that there are other possibilities by living them. But this is something happening on a grand scale. The stories that shape our world, the processes that got us here, are intertwined with the very language we were born into. These are process that have been in motion for thousands of years and will likely continue along for many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, more to come.

Still, we have our lives here, now. In the trees or out of them. I prefer in.

From what I read, the great forests of the east are not what they used to be. They are not “virgin” (always Europeans with their sacrosanct virgins), but to my mind these woods are still a grand thing. A beautiful place to sit quietly in, to play in, to drink this early morning coffee in, to live in.

The afternoons swelter. We go to the cool water of the river. Its slick, algae-covered rock slide is a welcome escape from the heat.

Summer hasn’t let go yet, but you can feel Autumn lurking at the edges of evening. The breeze stirs, the dead still, stagnant air of summer is broken by wind wandering through the trees. It comes in fits and stutters. Cool puffs of air that find us as the sun sets.

It’s coming though. I watch the chickadees and squirrels, they know it’s coming too. If they are right this winter will be long and cold, even down here in the South.