Trees Again

OK, I'm becoming slightly obsessed.

Not so bad as Baron Wormser, who in his book The Road Washes Out in Spring took the cake. He had an excuse, since his house in the middle of nowhere, where he lived for 25 years, had no furnace or electricity but did have three wood stoves, thus eating up innumerable hours (and trees) in felling them, cutting them into chunks, dragging the chunks to his house, cutting them into stove sizes, splitting them, stacking them, drying them, carrying them into the house, burning them. And yet had time for a wondering walk every day among them.

Since we must consume, it's good to have such partners. Adjectives ranging from scrub to magnificent describe them. They are uncursed by locomotion, leaving restlessness to the animal world, breathing in what we breathe out from our exertions. They sacrifice themselves, living to dead, trunk to board, bark to compost, branch to bow, twig to arrow. We over-use them at our peril. At this rate Siberia will soon be a desert just from feeding China.

Our next-door neighbors recently cut down a nice stand of birches near the shore to construct a new septic system. Irrationally (after all, my own house has a leaching field where there were once trees), I want to get out my tape measure and see if it's set back 25 feet from the water as the law requires. They have the perfect right, of course; but was there no other way, and can we use only fallen or hollowed trees for firewood and please, how long before technology can make tables and floors from something else as beautiful as oak?

State O' Maine

I'm reading State O' Maine, Louise Dickinson Rich's informal history of the state. Among other goals I've wanted to understand something of the crazy-quilt pattern of English and French and Indian and American interactions in Maine in the years before the Revolution. You walk around Castine, for example, and the little historical markers try to be helpful but the number of raids and battles are bewildering and allegiances change every hundred yards. Oh, and the Dutch seem to have been involved there too.

The problem, I discover, is that the various colonial wars lasted nearly a century, from the late 1600s to nearly the Revolutionary War. No wonder it's appalling; if we're outraged by four years in Iraq, imagine 85. In Maine, the Spanish and the Dutch got their licks in, but mostly it was the Brits and their colonies and their Indians allies against the French's same. So Europeans settling in Maine basically lived in fear from the beginning, from outright deprivation in the early part of the 17th century to rebels and redcoats and scalpers and pirates for decades later on. In a way it was the battleground between British Massachusetts and French Canada, and since Maine was the colony of a colony until breaking free of Massachusetts in 1820 (not ever entirely, more's the pity), its loyalties generally lay with the Crown of England, at the peril of their own crowns.

I don't know the motivation of the artist who carved this head. We found it in Belfast (another enduring name in the annals of fear) outside a shop, in a small colony of similar totems. I'd like to think she was mourning the terrible quandaries of the Passamaquoddies and the Abenakis who populated this land, who succumbed to the religion of the French and the commerce of the English, who killed and were killed intestate, who never became Americans. And yet can tell us white people in our white SUVs so much of nobility in the face of paradise lost.

Gardens

We used to be able to count on beds of snow to protect the gardens. Now leaves fill in the spaces left by global warming, which means, of course, that double-handling is required, once to rake them up and carry them to the gardens in the fall, once to rake them off the garden and carry them to the woods in the spring.

I've just finished putting five of the six little babies to bed (forgot about the newish one behind the garage, the one I myself planted with alternating hostas and lilies divided and transplanted in a showy utilitarianism, if not originality). The others were constructed by this house's former owners, beautifully and sturdily, and we have tended them, reasonably and sporadically, with bursts of energy in the spring and fall, and with, every once in a while in the summer, flashes of enthusiastic insight and dashes to the Green Thumb for species that might do a little better in the thin spot near the driveway or bloom longer than two years or be less tasty to the deer. The seventh "garden" is actually a wooden flowerbed cleverly concealing the septic holding tank, has no perennials, doesn't need the blanket of leaves, does allow an annual burst of creativity.

The birch-and-maple-and-needle blanket apparently does help, although I marvel that these fragile wonders can survive the harsh winters at all. If we dressed them in flannel sheets and down comforters and fleece blankets, would they bloom twice as long, grow twice as high? Or should we just wait for climate change to improve our gardening skills?

Oak Leaves

I'm not sure that it's possible there were more leaves this year than last, but it certainly seemed so as we raked on Monday. It also seemed that they fell earlier than usual; it's not even Thanksgiving and the oak trees are bare. Usually, there are leaves rattling in the wind like little skeletons well into December. But the extra work was good for our aging muscles, now embarrassingly sore.

Raking leaves in Massachusetts is a chore, in Maine a pleasure (almost) that I'll be enjoying later in the week. The day will be bright and cold and crisp, the ocean glittering and bare of lobster pots, the gulls mewling, and the dog obnoxious (the rake is her personal play thing). There's not that much to rake either, a few yellowed birch leaves, a showering of pine and spruce and fir needles, a few cones, and the gardens to put to bed for the winter, so I can start after lunch and often just stand and daydream in the sun and still not run out of time in the short day.

And there are no oak trees: I imagine they can't survive the storms and the poor shallow soil and the bedrock and probably were all burned for firewood long ago anyway. Big oak trees thrive in old stable communities and ancient protected forests. Their roots must go deep. They stand and protect us. They make us think of immortality.

Life on the ocean's edge is much more ephemeral, no illusions of stability in the ceaseless tides and winds, and isn't it wonderful to realize that we are so fragile and small and so much a part of, not conquerors of, indifferent Nature?