Birch Forest Quotes

In Vienna there are shadows. The city is black and everything is done by rote. I want to be alone. I want to go to the Bohemian Forest. May, June, July, August, September, October. I must see new things and investigate them. I want to taste dark water and see crackling trees and wild winds. I want to gaze with astonishment at moldy garden fences, I want to experience them all, to hear young birch plantations and trembling leaves, to see light and sun, enjoy wet, green-blue valleys in the evening, sense goldfish glinting, see white clouds building up in the sky, to speak to flowers. I want to look intently at grasses and pink people, old venerable churches, to know what little cathedrals say, to run without stopping along curving meadowy slopes across vast plains, kiss the earth and smell soft warm marshland flowers. And then I shall shape things so beautifully: fields of colour…

I want you to promise we’ll see each other again, you’ll send a letter. Promise we’ll be lost together in our forest, pale birches of our legs. I hear your voice now—I know, everyone knows promises come from fear. People don’t live past each other, you’re always here with me. Sometimes I pretend you’re in the other room until it rains… and then this is the letter I always write...

To our indigenous ancestors, and to the many aboriginal peoples who still hold fast to their oral traditions, language is less a human possession than it is a property of the animate earth itself, an expressive, telluric power in which we, along with the coyotes and the crickets, all participate. Each creature enacts this expressive magic in its own manner, the honeybee with its waggle dance no less than a bellicose, harrumphing sea lion. Nor is this power restricted solely to animals. The whispered hush of the uncut grasses at dawn, the plaintive moan of trunks rubbing against one another in the deep woods, or the laughter of birch leaves as the wind gusts through their branches all bear a thicket of many-layered meanings for those who listen carefully. In the Pacific Northwest I met a man who had schooled himself in the speech of needled evergreens; on a breezy day you could drive him, blindfolded, to any patch of coastal forest and place him, still blind, beneath a particular tree -- after a few moments he would tell you, by listening, just what species of pine or spruce or fir stood above him (whether he stood beneath a Douglas fir or a grand fir, a Sitka spruce or a western red cedar). His ears were attuned, he said, to the different dialects of the trees.

What if something were to happen? What if something suddenly started throbbing? Then they would notice it was there and they'd think their hearts were going to burst. Then what good would their dykes, bulwarks, power houses, furnaces and pile drivers be to them? It can happen any time, perhaps right now: the omens are present. For example, the father of a family might go out for a walk, and, across the street, he'll see something like a red rag, blown towards him by the wind. And when the rag has gotten close to him he'll see that it is a side of rotten meat, grimy with dust, dragging itself along by crawling, skipping, a piece of writhing flesh rolling in the gutter, spasmodically shooting out spurts of blood. Or a mother might look at her child's cheek and ask him: "What's that, a pimple?" and see the flesh puff out a little, split, open, and at the bottom of the split an eye, a laughing eye might appear. Or they might feel things gently brushing against their bodies, like the caresses of reeds to swimmers in a river. And they will realize that their clothing has become living things. And someone else might feel something scratching in his mouth. He goes to the mirror, opens his mouth: and his tongue is an enormous, live centipede, rubbing its legs together and scraping his palate. He'd like to spit it out, but the centipede is a part of him and he will have to tear it out with his own hands. And a crowd of things will appear for which people will have to find new names, stone eye, great three cornered arm, toe crutch, spider jaw. And someone might be sleeping in his comfortable bed, in his quiet, warm room, and wake up naked on a bluish earth, in a forest of rustling birch trees, rising red and white towards the sky like the smokestacks of Jouxtebouville, with big bumps half way out of the ground, hairy and bulbous like onions. And birds will fly around these birch trees and pick at them with their beaks and make them bleed. Sperm will flow slowly, gently, from these wounds, sperm mixed with blood, warm and glassy with little bubbles.

The sun in its slow descent filtered great cathedral-moats of gold through latticed boughs of pine and birch and maple. It was that time of day- or afternoon- when the forest's breath, sun-stunned, yearning for night, impalpably swoons to the slow pulsations of blood and time and silence.

If nature has a soul, it feels like it must be bound up in the bark and sap of our forests. There, older, wiser sentinels stand in silent judgment. Not just the ancient sequoias and redwoods—even regular pine and birch trees outlast us. Every tree is a witness tree—they see how we spend our time on earth, what we take and what we give.

Every moment the patches of green grew bigger and the patches of snow grew smaller. Every moment more and more of the trees shook off their robes of snow. Soon, wherever you looked, instead of white shapes you saw the dark green of firs or the black prickly branches of bare oaks and beeches and elms. Then the mist turned from white to gold and presently cleared away altogether. Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down on to the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops. Soon there were more wonderful things happening. Coming suddenly round a corner into a glade of silver birch trees Edmund saw the ground covered in all directions with little yellow flowers- celandines. The noise of water grew louder. Presently they actually crossed a stream. Beyond it they found snowdrops growing.

The thorns thinned out and the trees grew taller and straighter, their branches not beginning until a few feet over our heads. The white, peeled bark of the birches looked buttery in the long, slanting afternoon light, and their leaves were a delicate gold.

Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another. The oak dies down to the ground, leaving within its rind a rich virgin mould, which will impart a vigorous life to an infant forest. The pine leaves a sandy and sterile soil, the harder woods a strong and fruitful mould. So this constant abrasion and decay makes the soil of my future growth. As I live now so shall I reap. If I grow pines and birches, my virgin mould will not sustain the oak; but pines and birches, or, perchance, weeds and brambles, will constitute my second growth.

A few of us—the drowned girls, the birch brides, the unquiet spirits—do both.

THE FORTRESS Under the pink quilted covers I hold the pulse that counts your blood. I think the woods outdoors are half asleep, left over from summer like a stack of books after a flood, left over like those promises I never keep. On the right, the scrub pine tree waits like a fruit store holding up bunches of tufted broccoli. We watch the wind from our square bed. I press down my index finger -- half in jest, half in dread -- on the brown mole under your left eye, inherited from my right cheek: a spot of danger where a bewitched worm ate its way through our soul in search of beauty. My child, since July the leaves have been fed secretly from a pool of beet-red dye. And sometimes they are battle green with trunks as wet as hunters' boots, smacked hard by the wind, clean as oilskins. No, the wind's not off the ocean. Yes, it cried in your room like a wolf and your pony tail hurt you. That was a long time ago. The wind rolled the tide like a dying woman. She wouldn't sleep, she rolled there all night, grunting and sighing. Darling, life is not in my hands; life with its terrible changes will take you, bombs or glands, your own child at your breast, your own house on your own land. Outside the bittersweet turns orange. Before she died, my mother and I picked those fat branches, finding orange nipples on the gray wire strands. We weeded the forest, curing trees like cripples. Your feet thump-thump against my back and you whisper to yourself. Child, what are you wishing? What pact are you making? What mouse runs between your eyes? What ark can I fill for you when the world goes wild? The woods are underwater, their weeds are shaking in the tide; birches like zebra fish flash by in a pack. Child, I cannot promise that you will get your wish. I cannot promise very much. I give you the images I know. Lie still with me and watch. A pheasant moves by like a seal, pulled through the mulch by his thick white collar. He's on show like a clown. He drags a beige feather that he removed, one time, from an old lady's hat. We laugh and we touch. I promise you love. Time will not take away that.

