Hellstrips, cardinals and sycamore trees

I woke up Sunday morning to a cardinal outside our bedroom window, sitting in the tree that grows in the hellstrip, the patch of no man’s land between the sidewalk and the street. There’s nothing unusual about seeing a cardinal in that tree, but this one was still at the moment I spotted him, interrupted in his busy fall to-do list. He stopped and stared at me and I back at him. Then he fluffed his feathers out in that way birds do, transforming themselves in an instant, and flew away.

Later that morning, I read about the sycamore tree in England, on Hadrian’s Wall, over two hundred years old, cut down by a sixteen-year-old boy. No one says why. No one explains why the boy decided to cut down the tree. It’s not the easiest thing to do, though it takes much less time than it does to grow a tree. Maybe I’m naïve, but I can’t help but imagine that even as the boy took the chainsaw to the trunk, he had to have felt the sadness of what he was doing. The wrongness of it. I have to believe that even if he was full of rage or misguided glee, he also knew the horror of what he’d done. I have to believe the tree spoke to him, gently. I can’t imagine what the tree said, because the intelligence of trees is far beyond my feeble, bone-trapped mind.

The sycamore tree on Hadrian’s wall

I asked my neighbor what kind of tree it is that grows there in the hellstrip, the one the cardinal was in Sunday morning. It isn’t that old, this tree. It grew so fast. I can’t remember what he told me. Something Japanese, though it looks like an ash to me. Of course, those are all gone—the ash trees. The tree moves like an ash, though, light and nimble in the wind. It’s branches come right up to our window and we should trim them, but it feels companionable, to look out into its leaves.

I thought my neighbor had planted the tree or requested that the tree be planted. He’s a great lover of trees and plants and stray cats. The process through which trees are planted in my town is a mystery to me. Mostly what seems to happen is that trees get cut down, the oldest ones, especially. I still mourn the two oaks beside the courthouse. I wonder where that village of birds and squirrels have gone.

“No,” my neighbor said. “I didn’t plant it. I didn’t ask the city to plant it. They just showed up one day and put it in the ground.” I like to think it’s some strange bureaucratic error that brought the tree to us.

The tree cut down in England was a sycamore and in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard says sycamore is the most beautiful word in the English language and I have always agreed with her. She goes on and on about a sycamore tree in that book. It’s a character. She sits under it. She goes back to it. It carries revelation, this tree. She is in dialogue with the sycamore at Tinker Creek.

Sometimes when I’m out for a walk around town, I’m stopped in my tracks by the beauty of a tree. The pattern of it’s bark. The twisting of its branches. When I’m feeling bold, I touch their trunks. Who cares if people think it’s strange? I touch the fuzzy fruits on the magnolia. The strange growths on the sad little oak tree trying to grow in a long stretch of bare, sun-bleached pavement. I can’t tell you precisely what this touch accomplishes. Is it for me or the tree? I know only that when we are little, we need to touch all the trees. We need to touch all the leaves and the flowers and the grass and the stones and the dirt. There is a wisdom in that need.

When I am strongest…when I am most well, I find I can carry moments like those with me through the day like home or a lighthouse beacon that brings me back to myself. A leaf that appeared to float and dance, suspended by a spider’s web. A vulture that appeared over my head as I walked around campus. The cardinal out my bedroom window in the morning.

On the best days, these images linger. I go back to them, again and again. I carry them with me. And by revisiting them, they expand. They spread like mushrooms through my consciousness until my hours are bathed in these bursts of light. I don’t know what they add up to. I know they take up the space where other worrisome thoughts might grow. I know they are thoughts that feel like a warm drink on a cold day. They are, in other words, a comfort.

Like the image of that sycamore tree, which I never saw and now never will. Maybe they’ll get it to regrow, but it won’t be the same and it will be many, many years before that image returns. But when we see that picture, the tree against the horizon, no one needs to tell us what to feel about it. No one needs to tell us what it means. We know. Trees grow in hellstrips and forests and sheer cliffs and cracks in concrete and along a wall that is thousands of years old. We understand, somewhere deep inside ourselves, that this is magic. A magic that has nothing to do with us and maybe that’s why the boy cut down the tree. He understood its power and was frightened. Or jealous.

Maybe he didn’t have any of those moments to carry with him, to still the dull droning of the ugly thoughts. Maybe he could no longer feel the solace that is lying down in a field or dipping your toe into a cool stream. Maybe it had been too long since he’d stopped and laid his hand against the trunk of a tree and smiled.

If there are any sociology, gender studies or social science instructors out there, I’m doing a webinar next week for SAGE Talks, Thursday, Oct. 12 at 12 pm EST on…Barbie! And how to use Barbie to teach core concepts in the sociology of gender like intersectionality, media theories and occupational segregation. It’s free, but you need to register here.