Winter and Trees
Winter reintroduces me to the arboreal neural networks that speak to the power and wisdom of trees. Every weekend I drive about 60 miles from an island where we have an old house back to my home near where I work in a small town mid-way out on Long Island — an island within an island. This town, Saint James, is an odd mixture of classic suburban homes with semi-rural areas and neighborhoods with old families who have roots back in the 17th century with homes that bear witness to that history.
Sixty miles east, our house on the island is modest but warmly inviting and represents both a rich gain and a deep loss: the loss of my own family’s home in Amagansett out on the south fork after fifty years of ownership to a gain of this new footprint on the small island lying between the twin forks of Long Island. I fervently pray that this island will not go the way of my beloved Amagansett and the “Hamptons,” a location which once was a genuine community but has morphed into a tourist and party destination with seasonal life, none of it really sustaining. The only way on or off our island is via a ferry so that helps keep it a bit removed from the nonsense on the south fork.
But my story is about trees, and my weekly drive from the island back to the small hamlet of Saint James. First, I take a ferry off the island to Greenport, on the north fork, and then start the drive west. I follow a rural road running west along the fish tale of this north fork.
I pass fields struggling to remain agricultural with the pressures of development pushing them to give in to the lure of tract housing. Old dilapidated farm houses surrounded by riots of wanton bushes and large trees delight me: they seem replete with ghosts of individuals who farmed there before the city became too close. They stand as a silent and courageous rebuke to time. Wineries, quaint white churches, farm stands — now tightly closed for the winter — watch me drive by week after week. And I, while far too familiar with the trip now to delight in every twist and turn of the road, still find moments of astonishment. And it is the winter trees and clouds that mostly offer me such joy.
Trees in winter lift their bare tangle of nerve-ending branches to the winds and clouds of a winter sky. They seem to beckon the weather to do its worst even as they also cry out for the sun, and the green, to return. They fascinate me in how the branches grow at fractal angles to one another, suggesting a logic that is deeply engrained in the wooden core even as it completely mimics randomness. Somehow each twist and turn of a branch has an articulated cause that generated it. It is replete with intentionality but one hidden from my bemused contemplation. The best accompaniment for this journey is medieval English music. Music from England in the 12th and 13th century always sounds as if it was written in winter and in the icy cold. Even spring songs shiver. The melancholy of this winter music sounds vibrant and curiously comes alive when paired with these struggling and valiant trees that I pass by.
The journey home soon requires that I turn south and after passing wide-ranging fields of sod join a huge highway where all thought of nature is replaced by the frenzy of speed and the lookout for police who might decide to slow us all down. But for that meditative hour I am vibrating along with the ever changing vision of trees in winter, fields laid open to the wind, and glorious clouds that count underscore down the fact we are enmeshed in time with no going back… only forward. The ephemeral nature of being sings from every branch and cloud burst and the rolling waves of the Long Island Sound mock any attempt to stop time and evade change, and ultimately reminds us that death will be followed by a spring of green leaves returning, again and again. Those trees tell anyone who will listen their story.
