On the Rings of Trees - William Crombie

pictured: the branch of a young Douglas fir

and an ancient bristlecone pine

    I think, sometimes, about tree rings. They would be difficult for me to forget: where Highway 101 enters my hometown (once the largest timber-producing port in the world), there is an enormous Douglas fir round taken from the kind of old-growth that used to cover the Coast Range, wide enough to take me as its radius and suspended above the ground by chains as thick as my torso. It's a relic of our prosperous decades as a timber boomtown, but it's just as much a relic of time itself; in its wood, drawn with the faithfulness of the most divinely exacting scribe, are centuries upon centuries. When the city erected it, they marked significant dates along its rings. 1492. 1588. 1666. 1776. 1865. 1914.

    A few years ago, a cherry tree fell in a late-spring storm a ways up the ridge from my house-- not nearly so large as the tree the round by the highway must have come from, but large enough to supply my family with firewood for much of the next winter. Over the following month, wheelbarrow-ing my axe and splitting maul up the mountain and easing loads of wood back down, I became intimately familiar with another set of rings. I never counted back from the edges to pinpoint exactly when the tree first sprouted; I never felt a need to. It was beautifully disconnected from human time: instead, radiating from some numinous central point of genesis, I found a chronicle of the land.

 

Regretful ridges form concentric circles

beneath my hand. I almost smell the sap.

You crowned the forest here before dead-wagons

disgorged insistent settlers. Needles bent

in wind a hundred years before your branches

would crash upon the ground as testaments

of guileless saws. A slug advances, glistens,

traverses weathered stories frozen deep

in wood. A fire. A storm. A brutal winter.

The rain is drumming canticles to soil.

     

    I wonder, sometimes, what the mind of a tree would be like if we could translate it into something within the compass of human understanding-- patient, I'm sure; enduring and (hopefully) forgiving. I wonder, too, what they would communicate to us. No doubt we would have much to learn from the green hope of a Douglas fir sapling just beginning to emerge from the understory and the venerable hindsight of a 4,789 year-old bristlecone pine. As it is-- as we are-- perhaps the best we can do is sit in a stand of aspens and listen to the wind in the leaves, and imagine what the trees might be telling to our better selves.