Year of the Tree ast summer I took a solo trip to ^■ Southern Oregon and Northern J L J California. I needed to sort out my life. Somewhere along the way my interest in trees turned into an odyssey. I met the Pacific Silver Fir in an 1-5 rest stop. She was a sharp tipped tree whose branches turned up like the nipples of a young woman. West of Roseburg, I noticed a dark tree with lattice fronds cascading off each branch, gently, like the Oregon mist. The Port Orford Cedar was a graceful old woman. It’s amazing how you begin to notice characters who were there all along. On the Pacific Coast the Sitka Spruce stood tall, proud, and harsh as the ocean storms, like an old fisherman. Firm needles radiated from each stem like a bottle brush. His wife, the Coast Pine, stooped low, her cones turned inward toward the trunk, as if knowing the only true security was in self. Another pair of survivors populated Black Butte, a cinder cone in Northern California. The Shasta Red Fir was small and delicate. Limbs radiated from the trunk at even intervals, the spokes of a wheel. The underside of every twig was naked. Cones, by the dozen, sat atop only her highest limbs, a tiara. The Western White Pine stood big and alone. His cones were long, cylindrical, phallic. I spent hours consulting my tree book. Learning the name of a tree symbolized a bond formed through intimacy. I studied the shape and density of crowns. I counted and twisted needles. I caressed bark. The words Tree Perspective came from my lips, like they’d always been there. A tree is fundamentally rooted. It knows its place, and knows it well. It stands where it stands up to a hundred human lifetimes. Learning a tree’s name was only a start. It was then I saw how the individual trunks spiraled into the air, split from the expanding stream of a lightning strike, became'nested with aphids, squirrels and woodpeckers, and knurled upon themselves from the wind and heat and cold. Do trees feel pain? One tall open-crowned tree stopped me from sixty miles an hour. Reaching into the sky, exuding a sense of quiet confidence, the Incense Cedar joined male and female in harmony. It^melted of home. A frond hangs in the arch between my dining and living rooms. Burn this, say Native Americans, for purification at weddings. The cones along one dirt road looked like giant hand grenades. The bark of nearby three-needle-to-a-bundle trees smelled of pure and strong vanilla. I hiked through a sparse stand of Jeffrey Pine in an otherwise charred wasteland. They had survived fire! The dry interior of far Northern California was a sea of overgrown bushes. The twisted branches and jumbled braids of one old but friendly Western Juniper gave me shade for almost an hour. Ill On a road near Powers, Oregon, I encountered two burly men standing beside a pickup. It was after dark. I was alone on foot, hoping for a ride. One asked, “Are you with those people camping in that field down by Broadbent?” “Yeah,” I said. “It’s like a reunion. We're into folk music.” “ I thought they might be protesting the timber-sale contracts,” said the same guy. “We’ve had a lot of trouble. Lumbering made Oregon, you know.” u e uie u sig a o e p u eo Clinton St. Quarterly—Spring, 1988 31
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