For in their interflowing aggregate, those grand fresh-water seas of ours,--Erie, and Ontario, and Huron, and Superior, and Michigan,--possess an ocean-like expansiveness, with many of the ocean's noblest traits; with many of its rimmed varieties of races and climes. They contain round archipelagoes of romantic isles, even as the Polynesian water do; in large part, are shored by two great contrasting nations, as the Atlantic is; they furnish long maritime approaches to our numerous territorial colonies from the East, dotted all round their banks; here and there are frowned upon by batteries, and by the goat-like craggy guns of Mackinaw; they have heard the fleet thunderings of naval victories; at intervals, they have yield their beaches to wild barbarians, whose red painted faces flash from out their pelty wigwams; for leagues and leagues are flanked by ancient and unentered forests, where the gaunt pines stand like serried lines of kings in Gothic genealogies; those same woods harboring wild Afric beasts of prey, and silken creatures whose exported furs gives robes to Tartar Emperors; they mirror the paved capitals of Buffalo and Cleveland, as well as Winnebago villages; they float alike the full-rigged merchant ship, the armed cruiser of the State, the steamer, and the birch canoe; they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

I’d dreamed once of a forest of gold, and Jesse had done what he could to give it to me. His bedroom had been transformed into a wonderland of leaves and flowers, pinecones and branches of birch and oak, all of it glimmering, all of it singing. The bed was covered, his chest of drawers, the sill. Much of it was jumbled together, beautiful for what it was if not its presentation. Jesse had last left this room on the night of his death, right after he’d called to me, right before he’d gone to the castle. So he would have been scattering his final gift in haste, knowing he worked against the clock. Knowing, somehow, what was to come. Which meant he’d been making gold for weeks. When I’d seen him so tired, when he’d told me all those nights that we should rest apart…he had been doing this. For me. A folded note had been set upon the bed. My name had been scrawled upon it. I love you was all it said inside. I sank to the floor. I looked up and all around as the sun danced through the window and turned Jesse’s room into an ambered heaven of song and shimmer and sparks. That was how Armand found me, hours later. That was what he saw, as well, what he heard, as he walked slowly into the chamber and eased down beside me to rest his back against the bed. We sat there together, listening, marveling. In time, his hand reached out and took firm hold of mine.

Last Night’s Moon," “When will we next walk together under last night’s moon?” - Tu Fu March aspens, mist forest. Green rain pins down the sea, early evening cyanotype. Silver saltlines, weedy toques of low tide, pillow lava’s black spill indelible in the sand. Unbroken broken sea. — Rain sharpens marsh-hair birth-green of the spring firs. In the bog where the dead never disappear, where river birch drown, the surface strewn with reflection. This is the acid-soaked moss that eats bones, keeps flesh; the fermented ground where time stops and doesn’t; dissolves the skull, preserves the brain, wrinkled pearl in black mud. — In the autumn that made love necessary, we stood in rubber boots on the sphagnum raft and learned love is soil–stronger than peat or sea– melting what it holds. The past is not our own. Mole’s ribbon of earth, termite house, soaked sponge. It rises, keloids of rain on wood; spreads, milkweed galaxy, broken pod scattering the debris of attention. Where you are while your body is here, remembering in the cold spring afternoon. The past is a long bone. — Time is like the painter’s lie, no line around apple or along thigh, though the apple aches to its sweet edge, strains to its skin, the seam of density. Invisible line closest to touch. Lines of wet grass on my arm, your tongue’s wet line across my back. All the history in the bone-embedded hills of your body. Everything your mouth remembers. Your hands manipullate in the darkness, silver bromide of desire darkening skin with light. — Disoriented at great depths, confused by the noise of shipping routes, whales hover, small eyes squinting as they consult the magnetic map of the ocean floor. They strain, a thousand miles through cold channels; clicking thrums of distant loneliness bounce off seamounts and abyssal plains. They look up from perpetual dusk to rods of sunlight, a solar forest at the surface. Transfixed in the dark summer kitchen: feet bare on humid linoleum, cilia listening. Feral as the infrared aura of the snake’s prey, the bees’ pointillism, the infrasonic hum of the desert heard by the birds. The nighthawk spans the ceiling; swoops. Hot kitchen air vibrates. I look up to the pattern of stars under its wings.

Alice haunted the mossy edge of the woods, lingering in patches of shade. She was waiting to hear his Austin-Healey throttle back when he careened down the utility road separating the state park from the cabins rimming the lake, but only the whistled conversation of buntings echoed in the branches above. The vibrant blue males darted deeper into the trees when she blew her own 'sweet-sweet chew-chew sweet-sweet' up to theirs. Pine seedlings brushed against her pants as she pushed through the understory, their green heads vivid beneath the canopy. She had dressed to fade into the forest; her hair was bundled up under a long-billed cap, her clothes drab and inconspicuous. When at last she heard his car, she crouched behind a clump of birch and made herself as small as possible, settling into a shallow depression of ferns and leaf litter.

In Views of Nature Humboldt showed how nature could have an influence on people’s imagination. Nature, he wrote, was in a mysterious communication with our ‘inner feelings’. A clear blue sky, for example, triggers different emotions than a heavy blanket of dark clouds. Tropical scenery, densely filled with banana and palm trees, has a different effect than an open forest of white-stemmed slender birches. What we might take for granted today – that there is a correlation between the external world and our mood – was a revelation to Humboldt’s readers. Poets had engaged with such ideas but never a scientist.

The limbs of a stand of birch tree hold up the forest's form like women's bones. This grove has a magnetic pull, beckoning toward a carpet of blue-green mosses where I long to lie on my back and sing into the leaves. But it is a place where bodies were stacked, and I don't want to make friends with trees that once hid the dead.

Whether Whether anger quickens a lagging stride, and periodic burn-offs in the forest revitalize exhausted soil and flora—. Whether we should take pleasure in the wildcat jubilation of a lightning bolt that whips its silver vein of genesis through the night sky, flash-photo of a white birch upended, the root-system buckled to swollen thunderheads—. And whether naming an offense amounts to sour grapes and common bitterness, or even the conceited nonsense of unwashed yahoo multitudes, a yawping insult to civilized behavior—. Whether a July rainstorm, even when it drenches the unprepared pedestrian and befuddles traffic, might be extravagant, a joy, like the whoops and escalating bop glissandos of Gillespie’s upraised horn, cascading pitches a countersong to meteoric chalk marks Perseids burn across the House of Leo—. And whether peaceful ecstasy might float up from a fifteen-second avalanche reflected in the skier’s goggles, his jacket a spark of scarlet on the topmost slope, waiting for the homeward track to clear.

