TREES OF PAIN AND DEATH
Gatherers of Pain
Trees clearly suffer. Gaston Bachelard says: “The suffering tree is the epitome of universal pain.”1 For instance, the “accumulation of pain” in Jane’s apple tree. Or the difficult witnessing of the tree that “writes” of mass murder in its roots (the Kurdish poem discussed in the previous chapter). Or, in another way, the power of wounded and devastated trees after a great storm. Conversely, we may ourselves suffer varieties of fear, estrangement, and death amidst trees. In such ways, we are animated by trees of pain.
When I first drove northeast out of Charleston on Highway 17, I went straight into this pain. Highway 17 cuts through the eastern edge of the Francis Marion, in the area hit hardest by Hugo’s 140 m.p.h.-plus winds (the hurricane made landfall over Charleston itself, but the most intense part of the storm, its northeastern quadrant, passed over the Francis Marion). As I continued northward, low clouds and fog that had shrouded the landscape burned off, and the sun revealed a desolate scene. Many ruined buildings were still boarded up, though I saw several people emerge from small wretched houses. For miles on either side of the highway, the forest, mostly pine, was flattened. A few tall, scraggly trees remained, most with few limbs or needles and bent toward the southwest, away from the hurricane wind. All other forest trees (the loblolly pines) over about twenty feet tall were either snapped off or uprooted, with the trunks and limbs falling in the same direction. In the hardest-hit communities on or near the coast, like Awendaw and McClellanville, oaks and other hardwoods stood without limbs, or with half of their crown dangling and dead; others lay sprawled, having pulled up huge clods of earth as they fell over.
There was sun where shade and shadow should be. I passed a field of broken trees on my right where the ground had been blackened by fire. Men in heavy work clothes were gathering piles of limbs together and burning them. White smoke wafted over the highway. I felt faintly nauseated. I understood now what Susan, a secretary with whom I had spoken by phone, had told me. When she got up the morning after the storm and looked out at the downed trees, “it just made me sick to my stomach. I felt on the verge of going into shock.” Dangling, twisted limbs in too much sun assaulted me on all sides. Various images of war—from Vietnam and of the leveled cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—came to mind: images of rubble, of dead trees, of blast-bent smokestacks. The tangled limbs and branches—“rough,” in foresters’ parlance—especially reminded me of bombed-out ruins, even of human remains. These images and more general ones of a polluted industrial wasteland somehow merged in my overall impression of miles of tree trunks snapped off at between fifteen and twenty feet from the ground. It still disturbs me, this image of a blasted forest of smokestacks.
Susan’s home is in the Francis Marion. In her mother’s yard was a white flowering dogwood tree that had been blown over by the storm. Since this tree still had roots in the ground and was small enough to be handled, Susan propped it back up and tried to reroot it. As she said when we met, “it was nice to be able to … save something like that. Or even try.” A friendly, worn-looking woman in her thirties, Susan was reluctant to directly voice her emotions. When I asked how she felt just after she had propped the tree back up, she hedged: “You really didn’t have time to think about it.” But then she responded with an image: “when that tree … flowers out” in the spring “I’ll feel a lot of satisfaction.” I asked how she might feel then, standing by the tree while it is flowering, and Susan replied, “I’d probably want to hug it or something.” Her spirit flows kinaesthetically into the righted tree, and its spirit into her. But, though the image was one of hope and beauty, it also evoked deep pain, which I felt at the moment as a sudden wave of sadness. It seemed that Susan was about to cry, but she stopped herself: “Well—sometimes it doesn’t pay too much to think about all this stuff, you know? You can’t really concentrate on … a few single things too much, because you’ll be disappointed, maybe, you know?”
