A few days ago (Hiking Notes #2/July 9), I told the story of surviving the swamp lettuce. Today, I'm going back to the trail where I picked the toxic salad: the Frost Trail, which runs two miles along the north shore of Lake Paran in North Bennington, Vermont, to the Robert Frost Stone House Museum in South Shaftsbury, where Robert Frost lived from 1920 to 1928.
I had seen a note on the trail map about a grove of red pines that Frost himself had planted almost exactly 100 years ago. I wanted to see those trees.
So today I'm writing about what I seem to need as I toggle between my wooden desk and the woods. I'm thinking about trees as lifeforms whose biology blurs the distinction between the living and the dead. About shade, and shades.
The Frost trail veers northwest away from Lake Paran, crossing streams, moving through mostly deciduous woods. Eventually you cross over stones that mark the edge of Frost's property line, through wetlands where you can find watercress in the spring -- as well as the dreaded "water lettuce," which I have warned you not to eat.
As you reenter the woods, you can start looking for the red pine grove. If you're like me on the first visit, you won't know what you're watching for. It was late spring, one of the season's first warm afternoons. How big was the grove? Would I be able to distinguish it from the rest of the woods, which had evergreen patches? The nearer I got to the Stone House Museum (now about .5 mile away), the more I expected a commemorative plaque.
The clear air was suddenly softened and clouded by a clean scent as undeniable as a bullhorn. My nose made me ready to see -- not the sign I had been watching for, but the trees themselves. Sure enough, the smooth grey barks of the leafy trees I had been moving through had disappeared. In their place stood more pines than I could count -- 80' to 100' tall, their heavily notched bark the color of charred earthenware. Once I was inside the red pine grove, I wondered how I thought I could miss it.
Later, I read through Frost's journals and letters for the details: After moving to Shaftsbury, Frost purchased several hundred seedlings cheaply from the state, when agencies all over the country were stimulating reforestation to check erosion. Red pine is a fast-growing, low maintenance species that favors acidic, sterile, sandy soil. Similar stands exist throughout the midwest and northeast (in Canada, west to Manitoba; and in the U.S., south to Pennsylvania). In Vermont alone, red pines contribute 12 million cubic feet of wood to the state's forests.
Frost planted the trees in 1921 with his son, Carol, who was 19 at the time. I picture them working together for days that spring, carting the burlap balls down to the chosen site, discussing the arrangement, digging hundreds of holes with sharp spades. The watering, the tending, the waiting, the worrying and forgetting. Frost thrust a scrap in his pocket that year (no ascertainable context): I had forgotten why I left the world.
In ideal, unshaded conditions, red pines will grow fast in the first two decades, as much as 12" to 24" inches per year. What I'm trying to calculate is how tall the trees were when Carol committed suicide in 1940 with a deer rifle -- in the Vermont woods not far from this grove. Carol was also a poet. He burned his poems before he killed himself, leaving behind his wife and their young son.
I wonder if the grove smelled then as it does not now, free of every human prayer. Standing in the shade of mature red pines, I am trying to be with trees. I am feeling across the difference that separates me from the pines. Dan Beachy-Quick: "we are not the woods if we / whisper the woods / quietly to ourselves we / witness our hands / walking into the forest we are / two rooms who think // alone // unless" (from Mulberry, Tupelo Press, 2006). I stand as close to the trees as possible, without touching, trying to see around the grief, thinking // alone.
It's almost impossible to leave the human behind. I think of Orpheus, sick of wandering in grief through the mountains of the Balkan peninsula, ready to be a poet again. He comes to a clearing on a hill:
With verdure thick, but destitute of shade.
Where, now, the Muse's son no sooner sings,
No sooner strikes his sweet resounding strings.
But distant groves the flying sounds receive,
And list'ning trees their rooted stations leave;
Themselves transplanting, all around they grow,
And various shades their various kinds bestow.
(Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 10,
trans. Garth, Dryden, Pope, Addison, Congreve)
Every tree in Orpheus's instant grove houses a human ghost. For Ovid, poetry harnesses nature to do the work of consolation. I started this week of blogs, five days ago, with G. C. Waldrep, "The forest is not a biddable place." Ovid imagines the perfect opposite: trees rushing to transplant themselves at the poet's bidding. I side with Waldrep.
Ovid can't see the cypress without seeing Cyparissus, the beautiful young man who accidentally shot his beloved -- the enormous, gilded, glowing stag -- and who wants nothing but the chance to grieve forever. Walking through Ovid's woods, we hear the strains of mothers and fathers and lovers and daughters and sons. Residual human grief gives structure to the new tree forms, as dead heartwood supports the narrow, outer band of actively regenerating sapwood cells. Every mature tree carries its owns deaths with it, lodging its expired cells like empty boxes deep inside, stacking them so as to stand upright.
And then there are the strains of the trees themselves. News broke a couple of years ago that red pines are beginning to fail across the state -- climate change, disease, or red pine scale, an almost microscopic insect that locks into the phloem and sucks the life from the tree. I've got my eye on this stand.
I started this week of writing asking what happens when I uproot myself and take myself to the trees, quieting my urge to fit them into me. I want to fit myself into them in such a way that the trees hardly notice. I want to make a poem that sits in this crotch or that hollow -- right up close, but unattached. Mossy, mossy, mossy. Keep me as near as possible to this wooded place of difference, moving through the trees' exhale.
Laka Paran in Bennington: what wonderful memories that brings up. Summer frolicking. -- DL
Posted by: The Best American Poetry | July 12, 2019 at 04:09 PM