Our home villages with the hills, mountains and forests, the lakes and ponds, rivers and streams, waterfall and fjords. The smell of new hay in summer, of birches in spring, of the sea, and the big forest, and even the biting winter cold. Everything . . . Norwegian songs and music and so much, much more. That’s our Fatherland and that’s what we have to struggle to get back.

There was something wonderful about the atmosphere at Stony Cross Park. One could easily imagine it as some magical place set in some far-off land. The surrounding forest was so deep and thick as to be primeval in appearance, while the twelve-acre garden behind the manor seemed too perfect to be real. There were groves, glades, ponds, and fountains. It was a garden of many moods, alternating tranquility with colorful tumult. A disciplined garden, every blade of grass precisely clipped, the corners of the box hedges trimmed to knife blade crispness. Hatless, gloveless, and infused with a sudden sense of optimism, Annabelle breathed deeply of the country air. She skirted the edge of the terraced gardens at the back of the manor and followed a graveled path set between raised beds of poppies and geraniums. The atmosphere soon became thick with the perfume of flowers, as the path paralleled a drystone wall covered with tumbles of pink and cream roses. Wandering more slowly, Annabelle crossed through an orchard of ancient pear trees, sculpted by decades into fantastic shapes. Farther off, a canopy of silver birch led to woodland beds that appeared to melt seamlessly into the forest beyond.

Daylight would have shown a wilderness weathered and blowzy, a wanton that had lived her summer too fast and too greedily. It would have shown the white birches pale and shivering in a sudden ague, and here and there an ash or a sumac burning red, like a hectic spot, where the first frosts already had set the marks of their galloping consumption on the cheek of the forest, giving warning of the time when the white plague of the winter would make a massacre of all this present glory and turn the trees to naked skeletons and stretch a bony bare cadaver on every steeper hillside to bleach there until the snows covered things up. But now the kindly nighttime had all signs and threats of approaching death, so that each shriveled speckled leaf, as revealed and traced in the waning light, seemed flawless — a perfect part of a perfect tapestry.

Scattered trees, never thick enough to be a forest, were everywhere. Shasta, who had lived all his life in an almost tree-less grassland, had never seen so many or so many kinds. If you had been there you would probably have known (he didn't) that he was seeing oaks, beeches, silver birches, rowans, and sweet chestnuts. Rabbits scurried away in every direction as they advanced, and presently they saw a whole herd of fallow deer making off among the trees.

Most often they speak according to their kind – the deep rumble of oak, the whisper of the birch, or the singsong chant of the alder. The evergreen stands of pine have voices sharp as needles. But the forest can speak as one, when it must. When the trees so choose, they think with one mind. When there is danger, especially, they speak in one voice of a thousand echoes. I hate it when they do this. For the forest mind is always right, and will hear no argument.

In 1917 I went to Russia. I was sent to prevent the Bolshevik Revolution and to keep Russia in the war. The reader will know that my efforts did not meet with success. I went to Petrograd from Vladivostok, .One day, on the way through Siberia, the train stopped at some station and the passengers as usual got out, some to fetch water to make tea, some to buy food and others to stretch their legs. A blind soldier was sitting on a bench. Other soldiers sat beside him and more stood behind. There were from twenty to thirty.Their uniforms were torn and stained. The blind soldier, a big vigorous fellow, was quite young. On his cheeks was the soft, pale down of a beard that has never been shaved. I daresay he wasn't eighteen. He had a broad face, with flat, wide features, and on his forehead was a great scar of the wound that had lost him his sight. His closed eyes gave him a strangely vacant look. He began to sing. His voice was strong and sweet. He accompanied himself on an accordion. The train waited and he sang song after song. I could not understand his words, but through his singing, wild and melancholy, I seemed to hear the cry of the oppressed: I felt the lonely steppes and the interminable forests, the flow of the broad Russian rivers and all the toil of the countryside, the ploughing of the land and the reaping of the wild corn, the sighing of the wind in the birch trees, the long months of dark winter; and then the dancing of the women in the villages and the youths bathing in shallow streams on summer evenings; I felt the horror of war, the bitter nights in the trenches, the long marches on muddy roads, the battlefield with its terror and anguish and death. It was horrible and deeply moving. A cap lay at the singer's feet and the passengers filled it full of money; the same emotion had seized them all, of boundless compassion and of vague horror, for there was something in that blind, scarred face that was terrifying; you felt that this was a being apart, sundered from the joy of this enchanting world. He did not seem quite human. The soldiers stood silent and hostile. Their attitude seemed to claim as a right the alms of the travelling herd. There was a disdainful anger on their side and unmeasurable pity on ours; but no glimmering of a sense that there was but one way to compensate that helpless man for all his pain.

In a city it's impossible to forget we live in places raised and built over time itself. The past is underneath our feet. Every day when I leave the house , I may walk over a place where a king killed a wolf in the Royal Forest of Stocket, one of the medieval hunting forests ,where alder and birch , oak and hazel,willow, cherry and aspen grew. The living trees were cut down , their wood used to fuel the city's growth , it's trade, it's life.The ancient wood ,preserved in peat, was found underneath the city(The site of the killing is fairly well buried -the wolf and the king had their encounter some time around the early years of the eleventh century)It's the same as in any other city, built up and over and round , ancient woodlands cut down , bogs drained , watercourses altered, a landscape rendered almost untraceable, vanished.Here, there's a history of 8,000 years of habitation , the evidence in excavated fish hooks and fish bone reliquaries, in Bronze Age grave-goods of arrowheads and beakers, what's still under the surface, in revenants and ghosts of gardens , of doo'cots and orchards, of middens and piggeries, plague remains and witch-hunts, of Franciscans and Carmelites, their friaries buried , over-taken by time and stone .This is a stonemasons' city , a city of weavers and gardeners and shipwrights and where I walk , there was once a Maison Dieu, a leper house; there was song schools and sewing schools, correction houses and tollboths, hidden under layers of time, still there

Before coming to the Black Wood, I had read as widely in tree lore as possible. As well as the many accounts I encountered of damage to trees and woodland -- of what in German is called Waldsterben, or 'forest-death' -- I also met with and noted down stories of astonishment at woods and trees. Stories of how Chinese woodsmen in the T'ang and S'ung dynasties -- in obedience to the Taoist philosophy of a continuity of nature between humans and other species -- would bow to the trees which they felled, and offer a promise that the tree would be used well, in buildings that would dignify the wood once it had become timber. The story of Xerxes, the Persian king who so loved sycamores that, when marching to war with the Greeks, he halted his army of many thousands of men in order that they might contemplate and admire one outstanding specimen. Thoreau's story of how he felt so attached to the trees in the woods around his home-town of Concord, Massachusetts, that he would call regularly on them, gladly tramping 'eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines. When Willa Cather moved to the prairies of Nebraska, she missed the wooded hills of her native Virginia. Pining for trees, she would sometimes travel south 'to our German neighbors, to admire their catalpa grove, or to see the big elm tree that grew out of a crack in the earth. Trees were so rare in that country that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons'....