The commingling of beauty and pain is not unique to Susan. Trees can elicit tears, as they did in David. And we can compare the sequence of David’s narrative to Susan’s image; each amplifies the other. In David’s case, helpers arrived to right his three palms, “and they stood ‘em up for me. Started cryin’. I couldn’t help it, … it was pretty to see ‘em come up … those guys helped put me on the track … because a tree’s comin’ up, all the sudden we’re goin’ again.” In each case, it is the righting of the tree, combined with a prospect of beauty, that releases pain. The human-tree analogy becomes emotionally and kinaesthetically embodied; Susan and David get in touch with a human grief, but equally they are in touch with something nonhuman—or are momentarily transformed into tree spirits.
We can learn about this grief-beauty connection from “The Ecology of Grief,” to use the title of an article by Phyllis Windle, a plant ecologist and hospital chaplain. Windle notes her own response to reading that a blight could annihilate dogwood trees. This “stunned” her, and “memories of dogwoods came flooding back … I remember my first wild dogwoods. Across a southern Illinois field, a few gloriously white-blooming trees stood against a backdrop of dark pines. I was doing field work with the man I loved, and those wild trees blossomed in my heart, too.”2 She realizes that “I am in mourning for these beautiful trees.” She reflects on environmental scientists’ deep love for “their organisms” and how in a time of massive species loss this poses particular difficulties. “Notice how quickly developers accuse us of caring more for spotted owls, snail darters, and wildflowers than for people. Our guilty backpedaling suggests we know they are right, at least about our love for the organisms and places in which we invest our life’s work, if not about how people rank in our affections.” Remember that Will complained that some people in the Earth First! movement seemed to care more about trees than human beings. But then he, too, was susceptible to the love of dogwoods. Also, as the experiences of David and Susan suggest, one need not have invested one’s life work in ecology in order to feel deep grief over ecological loss.
What also makes it hard, whether one is a biological scientist or not, is that societal assumptions “may make environmental losses difficult to grieve. We have almost no social support for expressing this grief.” Indeed, one staff member at Fairchild Tropical Garden said that “a lot of us were ashamed to admit how depressed we were” over what Andrew did, as though such grief were somehow inappropriate. Frank, a South Florida botanist, struggled not to cry as he reassured me (and himself) that nature would “come back.” But he couldn’t contain his tears when thinking of the remaining trees coming back into leaf and flower—like freshly unfolding pain. He seemed profoundly uncomfortable about being so emotional about what his training told him would renew itself; but the logic of his loving attachment to what he wanly referred to as “my life’s work” follows a different grain. In Frank’s case, his botanical knowledge made mourning harder. It was an ecological image that made it nonetheless possible—the releafing of the trees, the spirits in the leaves.
Fortunately, Dan, the South Carolina forester, worked in a setting where there was support for grieving. Dan became tearful as he recalled driving back through the forest with his wife and children, after having taken shelter from Hugo in the western part of the state:
When I got into the national forest and saw the areas, the stands that I was familiar with and worked in-well, I just cried. ’Cause it was just devastating to see this 100-year-old longleaf [pine] just laid flat just as far as the eye could see … I really did have to just pull off the road for a minute, it affected me so much I … just couldn’t continue drivin’. And everybody I met those first few days was like that—it gets me choked up to start thinkin’ about it … I’d gotten to a point where I’d adjusted to the idea [but during] the first few weeks [when] I’d have to drive right back through the forest and look at all of it, I’d find myself cryin’ … But everybody I talked to, the guys that work on the forest, the timber markers, the guys like that—these rough, tough guys—they all had tears in their eyes. They loved this forest—as I did.
