One year since the beginning of the end of the world as we thought we knew it. One year since artist Emily Poole and I embarked on a Spring Creek Project for Ideas and Nature collaborative residency to the Cabin at Shotpouch Creek. We went deep into the Coast Range to draw and write the world of salamanders. Because there was no internet at the cabin, the apocalypse came in bits and snatches of phone service gleaned from the ridgetops. A trickle of disturbing news grew into a torrent of toilet paper hoarding and school closures. We were amused at first, then dismissive, then incredulous, and finally downright depressed at the prospect of returning home to the “real” world that had very quickly become unreal. The salamanders who found us didn’t care about any of it.
One year later and I’ve decided that my real-world still lies hidden in the Coast Range. I’ve been deciding this for the past two decades. But in this year of heave and froth from Covid and political extremism, I’ve dropped my emotional anchor at the Johnny Gunter place. Today the sun has breached the ranks of successive late winter rainstorms marching in from the gray churn of the Pacific. I saw the first buttery bloom of wood violets in the moss between the driveway ruts. Squishy pickup tracks in the parking area are beginning to dry and harden. The front porch thermometer threatens sixty degrees.
Since early February I have averted my eyes from the growing grass and been diligently pruning fruit trees. Today Kim has come with me. Her primary chore is to gather and haul the slender sprouts of once rampant growth to a pile outside the orchard. Beyond her excellent company, she’s here for another reason. I still need to prune the big King apple tree, aka Man Killer. It is thirty feet tall, ancient trunk peppered with red-breasted sapsucker drills, limbs mossy and drooping with old man’s beard lichen. Most of the work can be done with a ladder and a pole pruner, but the topmost branches can only be reached by climbing. I’m not sixty anymore, and if something goes sideways, or maybe I should say rapidly downward, Kim is here to haul my sorry ass out to the emergency room. Or the morgue.
When I started pruning at the Johnny Gunter place over a decade ago, the trees were growing feral and unchecked other than by the indiscriminate brutality of bears. This late winter ritual with loppers and saw has brought me to despise the old pruning metaphors. You know, off with the old wood to encourage new growth. That kind of thing. Anyone who has spent serious time on the arms-end of a pair of loppers knows this is utter bullshit. Most of the old wood stays on the tree. It’s the straight young shoots that hit the ground in heaps to be carted away to the burn pile.
My growing disdain for the current old wood/new wood metaphor might be because I’m becoming old wood myself. It’s also ageist. So it’s time for a proper and more useful pruning metaphor. Old wood provides structure, a framework around which to shape the tree. The old wood guarantees the future of these trees by holding newer wood up to the sun so that it can mature, blossom, and bear fruit. Even ancient wood hollowed out by rot will continue in this supporting capacity. Decay seems to make the trees ever wiser and more diverse. They provide nesting cavities for house wrens and chickadees. And when a limb finally breaks off under the weight of wet snow or a hungry bear, it makes a final contribution to my smoked salmon.
Old and New. On and on. Over and over. From my elevated view in the Man Killer, I watch Kim stooping to pull blackberries from around a large and ancient azalea at the corner of the old house, its pear-colored buds about to burst into spring. From within the density of its unpruned branches, a Pacific wren chatters at the morning sun with walnut-sized ferocity. I hope he finds a mate and they will nest there.
The house itself is an odd mix. Most of the frame is rough-cut lumber milled by Uncle Johnny back in the 1940s. The floor is supported by commercially milled 2 x 8s. Everything is topped over by the green glisten of a metal roof put on by Dad twenty years ago. I’ve been milling boards and battens for new siding and window frames to install this coming year. We’ll use some of the weathered rough-cut boards from collapsed outbuildings to decorate the interior walls. Old supports new that shelters old before also becoming old. There are no castoffs.
You knew my pruning cogitations would eventually wind around to our human lot in the world. When Grammy was about ninety, her family took her to southern Arizona for a winter “vacation.” When she returned, Mom asked her how her trip was. “It was nice, but I got tired of being around all those old people!” What she meant was she grew weary of being without any intergenerational diversity in her life. Even though Grammy’s brain became riddled with dementia in her last decade, she was able to die at Mom and Dad’s. What great fortune to have been born into a family that takes care of old wood.
Back in town. The Man Killer has killed no men this year. From the foot-plant safety of the ground in my front yard, I snip vertical shoots off a timid semi-dwarf apple. Across the street our neighborhood kids take turns flailing and screaming from swings strung in a giant pin oak. They are the age of my grandsons. A couple wanders by with their dog. They moved into the neighborhood when we did, raised a son here. They stop for a few minutes to share their dog with the kids. She looks over at me. Smiles. “It’s not so quiet for you these days, is it?”
Nope, it isn’t quiet. And I like it. I only wish that when I finally hollow out, the chickadees could move in. Maybe a wren could nest in the dark gnarl of my chest.