The territory through which we passed had been overbuilt in the days over the Secular Ancients, but only a few traces of that exuberant time remained, and a whole forest had grown up since then, maple and birch and pine, its woody roots no doubt entwined with artifacts from the Efflorescence of Oil and with the bones of the artifacts' owners. What is the modern world, Julian once asked, but a vast Cemetery, reclaimed by nature? Every step we took reverberated in the skulls of our ancestors, and I felt as if there were centuries rather than soil beneath my feet.

When the logs in the fireplace crackle merrily, the corpse of a beech or oak is going up in flames. The paper in the book you are holding in your hands right now is made from the shavings of spruce, and birches were expressly felled (that is to say, killed) for this purpose. Does that sound over the top? I don't think so. For if we keep in mind all we have learned in the previous chapters, parallels can definitely be drawn to pigs and pork. Not to put too fine a point on it, we use living things killed for our purposes. Does that make our behavior reprehensible? Not necessarily. After all, we are also part of Nature, and we are made in such a way that we can survive only with the help of organic substances from other species. We share this necessity with all other animals. The real question is whether we help ourselves only to what we need from the forest ecosystem, and-analogous to our treatment of animals-whether we spare the trees unnecessary suffering when we do this. That means it is okay to use wood as long as trees are allowed to live in a way that is appropriate to their species. And that means that they should be allowed to fulfill their social needs, to grow in a true forest environment on undisturbed ground, and to pass their knowledge on to the next generation. And at least some of them should be allowed to grow old with dignity and finally die a natural death.

Something marvelous is happening underground, something we’re just learning how to see. Mats of mycorrhizal cabling link trees into gigantic, smart communities spread across hundreds of acres. Together, they form vast trading networks of goods, services, and information. . . .  There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big tree makes may go to feed other organisms. Even different kinds of trees form partnerships. Cut down a birch, and a nearby Douglas-fir may suffer. . . .  In the great forests of the East, oaks and hickories synchronize their nut production to baffle the animals that feed on them. Word goes out, and the trees of a given species—whether they stand in sun or shade, wet or dry—bear heavily or not at all, together, as a community. . . .  Forests mend and shape themselves through subterranean synapses. And in shaping themselves, they shape, too, the tens of thousands of other, linked creatures that form it from within. Maybe it’s useful to think of forests as enormous spreading, branching, underground super-trees.

(from Lady of the Lake) The western waves of ebbing day Rolled o’er the glen their level way; Each purple peak, each flinty spire, Was bathed in floods of living fire. But not a setting beam could glow Within the dark ravines below, Where twined the path in shadow hid, Round many a rocky pyramid, Shooting abruptly from the dell Its thunder-splintered pinnacle; Round many an insulated mass, The native bulwarks of the pass, Huge as the tower which builders vain Presumptuous piled on Shinar’s plain. The rocky summits, split and rent, Formed turret, dome, or battlement, Or seemed fantastically set With cupola or minaret, Wild crests as pagod ever decked, Or mosque of Eastern architect. Nor were these earth-born castles bare, Nor lacked they many a banner fair; For, from their shivered brows displayed, Far o’er the unfathomable glade, All twinkling with the dewdrop sheen, The brier-rose fell in streamers green, And creeping shrubs, of thousand dyes, Waved in the west-wind’s summer sighs. Boon nature scattered, free and wild, Each plant or flower, the mountain’s child. Here eglantine embalmed the air, Hawthorn and hazel mingled there; The primrose pale, and violet flower, Found in each cliff a narrow bower; Fox-glove and night-shade, side by side, Emblems of punishment and pride, Grouped their dark hues with every stain The weather-beaten crags retain. With boughs that quaked at every breath, Gray birch and aspen wept beneath; Aloft, the ash and warrior oak Cast anchor in the rifted rock; And, higher yet, the pine-tree hung His shattered trunk, and frequent flung, Where seemed the cliffs to meet on high, His boughs athwart the narrowed sky. Highest of all, where white peaks glanced, Where glist’ning streamers waved and danced, The wanderer’s eye could barely view The summer heaven’s delicious blue; So wondrous wild, the whole might seem The scenery of a fairy dream. Onward, amid the copse ’gan peep A narrow inlet, still and deep, Affording scarce such breadth of brim As served the wild duck’s brood to swim. Lost for a space, through thickets veering, But broader when again appearing, Tall rocks and tufted knolls their face Could on the dark-blue mirror trace; And farther as the hunter strayed, Still broader sweep its channels made. The shaggy mounds no longer stood, Emerging from entangled wood, But, wave-encircled, seemed to float, Like castle girdled with its moat; Yet broader floods extending still Divide them from their parent hill, Till each, retiring, claims to be An islet in an inland sea. And now, to issue from the glen, No pathway meets the wanderer’s ken, Unless he climb, with footing nice A far projecting precipice. The broom’s tough roots his ladder made, The hazel saplings lent their aid; And thus an airy point he won, Where, gleaming with the setting sun, One burnished sheet of living gold, Loch Katrine lay beneath him rolled, In all her length far winding lay, With promontory, creek, and bay, And islands that, empurpled bright, Floated amid the livelier light, And mountains, that like giants stand, To sentinel enchanted land. High on the south, huge Benvenue Down to the lake in masses threw Crags, knolls, and mountains, confusedly hurled, The fragments of an earlier world; A wildering forest feathered o’er His ruined sides and summit hoar, While on the north, through middle air, Ben-an heaved high his forehead bare.