Pamela, who didn’t work in such a congenial setting (but in a car rental agency), seemed to say obliquely that the destruction made her want to cry when she remembered walking in the woods as a child: “What gets me about the trees is that—I actually used to start to cry when I saw the sun shining through the trees, like on summer days or spring days, … just seeing the sun shine.” In each case, the words of a curator of an English botanical garden after the October 1987 storm apply: “I can think of nothing so heartbreaking for a gardener that [sic] to sit indoors and hear the sound of trees going over one by one.”3
One of the first things we learn, then, from Trees of Pain is that our grief over ecological loss has to be taken on its own terms and that the general lack of acknowledgment of such grief in our culture may cost us dearly. In our era of global ecological concern, it is worth taking seriously what Dan says of the destruction of the forest: it “is almost like a death in the family, it’s the same kind of feeling. It takes the same period of time and all to work your way through it, it’s not somethin’ that you can get over in a week or somethin’.” Or when Steve likens the destruction of Fairchild Tropical Garden to “hearing that someone you were really dose to died, because it’s sort of like a living organism—everything’s alive here.” That’s why, on the morning after Andrew, Steve and his girlfriend, on seeing “sticks and no order,” “got choked up and started to cry.” He called this “just like an instinctive reaction; it was like an overwhelming loss.” Trees of Pain tell us we love far more than we know.
Because we love far more than we know, we do not grasp the full power of trees in regard to pain if we go no further than to say that people can cry or feel genuinely heartbroken over the loss of trees that, in Susan’s words, “you get attached to.” For there are times “when loss leans like a broken tree,” times when trees, broken or not, have the power to evoke unexpected depths and reaches of loss in us.4 Trees can elicit the felt images of brokenness in all their forms. Susan’s imaginative contact with the dogwood tree drew out the whole of the loss she felt in connection with the hurricane, including prior family losses. For Dan, the forest’s devastation was also an uprooting of his family’s deep attachment to their home, an attachment dating back to their Revolutionary War ancestors—and it intensified his sense of dislocation in the human and bureaucratic world. Pamela keenly felt a basic loss of her early connections with nature.
Jane started to cry when she related her favorite old apple tree, with its “accumulation of pain,” to the depth of estrangement she perceives between human and nonhuman life (trees, she said, are like “strangers in a strange land”). Afterwards, she added that the “tree knows there’s a threat” to the ecological future. That is, the imaginal power of the tree brings to awareness the threat Jane feels and knows. The power of trees evokes a heightened awareness of pain and the knowledge that comes from such awareness. This is not a new insight; after all, the author of Genesis 2 knew that trees of knowledge can be trees of pain.
Particularly revealing of the reach of Trees of Pain is the way Lewis, the Homestead plant physiologist, juxtaposed his response to the trees hurt by Andrew with a more personal wound—his recent divorce. Lewis described how he had begun to try and reconstruct his life after the divorce, when “here comes this hurricane. And I was just getting things started and WHAM! it’s all wiped clean.” And, said Lewis, “it’s so amazing—the thing that really upset me, almost more than anything,” was the loss of a particular grapefruit tree he had recently planted. This destruction led Lewis to angry words with Andrew: “ ‘You could have wiped out everything, but maybe you coulda left me that one tree.’ … it just means I have to start over again. And I’ve been startin’ over again too much,” he said, with a tense laugh. Lewis recognized something important in his attachment to “that one tree,” the way “it just symbolizes,” as he put it, the way his life is back on hold. The felling of the tree brought up in a very immediate way Lewis’s frustration at the thwarting of his life goals—the growth of “my tree.”
