Alternate Routes Through the Woods
Let me start by saying: I am not a tree scientist. I’m barely a tree enthusiast. I love trees for what they do for the planet, for their shade and beauty and fruits and nuts and scents. I respect them for their age and grit. But that’s as far as the relationship really goes.
I was hiking in a new woods this week — new to me, of course, not to the world. It was a kind of emergency hike. I was obsessing over some piece of vague foreboding that I had no control over, and while I could see the pointlessness of this mulling, I could not talk my brain into dropping the subject. This shapeless gray concern threatened to cloud over my entire day.
This hike was, essentially, me begging Mother Nature to slap some sense into me.
It worked, more or less.
For starters, the trail itself greeted me with this sign:
I laughed out loud. First of all, where has this sign been all my life?
Secondly, and more to the point: the route it pointed to was the only route in sight. So off I went.
In the city this past year, I’ve walked past sidewalk shrubbery and wall-climbing vines that seem to have exploded with growth in the absence of regular human attention. I’ve seen kaleidoscopes of butterflies, and swarms of bees, and hummingbirds taking a break for a minute on top of a hibiscus bush. (I didn’t know hummingbirds were able to do that, to just sit still. I kind of thought they were like certain sharks, always in motion. But no, they can chill. I’ve seen it.) All this peace and quiet, a year of being left more or less alone; I think the city plants and animals probably enjoyed the change of pace.
The woods, on the other hand, is used to doing its own thing, the few trails that cut through it at constant risk of being washed out or overgrown by a brazen and powerful natural world. Despite this fact, and even though I’d never hiked this trail before, I found myself interpreting every unusual growth or unexpected sight as the product of this bizarre past year. All around me, I felt, was the story of what the forest had been up to while we were away. It’s the kind of thought process that crumbles under even the lightest scrutiny, but I guess my subconscious was just trying to get the forest onto my level.
And if I hadn’t been thinking this way, maybe I wouldn’t have related so entirely to this tree:
Forgive me, tree scientists, if I am wrong here. But what I see when I look at this tree is this: Something that was forced into a new, unusual direction and, instead of rotting away to dust, it decided to send out roots and try living in a new way.1
For the past two weeks, I keep on talking and reading about the same questions. We are starting to experience pangs of hope for the near future. Like the sweet pain of stretching a tight muscle, it’s not an entirely comfortable sensation. As we reenter the world — maybe it’s our social community, maybe it’s school, maybe it’s work, or all of the above — What are we going back to? There are things, places, and people that we cannot have back, or at least not in the way we had them before.
On top of all of this: Is there anything that we don’t want back?
I have a lot of my own answers to these questions. In the arena of work, for example. This year has taught me how much I love to collaborate with other people in person. But it’s also given me the unexpected gift of learning to “hang out” with friends in different time zones, and of making and meeting new friends on other continents. One day a few weeks ago, I walked past a local coffee shop and was delighted to see a friend sitting there who I thought had moved away; we chatted for a bit, and then I went home and had a meeting where some attendees were in Brazil, Spain, Egypt, and Canada. Both of these things were, in their own way, miraculous. I want to keep them both. Maybe, there’s a way forward where I can.
Oh, the many platitudes about change. Change is hard, inevitable, the only constant, good, scary. A forced, truly global change is all of those things on steroids (and we can add in that omnipresent buzzword, “unprecedented”). I want to mourn for the lost past, but the higher ground I always find myself scrambling for is, “Okay, if this is how things are: now what?”
I — we — have no choice but to grow our roots sideways. The only other option is to rot away, and that’s really no option at all.
— Marissa
P. S.
Since it’s Easter Monday, some humor from McSweeney’s regarding re-entering the world (thanks, Russ!): How to Manage Anxiety Around Reentering Society After Your Crucifixion and Resurrection by Catherine Elder
Full disclosure: the top of this trunk was cut off to clear the pedestrian trail. Surely there’s a whole other, darker metaphor there, but let’s just run with my initial impression, shall we?