Someone might be sleeping in his comfortable bed, in his quiet, warm room, and wake up naked on a bluish earth, in a forest of rustling birch trees, rising red and white towards the sky like the smokestacks of Jouxtebouville, with big bumps half-way out of the ground, hairy and bulbous like onions. And birds will fly around these birch trees and pick at them with their beaks and make them bleed. Sperm will flow slowly, gently, from these wounds, sperm mixed with blood, warm and glassy with little bubbles. Or else nothing like that will happen, there will be no appreciable change, but one morning people will open their blinds and be surprised by a sort of frightful sixth sense, brooding heavily over things and seeming to pause. Nothing more than that: but for the little time it lasts, there will be hundreds of suicides. Yes! Let it change just a little, just to see, I don’t ask for anything better. Then you will see other people, suddenly plunged into solitude. Men all alone, completely alone with horrible monstrosities, will run through the streets, pass heavily in front of me, their eyes staring, fleeing their ills yet carrying them with them, open-mouthed, with their insect-tongue flapping its wings. Then I’ll burst out laughing even though my body may be covered with filthy, infected scabs which blossom into flowers of flesh, violets, buttercups. I’ll lean against a wall and when they go by I’ll shout: “What’s the matter with your science? What have you done with your humanism? Where is your dignity?” I will not be afraid—or at least no more than now. Will it not still be existence, variations on existence? All these eyes which will slowly devour a face—they will undoubtedly be too much, but no more so than the first two, Existence is what I am afraid of.

People are like trees in a forest; no botanist would think of studying each individual birch-tree.' Katya,

In their urge for survival, the seed-bearing trees hit upon countless different devices for carrying pollen from one flower to another, but essentially the methods fall into two main categories. The first is wind-pollination, which requires the presence of light, small, dry pollen grains, easily shaken from the stamens, or male flowers. To receive the tiny bits of pollen that are blown about by the wind, the stigmata of flowers must be long, or feathery, or sticky, or so constructed as to trap the fine dust. All conifers are pollinated this way, as are the poplar, ash, birch, oak, beech, and certain other species. But since this method is so haphazard, a disproportionately high percentage of pollen is wasted and these trees must produce immense quantities of pollen in order that even a tiny amount will be effective. Scientists have estimated that a single stamen of a beech tree, for example, may yield 2,000 grains, while the branch system of a vigorous young birch can produce 100 million grains a year. One pine or spruce cone alone releases between 1 and 2 million grains of pollen into the air: In Sweden, which is covered with spruce forests, an estimated 75,000 tons of pollen are blown from the trees each year.

All winter she has struggled to describe the joy of her life’s work and the discoveries that have solidified in a few short years: how trees talk to one another, over the air and underground. How they care and feed each other, orchestrating shared behaviors through the networked soil. How they build immune systems as wide as a forest. She spends a chapter detailing how a dead log gives life to countless other species. Remove the snag and kill the woodpecker who keeps in check the weevils that would kill the other trees. She describes the drupes and racemes, panicles and involucres that a person could walk past for a lifetime and never notice. She tells how the woody-coned alders harvest gold. How an inch-high pecan might have six feet of root. How the inner bark of birches can feed the starving. How one hop hornbeam catkin holds several million grains of pollen. How indigenous fishermen use crushed walnut leaves to stun and catch fish. How poplars clean soils of chlorinated solvents and willows remove heavy metals. She lays out how fungal hyphae—countless miles of filaments folded up in every spoon of soil—coax open tree roots and tap into them. How the wired-up fungi feed the tree minerals. How the tree pays for these nutrients with sugars, which the fungi can’t make.

Soon after the Gordons left, Frank and Joe gave Aunt Gertrude a final hug and set off for the airport with their father. Their route included Toronto, then over a vast, lonely, region, splashed with lakes and carpeted with spruce. The plane landed briefly at Sudbury, where the boys glimpsed the white domes of a radar station standing out against the night sky. Two hours after leaving Toronto, they set down near the rugged mining town of Timmins. They registered at a hotel for the night and arranged by telephone for a bush pilot to fly them on to Lake Okemow. At daybreak the two sleuths were up and breakfasting on a hearty meal of Canadian bacon, eggs, and fried potatoes. Then they taxied off in a four-seater amphibian. The flight proved to be bumpy. Below lay a dense wilderness of black spruce, poplar, birch, and tamarack. Glittering lakes and snakelike streams slashed the forest. Farther north came barren patches, frosted white with snow. Then again they were flying over heavy timber. “Here we are!” the pilot said at last. He brought the plane down to a choppy landing on the not-yet-frozen lake and taxied to a wooden pier. On the shore lay the stout log hunting lodge. Smoke feathered from its chimney.

It has been well established that trees talk to each other through underground chains of fungus called Common Mycorrhizal Networks (CMNs). Affectionately called the Wood Wide Web, these networks allow networks of trees to locally communicate and organize the transfer of water, carbon, nitrogen, local gossip, and political pamphlets. Previous research suggested that these fungal networks only operated at a community level. Nutrient-transfer-back translation has shown this assumption is no longer valid. In the woods of Germany, England, Wyoming, and many more locations, accelerationist, international communist propaganda has been discovered in Douglas Firs, and a growing prevalence has been seen in Birch populations. This paper will discuss the methodology, results, and dangerous consequences of the dictatorship of a central, democratically elected, tree-based anarcho-communist syndicate of Fir collectives in your backyard and how the international communist organization has spread its radical message to the world’s forests.

In AD 9 was the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. The Roman commander Quinctilius Varus led twenty-five thousand legionaries into the heart of Germany and was slaughtered by Arminius’s spearmen, who rushed from their holy groves. Six years later, their skulls nailed to trees, their bones piled in torture pits and on votive altars, the Roman Army was discovered by the appropriately named Roman general Germanicus. It was the greatest tragedy ever to befall the Roman Empire and it sent a shudder of horror and shame across the civilized world that has vibrated in our subconscious for a thousand years. The slaughter in the Teutoburg Forest divided Europe into the warm south, who forever saw forests as dreadful places to be avoided and cleared, homes to dragons and trolls, antitheses of the civilized city, and the north, who understood them to be healing, protecting, mystical, spiritual places. How you feel about a silent birch forest at twilight says more about your blood and kin than your passport.

Mary Thomas’s mother and grandmother Macrit had taught her to show gratitude for the birches, to take no more than she needed, to place an offering in thanks. Mary Thomas had even called the birches Mother Trees—long before I had stumbled onto that notion. Mary’s people had known this of the birches for thousands of years, from living in the forest—their precious home—and learning from all living things, respecting them as equal partners. The word “equal” is where Western philosophy stumbles. It maintains that we are superior, having dominion over all that is nature.

What if the first eighteen years of your life were an Arctic winter? What if all the sunlight in your life comes late, at an oblique angle? What if the sun cyclically disappears from a life for nights that seem like they’ll never end? To grow just one membraned layer under such conditions is a feat. To add another ring—to endure—is an achievement. Some years are longer than others. Don’t compare your sturdy temperate trees to your neighbor’s Arctic forest. You can’t imagine how much implacable energy it took to grow those saplings. You might not be able to fathom what they have endured. You don’t know how ancient that forest is, how much time it has spent enveloped in darkness. Even more importantly: don’t compare the trees of your tundra existence to someone else’s equatorial rain forest. God doesn’t. They live in different conditions. The sun shines upon the just and the unjust, but not at the same angle or with the same intensity. The birch saplings that have punched up through the crust of your prior life are miracles of grace. (Remember when you thought nothing could ever grow there?) They’ve never lived through your winter. They don’t know how long your night has been. By the grace of God, you’ve endured the dark.