Lewis insisted that the native trees of the area can “handle” hurricanes. But “it was devastating to me to see everything just missing leaves.” Immediately—like David and Susan—he imagined recovery: “Now one of the therapeutic things was when you actually started digging through your trees, and you could lift up a tree, and underneath it there’d actually be a small tree that had made it because of the big one [that] fell on it.” And “a few leaves make you feel so much better” because “they hide the damage … the jags and the metal.” As with David and Susan, the image of tree recovery serves to quicken pain: “First thing I did was get all the metal out of the trees, ‘cause that was the real [disturbing thing] … I’d see that metal in the tree and that—that really affected me. Didn’t like it. It, uh, I don’t know what it made me feel, it just made me think of destruction.” For “twisted metal” in leafless, broken trees “just makes you feel so horrible …”
Like David and Susan, Lewis then imagines vertically: “Even when a tree’s laying on its side, you get it set up and you feel better ‘cause at least then you’ve tried to do somethin’ and the tree then has a chance.” Lewis, like David and Susan, struggles for a kind of efficacy, for doing something—in an arboreal way. The tree is upright and, kinaesthetically, that also gives the human self a chance at new vitality. But once again pain also increases. Lewis next spoke about his first trip out of the Homestead area after Andrew. As he drove northward, looking at the destruction, “I started to cry—which is interesting,” he added, perhaps in part to keep a handle on his emotions right then. After he had driven beyond the area of greatest damage, he found himself realizing how important it was to again see leaves on the trees. “I thought to myself, This is Paradise, compared to where I just came from.” Then more grief begins to leaf out: “It was interesting because I hadn’t really been emotional” about the storm before. His subsequent struggle for words was painful to listen to: “And still, though, the hurricane emotions on my indelible—I mean, on my, uh, unevenness about my emotionalness, you know, or getting—getting emotional about things—I know this hurricane will not affect me as much as my divorce. I still get emotional about my divorce, constantly. You know, I’ll be—I’ll be just driving home, and suddenly I’ll get hit with it.” Of course, the hurricane and the divorce are psychologically very much connected and intensify each other; Lewis’s grief over his divorce makes “the hurricane emotions” more difficult—but in their own way, those also are “indelible.” Both are heightened by trees.
Lewis’s predicament and his personal psychological style differ from David’s and Susan’s, but the way in which trees reach complexities of pain is remarkably similar in all three. It is the precise joining of broken trees and “hope for a tree,” to use the words of Job (14: 7), which joins human and nonhuman loss. The felt pain is the resurgent power of the trees’ bodily spirits.
Trees need not be utterly devastated in order to evoke shared pain and social concern, as literary images make clear. When Miss Amelia and her hunchback Cousin Lymon, the principal characters in Carson McCullers’s short novel The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, go upstairs to bed after their first meal together, the lamp Miss Amelia holds “made on the staircase wall one great, twisted shadow of the two of them.”5 This is McCullers’s way of illuminating and foreshadowing the twists and deformities of love and of morality in the South that is the subject of this and her other work. Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon are very much at one, it transpires, in their mingled capacities for love and for ruthless exploitation of one who loves them. Miss Amelia first brutally spurns a man’s love for her and then milks him for everything he’s got during a marriage that lasts ten days. However, she loves Cousin Lymon. But Cousin Lymon doesn’t return her love. Instead, he exploits Miss Amelia’s love for him and eventually participates in her ex-husband’s revenge against her. The story is about “one great, twisted shadow” of love.
The story holds other shadows. As Cousin Lymon first arrives one evening, “the moon made dim, twisted shadows of the blossoming peach trees along the side of the road.” Introduced in the novel’s first sentence, the peach trees mirror the course of the narrative. Their blossoming, “light as March clouds,” is coincident with Miss Amelia’s first flush of love for Lymon: her love is that beautiful, and her character mirrors the complexities of the peach trees themselves. The cafe that flourishes for a time, and inspires a heretofore lacking sense of community among the townspeople, is also like the trees. At the time of Miss Amelia’s marriage, over a decade before the arrival of Cousin Lymon, “the peach trees … were more crooked and smaller” than when the cafe flourished. But now, years after the tragic conclusion, mirroring the decaying town and a now aged Miss Amelia, “the peach trees seem to grow more crooked every summer, and the leaves,” seen in the merciless August sun, “are dull gray and of a sickly delicacy.” They portray the broken-down spirit of the place. Imagistically, these sickly trees can be compared to the “stunted, smokeblackened tree” with “new leaves of a bilious green” that anticipates the tragic resolution of McCullers’s novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.6 The stunted, stifled peach trees figure Miss Amelia’s biography and the history of a mythic town—the suffering and decay (and also the tenacious life) in the rural American South that McCullers’s fiction probes.
