I went huckleberry hunting with the girls last night, the forest smelled like some sort of miraculous, freshly baked berry pie, zingy and stain-your-fingers-magenta. Just gorgeous. Our berry picking area was just down a slope from what is believed to be the biggest tree in this forest district so we went to visit that old grandfather and he was a real beauty.
For a tree in the interior West, this is a really huge, ancient ponderosa pine. It took three of us to wrap the trunk in a complete hug. The bark smelled of warmth, sugar honey and caramelized sunshine. I couldn’t help but wonder how many forest fires this tree has survived. How often it has nearly been struck by lightning, or struck at all, over the centuries. I wondered how many birds have built nests in its branches, how many mountain lions have scampered up its trunk, how many people have leaned up against it in a contemplative moment, how many woodpeckers have taken bugs from its trunk, how deep its roots sink into the earth…I wondered a lot about this beautiful grandfather tree. I wondered how many generations of trees it has sired and if they know each other by name and sing a family anthem when the wind blows through their glimmering needles, and let’s take a moment to be honest here, no tree glimmers like a ponderosa pine in the sunshine.
I love ponderosa pine forests. They might be one of my very favorite forests of all. They are peaceful, spacious and kind. The combination of reddish trunks with merry green crowns is chroma-textural and striking. A ponderosa pine forest is a bright place to be. The coastal forests always seem so dark and dripping to me and feel almost oppressive when I am in them — like the dense, black spruce forests of interior Alaska — there’s so much darkness wrapped around the green. But a ponderosa pine canopy does such a magnificent job of filtering light and holding light. The forest floor beneath the trees is always dry, warm, and spicy, especially on hot summer days.
In the summer, when I step under a pondi and simply breathe deep, I feel filled up with sun cinnamon, I speak in waves of light, my heartbeat is refraction.
I’ve been thinking about trees for a couple of weeks now and have come to realize that there’s nothing else on earth that lives a life of service quite like a tree. They spend their entire lives serving the forest they belong to, the dirt between their roots, the air and wind on our planet, the birds in their branches and the animals that populate the ground beneath them. We, as humans, lean up against them when we read our books that are printed on tree flesh, we climb them to get better views or to reach bird nests or to rescue our cats, we sigh with relief when we step inside the shade of their canopies on the hottest days, we nap beneath them, we plant them in thick rows to protect the topsoil of our fields, we cut them down and burn them to keep ourselves warm, we harvest them and build our homes, our cities, our barns out of them, we craft our rocking chairs out of their bodies (canoes, fences, cradles, kitchen tables…), we print our money on the backs of trees, we make maps out of trees so we know where we’re going, we write love letters with trees, we blow our noses with trees, make grocery lists with trees, we pour the life blood of trees on our pancakes and cry out “YUM!” with every forkload of waffle that makes it to our mouth. Our lives are so deeply entwined with trees, in every way, every moment of the day.
Trees live their lives in service to us. And in their death, they serve us still.
Yesterday evening, when I hugged the grandfather ponderosa pine, pressed my nose against his jigsaw bark and breathed deep his sweet summer scent, I felt a flood of gratitude for how hard this tree has worked to stand steady over the centuries, for all the trees he has sired, for the beauty of the mountains around me, for the strength and girth of his tree trunk and for the beauty of the history I could see written across the plates of his skin. And I thanked God for all the trees. All the beautiful trees.