The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [118]
The immensity of land and sky in the western Dakotas allows for few trees, and I love the way that treelessness reveals the contours of the land, the way that each tree that remains seems a message-bearer. I love what trees signify in the open country. The Audubon field book describes the burr oak as “a pioneer tree, invading the prairie grassland,” and I try to listen to what these “volunteers” have to say about persistence, the strength of water, seeds, and roots, the awesome whimsy of birds scattering seed in their excrement, casting not only oak but small groves of Russian olive in their wake. Cottonwoods need more water; their presence signifies ground water, or the meanderings of a creek. Sometimes, in the distance, you glimpse what looks like a stand of scrub brush or chokecherry bushes. But if you turn off the asphalt two-lane highway onto a gravel road, you find that what you’ve seen is the tops of tall cottonwoods standing in glory along a creek bottom, accompanied by willows.
Nearly every morning I walk past a young tree—some sort of locust—that signifies survival against all odds. Most likely it was stripped bare in its earliest years, when, every summer, a farmer mowed the roadside ditch for hay. But it lived on, a leaf or two surviving each year, until the farmer noticed it and decided to mow around it. It’s now nearly seven feet tall, the only tree for hundreds of feet around. Standing alone at the very bottom of the shallow ditch, this clever tree catches what moisture it can. It feels natural for me to converse with it, in any season, in the light just before dawn.
I share with this tree years of mornings, a moonset so enormous and red I mistook it for a fire in the distance, an ice storm with winds so sharp I couldn’t keep walking westward and had to return home. Years of painterly skies at dawn. Foxes on the run, cats on the hunt. For much of my walk I am as treeless as the land around me, but on my way back into town I pass a large grove, an entrance to a drive-in movie theater, long since gone. If the wind is up, the trees roar like the ocean. Sometimes sheep are grazing there, and even though I expect to see them, they startle me with their cries, which sound remarkably like those of a human infant. This past summer the grove was the haunt of kestrels, and I often watched them maneuvering in the sky, wondering what it would feel like to ride backwards, forwards, sideways on the currents of air.
Our trees, our treelessness is, as so much in life, a matter of perspective. One summer both my father-in-law and my mother were visiting. He was raised in New York State and couldn’t get over the lack of trees. I think he found it terrifying, as many easterners do. My mother kept telling him that there were many more trees here now than when she was a girl, so many that the countryside seemed luxuriant. Maybe trees are a luxury here; the question then becomes, How many do we need?
My mother has told me that she first encountered the notion of a forest from the illustrations in Grimm’s fairy tales. She wanted so badly to see a forest, any forest, that she would crawl under the lilac bushes that her mother had planted by the front door and pretend she was in the Black Forest. I used to pretend—I can no longer remember what—with the honeysuckle bushes in the first backyard I remember, in Arlington, Virginia. But I spent a lot of time with them, watching from my two-seat glider swing. The one great tree in that backyard, an elm, was a powerful symbol for me, a tree of family myth, because when I was five and my brother nine, he had used it to run away from home. Climbing out his second-story bedroom window to get away from a baby-sitter he disliked, he’d spent an afternoon at a neighborhood drug store, reading comic books. I remember looking up at that tree, after the great event, trying to imagine that freedom. I also examined the branches