A still starker illustration of the power of trees to evoke social pain is a particular chokecherry tree that was “planted” on the back of Sethe, the former slave woman and protagonist of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.7 You don’t see the tree at first, and Sethe herself didn’t know it was there until, fleeing slavery after being brutally beaten, and now about to have a baby, she was found in the woods by a white girl who briefly cared for her. The girl unfastens the back of Sethe’s dress and describes the wound:
It’s a tree … A chokecherry tree. See, here’s the trunk—it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it. In bloom.
Morrison here reverses the conventional association of trees with flourishing life, so that planting a tree embodies flourishing pain and oppression. But these grimmer embodiments are as ancient as are trees of life; and the chokecherry tree in American lore is often unwanted, a weed tree. At the same time, though, Sethe loves trees. Even where she had been enslaved, there were “the most beautiful sycamores in the world”; and the trees “beat out [her two runaway] children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that.” She treasures the woods that shelter a clearing in which her mother-in-law would preach, that “green blessed place” where “woods rang” when the assembled sang. And Sethe is about to give birth—another way of planting a tree—to a daughter who at one point sleeps outside so that “she smelled like bark in the day and leaves at night …” (Sethe’s tree-daughter would appear to take after an image of Janie Crawford’s mother in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Janie’s grandmother, during her escape from slavery at the conclusion of the Civil War, at one point “wrapped Leafy,” as she called her newborn daughter, “up in moss and fixed her good in a tree” until sure that “all of us slaves was free.”)8
Part of what makes for Sethe’s pain, after being discovered by the white girl and later on when she is caressed by her lover, is what brought whelming sadness to Susan, Dan, Jane, Ted, Pamela, and Lewis. In the white girl’s words, “anything dead coming back to life hurts.” The way trees gather pain is the way they raise the lost and the dead into new life but also figure irrevocable wounds. Loss lives in trees. That is why Sethe, years later, began to cry when her lover “rubbed his cheek on her back and learned that way her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches.”
Trees of Death
Not only can the dead come to life in trees, but also the living can go to death. This may take an oblique form, as in Annie Dillard’s images of Beal Obenchain as a piling driven into sand, and of a local Indian fatally wounded—a “stake had been driven into the ground, and he had been driven onto the stake.”9 The stake had been driven deeply into the ground, and the man rooted there, as it were, like the “Rooted Woman” of Kwakiutl mythology who inhabits the house of Man Eater or, in another way, like Christ on the tree of the cross.
Further, trees secure life’s connections with death. Death’s images are inherent in the memory of woods. All our persisting fantasies of Dantean “dark woods” indicate how death flourishes among trees. William Styron, in his account of his suicidal depression, can think of no image more apt than Dante’s lines that introduce us to the Inferno, when “I found myself in a dark wood.” This tells us something about the depth to which depression can take one, and also about Dante’s exquisite artistic ability—his words that “still arrest the imagination with their augury of the unknowable, the black struggle to come …”10 But it also tells us about the psychological nature of dark woods.
Think again of Will’s Old Folk Trees and the ranks of Trees of Fear. Think of certain yew trees Sally recalled, which grew outside of her parents’ kitchen, “very dark”; nothing could grow beneath them, and when you went out there you noticed a “strange smell.” Their “kingdom” had a “sinister” quality that “sort of sucked you in.” And “the tree trunks were strange”; they “had [a] sort of flaking bark which, if you rubbed against, you’d get green …” The trees deposited a thick carpet of needles, “and you’d get the kind of strange feeling that things were buried there, and you didn’t quite know what it was.” What might these things have been? I asked. Sally replied, with a slight gasp, that “it could’ve been cats.” Then she added: “I never felt bodies. And I tended not to dwell on those sorts of things anyway.”
