The Eagle Tree

by Ned Hayes

On average, I climb 5.6 trees every day.

They are like the claws of a bird that lives only in trees.

On that first morning I saw the Eagle Tree, I remained in the Red Cedar for exactly 121 minutes.

Also, typically after climbing three trees, I make an attempt to tell my mother or my uncle where I am and what trees I will climb next, before I do so.

“Arizona,” I said. “Arizona.”

And they’d be just as still as a tree, and then I could understand them better.

“No, alone. The parents leave it alone for a long time. No one knows how the chick knows how to go to the ocean. Or which direction the ocean is in. It is a rare bird. It is a mystery. No one knows much about them. No one gets close to them. No one sees them.”

other people seem to be telling me to stop learning so much about trees and stop talking so much about trees, and instead to do things that have no relationship in my mind to knowledge. They have me do art, even though I am not good at art. And they teach me the history of human beings, for which I cannot see an applicable purpose.

the vacuum cleaner must be held at unnatural angles for my hands, and I dislike the sound of the vacuum cleaner intensely, and sometimes I must cover my ears.

and I threw the orange book across the room, and it hit another child in the head,

“Donut, coconut, coffee and cream.” She said this phrase in a peculiarly musical way, and I repeated this phrase very loudly every day, over and over, for many days.

before I realized that you could use language for communication.

Trees do not require you to make certain sounds to be understood. They are simply present and ready for you to climb at any time. Trees are easier.

I do not know the girl’s name who drew the tree. We have been in class together for five years.

When I fell, every future move exploded apart in my mind, a deck of cards thrown in the air.

The nitrogen cycle requires bears. Brown bears catch salmon in streams and rivers. Then the brown bears carry the salmon farther inland, and they bury these nitrogen-rich fish in the ground for later retrieval. But bears have short memories, and often they forget the fish where they left them, far inland from the streams. And the fish bodies decompose, leaving a reservoir of nitrogen in the ground. This creates a rich and fertile environment for large trees to grow, and in fact

I didn’t like it at all when I first thought of it, but most people around me do not seem that disturbed by it, even though the knowledge of this is obvious and readily available to anyone who looks up trees on the Internet.

This is typical weather for the Pacific Northwest and Olympia. It is often wet in Olympia, but we have an average of only 49.95 inches a year of actual precipitation. That’s less than in Denver. In Olympia, the air is damp, and water collects and drips from everywhere. We do not get big downpours, but we get damp and spongy.

“Remember, my name is Maria. Here’s my card. Call me if you have questions about what is happening to the woods here, and what our organization is doing to help.”

But if you do not see a sign, then you do not know what it says, and then you can go past the sign.

Trees are never in straight lines; that is one reason I like them.

Therefore, it was a very strange thing to see this fence planted across the middle of the forest, as if to say “on this side is one ecosystem” and “on this side is a different ecosystem.” Human beings are fond of doing this, but in the great timescale and reality of the natural world, a fence is an entirely artificial and temporary boundary, like a line drawn in the wet sand at the verge of the ocean, telling the waves they can come no farther.

For example, after school, when we got to the new house, I needed to use the bathroom, but I could not immediately see the toilet. The toilet at our old house had a white handle with a small silver line around it, and the toilet at school also has a white handle with a small silver line around it. I went to every room in the new house and I looked for the white handle with the silver line, but I could not find it.

you take to influence the world? What can you do that doesn’t hurt you or the people around you? What can you do that takes all that powerful energy you have and does good in the world?”

It was a beautiful tree, with scaly bark that I could almost taste,

this. What if I could disappear back into the mix of other droplets with just a touch? Wouldn’t that be better for everyone? What would a world without March look like?

The trees would be fine without me. I thought my mother would be better off without me.