Not even the brown, unpeopled waste of northern Arizona rivaled this level of desolation. No sign of human habitation. Endless spruce forests interspersed with patches of turning paper birch—veins of gold from Will’s vantage point.

On clear days we trudged through White Forest, a man-made woods of metal trees and plastic leaves constructed in the boon years of Brezhnev when the party boss’s wife had grown nostalgic for the birches of her youth. By the time we trudged beneath them, however, the years had ravaged both the forest and the party boss’s wife, and the plastic leaves above were as sagging and liver-spotted as her face. We went on. The mud was a mustard we plodded through. On the forest’s far side we looked across the expanse of sulfurous waste stretching to the horizon. We shouted. We proclaimed. We didn’t need to whisper out here. For a few short weeks in July, red wildflowers pushed through the oxidized waste and the whole earth simmered with apocalyptic beauty.

The autumn air is chill and damp. As he does each morning at just about this time, Adolf Hitler emerges from the artificial light of his concrete bunker into the morning sun. He holds his two-year-old German shepherd Blondi on a short leash for their daily walk through the thick birch forest. A fussy man of modest height and weight who is prone to emotional outbursts, Hitler wears his dark brown hair parted on the right and keeps his Charlie Chaplin mustache carefully combed and trimmed. Hitler

Little is new to me. And what I wanted from my life, I have had, and more. I have had my whole life. Days like the leaves of the forest. I’m an old hollow tree, only the roots live. And so I dream only what all men dream. I have no visions and no wishes. I see what is. I see the fruit ripening on the branch. Four years it has been ripening, that fruit of the deep-planted tree. We have all been afraid for four years, even we who live far from the yumens’ cities, and have only glimpsed them from hiding, or seen their ships fly over, or looked at the dead places where they cut down the world, or heard mere tales of these things. We are all afraid. Children wake from sleep crying of giants; women will not go far on their trading-journeys; men in the Lodges cannot sing. The fruit of fear is ripening. And I see you gather it. You are the harvester. All that we fear to know, you have seen, you have known: exile, shame, pain, the roof and walls of the world fallen, the mother dead in misery, the children untaught, uncherished. . . . This is a new time for the world: a bad time. And you have suffered it all. You have gone farthest. And at the farthest, at the end of the black path, there grows the Tree; there the fruit ripens; now you reach up, Selver, now you gather it. And the world changes wholly, when a man holds in his hand the fruit of that tree, whose roots are deeper than the forest. Men will know it. They will know you, as we did. It doesn’t take an old man or a Great Dreamer to recognize a god! Where you go, fire burns; only the blind cannot see it. But listen, Selver, this is what I see that perhaps others do not, this is why I have loved you: I dreamed of you before we met here. You were walking on a path, and behind you the young trees grew up, oak and birch, willow and holly, fir and pine, alder, elm, white-flowering ash, all the roof and walls of the world, forever renewed.

Under pine trees the forest floor is nothing but old, brown pine needles, thousands and thousands of them. However, if you go to an area where our native deciduous trees are growing—the oaks, ashes, birches, hazels, hawthorns, beeches—then you see that all sorts of things thrive under their branches. There are the magical greens of the mosses and ferns, the bright white of the wood anemones, the acres of shining bluebells in May, the foxgloves in early summer. And every autumn the trees create their own rich carpet of dazzling colors.

Walking paths through woods, forests thick with pine and oak and birch, sunlight specking the path between the lace of needles and leaves, I've come across stone walls through trees, away from the path, miles from the road. There's something haunted in them. Long-gone farmers deposited these rocks here, held them, placed them, and in that effort, in the solid thing that remains, their human presence is felt, and their goneness. These walls service as a chain backwards through time.

Waiting for Steve to come back felt like forever. I had to be strong for Boney Pete, who paced the end stone the entire time, waiting for his friend to come back. I might have done the same if I wasn’t caring for Pete, stroking his spine and telling him that Steve was going to be all right. We knew he defeated Herobrine when Lucius began to glow. “Oh my!” he said as white light flashed from inside him, a lot like the ender dragon when it exploded, but he zero time to be afraid. The change happened so quick. One minute Lucius was a snow-white fox jumping in fright and the next he was a librarian villager spinning in circles, as if chasing his tail. When Lucius realized he no longer had a tail, he froze, and, trembling looked over his old body, newly acquired. “It feels so strange… I have hands. I - I have hands! HAHA!” He jumped for joy and ran to me, grabbing my hands and shouting, “Dance with me, Alex! Dance with me!” When he got tired of dancing he sat down. When he got tired of that he crawled on his hands and feet. “How did I ever get around on four legs? It is the most unnatural thing in the world.” Soon the realization hit us that it was over. Herobrine was defeated. Lucius paused party and looked back at the bridge. “But does that mean…” Boney Pete inched toward the bridge and whinnied into the void. He called and he called, but there was no answer. I walked up beside him and rubbed his neck. Boney Pete pushed his body against me and shuddered. I had to hold him up, or else he might have collapsed. “There there, buddy,” I said and pet his forehead, not sure how else to comfort an undead horse on the death of his friend. And the death of my friend… Steve… I could feel the stupid emotions filling me up and I hated it, but it also felt right, so I let the tears flow. I always hated crying, hated the way it made me feel—weak and powerless. Worse, I hated the way people looked at me when I cried, but I didn’t feel those things then. I just felt sad and crying felt good. I hugged Boney Pete tight and clung to his back. “I’m sorry, Pete,” I said. Then I heard something from the void bridge. A voice. “Ow… Ow… Ow… Ow… Ow…” Boney Pete and I raised our heads and there, coming across the bridge toward us, was Steve. We rushed to the edge of the end island, but still waited until he got off to crush him in a hug. Boney Pete got him first, and then me, and then Lucius. Steve winced each time we hugged him, and I saw why. His leg was twisted in a way that no amount of cooked chicken would heal. “Your leg…” I said and reached my hand toward it, but Steve flinched back. “Yeah, I used an ender pearl to escape falling into the void and the fall damage got my leg pretty good. I think my hero days are over, and honestly that sounds okay with me.” He rubbed Boney Pete. “What do you say buddy, are you ready to rebuild?” Together, the four of us left the end through the portal and reappeared in a birch forest.