Yew trees, in part due to their dark quality, have legendary associations with death and cemeteries.11 But death among trees is far more pervasive than that. The Kwakiutl forest was also a cemetery. The woods may evoke involuntary anticipations of death. Will imagined the wooded hills of his childhood home that way (Chapter 3). And David Rains Wallace writes about nearly getting lost in a Florida woodland, when he noticed a large orb weaver spider that “had caught a young anole lizard in its web, had wrapped it in silk, and was eating the flesh of its head. The lizard’s white skull gleamed strangely from the gray web.”12 Shortly thereafter, he “saw myself lying beneath a fallen branch, my skull gleaming like the anole’s.” Wallace’s own mortality gleams whitely in this vision of woods as the web of death. We find another such figuration in a story about soldiers on patrol in Vietnamese mountains during the war—in the “jungle, sort of, except it’s way up in the clouds and there’s always this fog … everything’s all wet and swirly and tangled up and you don’t see jack, you can’t even find your own pecker to piss with. Like you don’t even have a body.”13
There are no limits to ways in which trees can prompt an encounter with deaths. Every tree grows posthumously.
Sally was fifteen when her mother died. She remembered that “I was asked if I wanted to go in and see her body. And I chose not to, because it was too painful.” But her still—incomplete mourning (she “didn’t … so openly explore” her pain at the time of her mother’s death) was re-evoked when Sally spoke of her deeply felt horror “when you see, like on television, … one of these giant forest trees in the Amazon or something just being felled … crashing down and destroying stuff below and all the life above … all these trees could be crying out in unison and most people do not … hear … Sally did hear “the sound of the forest, the sound of the cry and the crash, [and] the silence afterwards,” adding that this “silence after the destruction of the forest that has gone on forever—as we know it-is quite horrifying, you know?” When I asked if she could recall any other times when she felt such horror, Sally paused. Her response showed what else the tree spirits, speaking through a television language, could say:
Well, in a strange way—I suddenly got this thought that it related to the way that I felt when my mother died. That there was a lot of activity in our home, there was a lot of life in our home. There were people coming and going. There was nourishment and nurturing … and life that just … revolved around her, and out from her. And when she died-and I have this very very strong image that I’ll probably carry to my grave—the door to her bedroom was closed (and I didn’t go through because I didn’t want to see her dead). That door shut on that life there. And there was a palpable silence about the way the life revolved within the house after that, or … it was cutting off the mother … it was the silence of death. And I believe that’s what the silence is when they cut the great trees down in the forest.
The trees, Sally’s mother’s life, and something in Sally and in her family’s life are in their mirroring way cut off and cut down.
Trees hold together death and survival. The uncanniness of trees of death has to do with the way death not only ends life but survives in it. Life grows on death, and death grows on life. The multifarious traditions linking death, burial, and trees reflect this awareness. They show love but also the persistence of death. Jan, a young woman, described the funeral service for her mother, who had died recently. She was cremated and, at Jan’s suggestion, the family buried her ashes under a tree in the family’s small cemetery plot. But if her ashes were buried under the tree, Jan reasoned, the tree would take them up and make them part of its life. To Jan’s surprise, her whole family embraced this idea. Her father, whom she thought would not be receptive, added that he would like his ashes placed beside his wife’s. Here is a memorializing and witnessing of human life, but not exactly its immortalizing. In a contemporary rural Greek lament, the author wonders: “My beautiful cypress tree, where would you like me to plant you?” and then resolves: “I will plant you in the graveyard, / so that you can spread out your boughs and branches.”14 Death lives in trees, where it becomes the heartwood of survival.
