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takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown.
alive like a tree.
as hard as life.
Her ears tune down to the lowest frequencies.
It says: Sun and water are questions endlessly ...
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There are more ways to branch than any cedar pencil will ever find.
Picture an acacia thorn. Nothing in your thought will be sharp enough.
TIME of chestnuts.
If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity. .
Here it is, the fabled free banquet of America—
Each one volunteers to be eaten, so others might be spread far afield.
drunk on roasted chestnuts,
hunger for the uncut world.
eastern white pine,
dark beech forests of Ohio, across the midwes...
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Then comes the prairie winter. The cold tests their will to live. Nights in the gap-riddled cabin zero their blood. They must crack the ice in the water basin every morning just to splash their faces. But they are young, free, and driven—the sole backers of their own existence. Winter doesn’t kill them. Not yet. The blackest despair at the heart of them gets pressed to diamond.
blunt, thumping English. “Feed me!
That May, Hoel discovers six chestnuts stuffed in the pocket of the smock he wore on the day he proposed to his wife. He presses them into the earth of western Iowa, on the treeless prairie around the cabin. The farm is hundreds of miles from the chestnut’s native range, a thousand from the chestnut feasts of Prospect Hill. Each month, those green forests of the East grow harder for Hoel to remember.
THEIR FIRSTBORN DIES in infancy, killed by a thing that doesn’t yet have a name.
Bend over to look at a sapling, and it’ll put your eye out.
By the time war comes again to the infant country, the five trunks have surpassed the one who planted them.
settles for one of the trees.
never occurs to the boy that stripping half the tree’s leaves to use as play money might kill it. Hoel yanks his son...
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smaller country to save.
A leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.
the wordless mind of God.
Its cells obey an ancient formula: Keep still. Wait. Something in the lone survivor knows that even the ironclad law of Now can be outlasted. There’s work to do.
The eldest son, John, stays on the farm with his family and works it as his parents decline. John Hoel throws in with speed, progress, and machines. He buys a steam tractor that both plows and threshes, reaps and binds. It bellows as it works, like something set free from hell.
He wonders: What makes the bark twist and swirl so, in a tree so straight and wide? Could it be the spinning of the Earth?
“Do you remember?” Jørgen asks the woman who holds his hand. “Prospect Hill? How we ate that night!” He nods toward the leafy limbs, the land beyond. “I gave you that. And you gave me—all of this! This country. My life. My freedom.” But the woman who holds his hand is not his wife. Vi has died five years ago, of infected lungs.
JOHN HOEL BURIES HIS FATHER beneath the chestnut the man planted.
The tree above casts its shade with equal generosity on the living and the dead. The trunk has grown too thick for John to embrace. The lowest skirt of surviving branches lifts out of reach.
The Hoel Chestnut becomes a landmark, what farmers call a sentinel tree. Families navigate by it on Sunday outings. Locals use it to direct travelers, ...
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He buys himself a Kodak No. 2 Brownie.
He decides, for whatever years are left to him, to capture the tree and see what the thing looks like, sped up to the rate of human desire.
month
“He’s waiting for it to do something interesting.”
When he assembles the first year’s twelve black-and-white prints and riffles them with his thumb, they show precious little for his enterprise. In one instant, the tree makes leaves from nothing.
Chinese chestnuts
Leaves curl and scorch to the hue of cinnamon. Rings of orange spots spread across the swollen bark.
the rain and wind. City gardeners mobilize a counterattack. They lop off infected branches and burn them. They spray trees with a lime and copper sulfate from horse-drawn wagons. All they do is spread the spores on the axes they use to cut the victims down.
identifies the killer as a fungus new to man.
The tree of the tanning industry, of railroad ties, train cars, telegraph poles, fuel, fences, houses, barns, fine desks, tables, pianos, crates, paper pulp, and endless free shade and food—the most harvested tree in the country—is vanishing.
Pennsylvania tries to cut a buffer hundreds of miles wide across the state.
people call for a religious revival to purge the sin ...
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backbone of entire rural ...
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It’s after something, the farmer thinks, his lone venture into philosophy. It has a plan.
oldest, shortest, slowest, most ambitious silent movie ever shot in Iowa begins to reveal the tree’s goal.
sinks it in the family plot, under the tree
The chestnuts up North were majestic. But the southern trees are gods.