But today, again, I want to learn the character of the trees, even though I know that the names- at least, the names given to them by humans- are not names the trees themselves use. They speak with bark and branch and leaf, with alterations in shade and sunlight, with the patterns of growth rings and with the activity of birds and animals, with movement inside stillness. Even if these aren’t their true names, it is good to speak the designations, even just in my mind, as I watch them and honor them: these apple and cherry orchards of farm and pasture, these maples at the edge of the road and in the woods, the white pines and fir and spruce in the forest, willows by the pond, these birches and beeches, these oaks.

Once the stream was left behind the character of the wood changed. It became deeper and more mysterious. There were no more birches, wild crab apples, and hawthorns. The oak trees still persisted, but they were much larger, and among them were those splendid knights of the forest, the armored beeches.

O’ Nine of Sacred Woods... When nine of magic woods combine, they create a spell, divine. To use to conjure up the best of all the forest’s great defense. To keep protected and ensure that light and life indeed endures. From Alder, Rowen, Willow, Birch to Hazel, Holly, Hawthorne’s perch. And then there’s Ash, the forest’s Queen, accompanied by the Oak, it’s King. They come together in glen and grove, to grow in such a treasure trove. So, use their force, their strength, and grain, to ensure your powers never wane.

How? Next time you’re in a forest, dig into the duff, and you’re bound to find white, cobwebby threads attached to roots. These are the underground parts of special fungi that deliver phosphorus to trees in return for carbon. Textbooks once described the exchange as exclusive, one tree to one fungus, until the data begged to differ. Simard’s work was among the first to prove that fungi branch out from the roots of one tree to connect dozens of trees and shrubs and herbs—not only relatives but entirely different species. [This “wood-wide web” is an underground Internet through which water, carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and even defense compounds are exchanged.] When a pest troubles one tree, its alarm chemicals travel via fungi to the other members of the network, giving them time to beef up their defenses. Thanks to researchers like Simard, foresters are now encouraged to leave birch and large hub trees in the forest to give seedlings a fast connection to the network.

There was something behind the glass, behind her reflection and the wash of clouded sky above her. She gazed past the surface, as though she were looking deep into clear water, ignoring the ripples and movements on the surface to search out what lived beneath. A tree, she realized, bending in a faint breeze, draped with purple leaves like streamers. Pure-silver flowers winked and sparkled in the deep foliage, swinging gently like bells, though Alaine couldn't hear anything. She gazed deeper, drinking in the beauty of a silver mist of moss on the ground, of a tangle of pale branches woven into knot-work unnaturally symmetrical, down to thorns bowing deeply to one another in vine-wrought curls. Something moved in the purple-and-silver forest, a figure, sliding like mist through the boughs. A woman--- Alaine started. She was tall and slim, shaped more than anything like a birch tree, with the same silver-pale gleam. Her hair was loose behind her, wound through with purple flowers, painfully bright against her fair waves. She looked up, gazing right at Alaine, almost meeting her eyes--- And then the mirror shattered in her hands.

The troutberry trees had already bloomed and gone; on the forest floor, delicate white petals of starflowers and goldthread and Carolina springbeauty sparkled when a stray beam of sunshine caught them. Wild onions were the only plant that had fully leafed out, brilliant bright green under maple and elm and birch and oak whose own leaves were still pregnant thoughts. All of nature was just waking up, fulling, becoming large and new.

revenge?? Night 10 Stumbling through the birch forest with my clumsy zombie legs, I let out a long, moaning sigh when I finally caught sight of the small desert valley up ahead.

With the web uncovered, the intricacies of the belowground alliance still remained a mystery to me, until I started my doctoral research in 1992. Paper birches, with their lush leaves and gossamer bark, seemed to be feeding the soil and helping their coniferous neighbors. But how? In pulling back the forest floor using microscopic and genetic tools, I discovered that the vast belowground mycelial network was a bustling community of mycorrhizal fungal species. These fungi are mutualistic. They connect the trees with the soil in a market exchange of carbon and nutrients and link the roots of paper birches and Douglas firs in a busy, cooperative Internet. When the interwoven birches and firs were spiked with stable and radioactive isotopes, I could see, using mass spectrometers and scintillation counters, carbon being transmitted back and forth between the trees, like neurotransmitters firing in our own neural networks. The trees were communicating through the web! I was staggered to discover that Douglas firs were receiving more photosynthetic carbon from paper birches than they were transmitting, especially when the firs were in the shade of their leafy neighbors. This helped explain the synergy of the pair’s relationship. The birches, it turns out, were spurring the growth of the firs, like carers in human social networks. Looking further, we discovered that the exchange between the two tree species was dynamic: each took different turns as “mother,” depending on the season. And so, they forged their duality into a oneness, making a forest. This discovery was published by Nature in 1997 and called the “wood wide web.” The research has continued unabated ever since, undertaken by students, postdoctoral researchers, and other scientists, with a myriad of discoveries about belowground communication among trees. We have used new scientific tools, as they are invented, along with our curiosity and dreams, to peer into the dark world of the soil and illuminate the social network of trees. The wood wide web has been mapped, traced, monitored, and coaxed to reveal the beautiful structures and finely adapted languages of the forest network. We have learned that mother trees recognize and talk with their kin, shaping future generations. In addition, injured trees pass their legacies on to their neighbors, affecting gene regulation, defense chemistry, and resilience in the forest community. These discoveries have transformed our understanding of trees from competitive crusaders of the self to members of a connected, relating, communicating system. Ours is not the only lab making these discoveries—there is a burst of careful scientific research occurring worldwide that is uncovering all manner of ways that trees communicate with each other above and below ground.

IF THE PROUD PAPER BIRCHES in the forest behind MacAulay’s Lumberyard could speak, they might speak of the young men who gathered there at nightfall on the last Sunday of every month. They might speak of the characters of these young men, of their unyielding resolve, of the marks, the cuts, and the scars on the faces of those who’d spent more time inside the thick manila rope strung waist high around four trees that formed a nearly perfect square—the Maker’s Ring. They might also tell of the young men’s civility, of how matches were seldom interrupted by onlookers because of foul play, and of how boxers in attendance week after week did not present themselves in the ring to injure one another, but to learn from one another, and to learn from themselves. They might tell you that every time one returned to the ring, always he appeared more assured and self-possessed than the last. He threw fewer punches and eluded more. He drew more prolonged breaths, and his feet were ever-lighter; the command of his movement always be-coming more calm and calibrated, the accuracy of his hands more fixed and unambiguous. They might tell of these young men’s fathers, or of these young men’s sons, of how the ground covering their old roots has welcomed the company of young men for generations. They might tell you, if you were listening, any of these things—but surely, they’d tell you of Everett Winter, and of how they missed him.