Partly because every tree has roots in the posthumous, it can be particularly important for people to know that trees will survive them or their loved ones. The Illinois man’s urgent desire to retrieve his family tree from the flooded house of his newly dead mother testifies indirectly to the link between trees, death, and survival. The response of people to the sudden loss of trees gives more direct evidence. That evil wizard whom Treebeard let out made his way to the hobbits’ homeland, the Shire, where at his “bidding [trees] had been cut down recklessly far and wide”; Sam, one of the main hobbit protagonists, “grieved over this more than anything else. For one thing, this hurt would take long to heal, and only his great-grandchildren, he thought, would see the Shire as it ought to be.”15
Just about everybody I talked with after Hugo and Andrew pondered the lasting quality of the destruction of trees. In South Carolina, people’s responses were typified by the first Charleston newspaper editorial after the hurricane: “Never in our lifetime will the city of Charleston look the same. Neither will much of the surrounding Lowcountry16 Pamela told me with wistful sadness that “it will never grow back again—not the way it was.” Especially painful for many was a sense of shared, generational loss. Said Dave, the wildlife biologist: “Our generation will never see it the same …” Dan, the forester in the Francis Marion, spoke for many, in the Lowcountry and South Dade County, when he said that “you don’t realize that people who live through things like this have to live with it for years …” Ted observed with quiet frustration that “houses can be rebuilt … but you can’t rebuild a forest. It will not be back the same in our lifetime.” Kevin, summarizing what many Charlestonarea residents told him about the loss of trees in their yards, said they would have preferred that houses and not trees be gone when they returned after the storm: houses can be repaired. “But they will never live to see the trees in the same condition they were in. There just is not enough time left in their lives to have … sixty-foot pines back in their yard, or oaks …
For some people around Homestead, the trees had receded into the background of concern. Frank, for instance, reversed Ted’s statement, saying, “You can grow trees but you can’t grow houses.” Reconstruction had been agonizingly slow, and the less-tangible, but no less traumatic, psychological effects of the storm were taking their toll. And for three months it had been, as one woman made homeless by the storm put it, “hot and stinky.” Yet, as Frank’s remark suggests, the trees were still psychologically present—or absent, despite new greening. Despite the difference between Frank’s and Ted’s responses, both connect trees, houses, and shelter. Further conversation, as in Frank’s case, often revealed that the loss of trees made other things that much harder to bear-more “foreign,” as Lewis said.
When the fallen trees appeared more or less plainly personified—as in images of an “injured” or killed “friend”—that also reflected a loss of shelter, familiarity, companionship. For instance, Dan’s job requires he be “out there with it [the devastation] day after day”—walking “day after day over the bodies of all those prostrate trees out there.” It “has affected me in a way that few other things have.” Dan later elaborated on the image of “bodies”: “A wildlife technician who … does some contract work for us … came up with that image. He said it’s like walkin’ around over dead people … It does give you that feelin’.”
NOTES
This article is excerpted from the author’s book The Power of Trees: The Reforesting of the Soul (Putnam, Conn.: Spring Publications, 1994). The people interviewed in the article live in areas devastated by Hurricane Hugo in 1989 (South Carolina), and Hurricane Andrew in 1992 (South Florida).
1. Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, translated by Edith R. and C. Frederick Farrell (Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 1988), 217.
2. Phyllis Windle, “The Ecology of Grief,” BioScience 42, no. 5 (May 1992): 363–66.
3. Observer staff, “Rare Trees Lost,” The London Observer, 18 October 1987: 1.
4. “The Lost Children,” in Mary Oliver, American Primitive (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1984), 15.
5. Carson McCullers, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories (New York: Bantam Books, 1990 [1951]), 12. Following quotes from pages 6, 12, 27, and 70.
6. Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (New York: Bantam Books, 1967 [1940]), 244.
7. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). The following quotes are from pages 79, 6, 89, 87, 19, 35, and 17.
8. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (New York: HarperCollins, 1990 [1937]), 18.
9. Annie Dillard, The Living (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 50.
10. William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Random House, 1990), 83.
11. See Hal Hartzell, Jr., The Yew Tree: A Thousand Whispers: Biography of a Species (Eugene, Oregon: Hulogosi Books, 1992).
12. David Rains Wallace, Bulow Hammock: Mind in a Forest (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1989), 13–14.
13. “How to Tell a True War Story,” in Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 80.
14. Quoted in Loring M. Danforth, The Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1982), 98.
15. J. R. R. Tolkien, The Return of the King, Part III of The Lord of the Rings (New York: Ballantine Books, 1965), 374.
16. In the combined edition of The Charleston News and Courier/Evening Post of 23 September.
Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture 55 (1994): 1–17
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