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In the Carolinas, boles older than America grow ten feet wide and a hundred and twenty feet tall.
Scores of mountain communities are built from the beautiful, st...
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fall shin-deep feed entir...
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The blight runs along ridgelines, killing off peak after peak.
never know the sight and sound and smell
of their mother’s childhood.
By 1940, the fungus takes everything,
Four billion trees in the native range vanish into myth.
secret pockets of re...
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He goes through the motions the way the extended Hoel family keeps celebrating St. Olaf’s Day without remembering what it is.
His pointless photographic ritual gives Frank Jr.’s life a blind purpose that even farming cannot give. It’s a monthly exercise in noticing a thing worth no notice at all, a creature as steadfast and reticent as life.
dendrologist
a chestnut that escaped the holocaust.
More than twelve hundred places east of the Mississippi have the word “Chestnut” in them.
The photos hide everything:
Extinction sneaks up on the Hoel farm—on all the family farms in western Iowa. The tractors grow too monstrous, the railroad cars full of nitrogen fertilizer too expensive, the competition too large and efficient, the margins too marginal, and the soil too worn by repeated row-cropping to make a profit.
climbed so often he could do it blind.
It’s his birthright, the Hoel emblem.
adults seemed sworn never to say where the project was going.
recognize them as easily as he did the faces of his cousins.
“Dad? I need to go to art school.” His father looked out over the top of his book, like he was gazing out on the ruins of his lineage. “I figured it would be something like that.”
Nicholas says, “Who’s up for Omaha?” There’s an American Landscapes exhibit at the Joslyn Museum, only an hour away. When he pitched the idea the night before, the old folks seemed interested. Now they look away.
can’t help lapsing into metaphor. Metaphor embarrasses Sih Hsuin.
Ghosts are everywhere,
The Communists will be here in six months.
“You can’t come back to something that is gone.”
It’s a single tree with two sexes, older than the separation of yin and yang,
Tree of Renewal,
silk tree on which the Ma family fortune was made, a tree to honor his father,
“There’s a Chinese saying. ‘When is the best time to plant a tree? Twenty years ago.
‘When is the next best time? Now.’
“Luóhàn.
arhats
I know no good way to live and I can’t stop getting lost in my
thoughts, my ancient forests. The wind that waves the pines loosens my belt. The mountain moon lights me as I play my lute.
THE THREE OPERA HEROINES hover above a silver plate. On the plate are three jade rings. On each ring is a carved tree, and each tree branches in one of time’s three disguises. The first is the Lote, the tree at the boundary of the past that none may pass back over. The second is that thin, straight pine of the present. The third is Fusang, the future, a magical mulberry far to the east, where the elixir of life is hidden.
Every hug is a small, soft jail.
Adam takes the elm plaque he inscribed for his sister and throws it on the fire. A tree is a passage between earth and sky. Elm isn’t a great firewood, but it burns without too much persuasion. All his botched words turn perfect and vanish into the general black—first tree, then passage, then earth, then sky.
It’s a game for Adam: logistics, planning, resource management.
They love that he stops bugging them for cash. It’s like win-win-win.
Adam can’t stop reading. Again and again, the book shows how so-called Homo sapiens fail at even the simplest logic problems. But they’re fast and fantastic at figuring out who’s in and who’s out, who’s up and who’s down, who should be heaped with praise and who must be punished without mercy. Ability to execute simple acts of reason? Feeble.
shaped to survive the savanna by policing each other.
If you want a person to help you, convince them that they’ve already helped you beyond saying. People will work hard to protect their legacy.
“Don’t ever blow smoke up my ass again.
She catches him gazing, and dares him, with a glance, to own up. He does. It’s easier than dying from acute distant admiration. She agrees to go out with him, if she can pick the venue. He signs off on the deal, never imagining the hidden clauses. She picks an audition for an amateur production of Macbeth. Why? She says no reason. A lark. A whim. Freedom. But there is, of course, no freedom. There are only ancient prophecies that scry the seeds of time and say which will grow and which will not.
“It’s community theater. I think they’re counting on you.” She knows already the precise worst button she can press in him, right there in their first week together. Criminally responsible, this man. Pathologically accountable to the hopes and expectations of his kind. And the lady, reckless enough for ten of him. She pretty much tells him: no Macbeth, no more dates. They take the parts.
Three nights a week of rehearsals for five weeks, and she’s convinced: Ray Brinkman would indeed leave his wife
and kids alone and unprotected, out in a castle in the sticks, just to save his godforsaken country.
Ray has almost forever to think: Something is happening to me. Something heavy, huge, and slow, coming from far outside, that I do not understand.
Oak.