Today, you are looking after the zoo’s newest arrival, Nadezhda, a baby Amur tiger. Amur tigers are the largest type of tiger in the world, living mostly in the birch forests of eastern Russia. They are also an endangered species, with only about five hundred and forty alive in the wild. Nadezhda means “hope” in Russian, because with so few Amur tigers remaining, each one carries the hope of the species.

thought he had awakened at night. Here and there, enormous mushrooms added their spreading tops to the forest roof.             It was an eerie, disturbing place, filled with mysterious growls and groans and half-glimpsed figures moving among the trunks. Though desperate for any sign of humanity, Steve knew better than to approach those dark, moaning figures. Instead, he hurried on through the gloom, seeking some way – any way – out of the shadow of those dark trees.             Eventually, he emerged into a sparser forest of oaks and birch,

The countryside around us changed again. Now we were driving through forest. Sørland forests with mountain crags here and there among the trees, hills covered with spruce and oaks, aspen and birch, sporadic dark moorland, sudden meadows, flatland with densely growing pine trees. When I was a boy I used to imagine the sea rising and filling the forest so that the hilltops became islets you could sail between and on which you could bathe. Of all my childhood fantasies this was the one that captivated me most; the thought that you could swim over bus shelters and roofs, perhaps dive down and glide through a door, up a staircase, into a living room. Or just through a forest, with its slopes, cliffs, cairns, and ancient trees. At a certain point in childhood my most exciting game was building dams in streams, watching the water swell and cover the marsh, the roots, the grass, the rocks, the beaten earth path beside the stream. It was hypnotic. Not the mention the cellar we found in an unfinished house filled with shiny, black water we sailed on in two styrofoam boxes, when we were around five years old. Hypnotic. The same applied to winter when we skated along frozen streams in which grass, sticks, twigs, and small plants stood upright in the translucent ice beneath us. What had been the great attraction? And what had happened to it? Another fantasy I had at that time was that there were two enormous saw blades sticking out from the side of the car, chopping off everything as we drove past. Trees and streetlamps, houses and outhouses, but also people and animals. If someone was waiting for a bus they would be sliced through the middle, their top half falling like a felled tree, leaving feet and waist standing and the wound bleeding.

About 180m (590 ft.) offshore is Kidston Island , owned by the town of Baddeck. It has a wonderful sand beach with lifeguards (sometimes—check with the visitor center) and an old lighthouse to explore. A shuttle service comes and goes, so check with the visitor center. The lovely Uisge Ban Falls (that’s Gaelic for “white water”) is the reward at the end of a 3km (1.8-mile) hike. The falls cascades 16m (52 ft.) down a rock face; the hike is through hardwood forest of maple, birch, and beech. Ask for a map at the visit center. Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site HISTORIC SITE   Each summer for much of his life, Alexander Graham Bell—of Scottish descent, but his family emigrated to Canada when he was young—fled the heat and humidity of Washington, D.C., for this hillside retreat perched above Bras d’Or Lake. The mansion, still owned and occupied by

A tree starts out as we do, as the union of two haploid gametes, the egg and the sperm. Cells divide again and again to become embryos. An infinitesimally small number of embryos become seedlings, and out of these, a tiny subset become trees. Time may stand still for decades in some seeds that enter dormancy until conditions for growth become suitable. Time may stop for decades as the seedling exists in the shade, garnering just enough energy for survival but not enough for growth. Time speeds up as sunlight is reached and the tree explodes in sudden growth and then proceeds along its trajectory to reproduction, senescence, and death. In some trees, like the gray birch and balsam fir, maximum life span is usually shorter than our own. In many others it is close to ours, while in a few trees, including the bristlecone pines, a life span of four thousand years is not impossible. Bristlecone pines grow extremely slowly because they live in a cold climate (the White Mountains of California) and because they have little water and few nutrients. They nevertheless stay a step or two ahead of decay and death because the climate also dries their deadwood. It takes them thousands of years to experience the growth, and life, that a white pine in Maine experiences in two hundred summers. Trees must be growing to be alive, but different species grow, and therefore live, at very different rates. Thus, even to a tree, both time and life are relative.

Noisy aspens and remnant birches, forests of cottonwoods and poplars, take up the chorus: The world is turning into a new thing.

My first description held true: I felt as though I was picking my way through a bit of forest that I had never seen before, and her words were like another experienced gleaner somewhere ahead of me calling back to say, There are blueberries down on the northern slope, or Good mushrooms by the birches over here, or There’s an easy way through the brambles on the left. She didn’t care how I got to the blueberries; she only pointed me in the proper direction and let me wander my way over to them, feeling out the ground beneath my feet.

When the interwoven birches and firs were spiked with stable and radioactive isotopes, I could see, using mass spectrometers and scintillation counters, carbon being transmitted back and forth between the trees, like neurotransmitters firing in our own neural networks. The trees were communicating through the web! I was staggered to discover that Douglas firs were receiving more photosynthetic carbon from paper birches than they were transmitting, especially when the firs were in the shade of their leafy neighbors. This helped explain the synergy of the pair’s relationship. The birches, it turns out, were spurring the growth of the firs, like carers in human social networks. Looking further, we discovered that the exchange between the two tree species was dynamic: each took different turns as “mother,” depending on the season. And so, they forged their duality into a oneness, making a forest. This discovery was published by Nature in 1997 and called the “wood wide web.

That’s the scary thing about men: get a few together with some simple machines, and they’ll move the world. The ad hoc crew works for many hours, reading each other with little need for words. Together, they drag the last carcasses of pine and spruce, pain-killing willow and astringent birch, into place. Then they stand in silence and regard the design they’ve laid out across the forest floor. The shape arrests them. It reads them their rights. You have a right to be present. A right to attend. A right to be astonished.

Forest Grove was ideal, cool at night and just warm enough in the afternoon, with Mount Hood’s majestic snowcapped peak visible in the distance and salmon running in nearby rivers. The quiet campus of Pacific, a private school known for its music and optometry schools, was lush with evergreens and white birch. The local residents were so excited to have an NFL team around that they fought to loan their cars to the players for use on the team’s days off.

Maybe more than the building itself, the land around the orphanage and the elaborate network of footpaths create for the kids a sense of place. There are trails through the birch and pine, across fields where, every spring, the kids burn leaves and work the ash into the soil and plant potatoes, trails that lead to the river, to the school, to the village, to ponds and creeks and springs flowing up from beneath the ground with cool, drinkable water, trails that are a story in themselves, worn by wandering feet over fifty years, worn by joy and hope and habit and need, trails like a sentence spoken, each a whisper about the surrounding world, a dialogue with doubt or desire that’s ultimately answered by a destination. Many of the children have either no history or a severely foreshortened sense of the past, but these trails, worked into the grass or through the forests by others before them, send the kids off to play in a shared world—shared not just in physical space, but down through time. It must in some humble way ease the isolation, like Crusoe finding a footprint in the sand.