By Ammi Midstokke
Cover photo courtesy of Rachael Baker
In the middle of the high desert forests of Central Oregon stands the tallest ponderosa ever recorded. It is named Big Tree. Recently, its top got blown off and someone found yet another enormous ponderosa nearby and named that one Phalanx. Both trees are over five hundred years old.
Surrounding these trees are the generations of their family, from other multicentenarians to the tender shoots of last year’s germinating seeds. A fence prevents me from running my hands down the gnarled bark, red and prehistoric with great scars and unspoken history told in knots and whorls of wood. It makes me nostalgic for something: a past that passed long before I took my first breath.
There’s a word for this: Anemoia—the yearning for a time or place one has never known.
It’s why I sink into, disappear into, books that capture nature as it might have been before the parasite of humanity did what it does best: build strip malls so we never have to drive more than 20 minutes to a TJ Maxx.
I’ve lost myself this way recently in a four-hundred-year-old Massachusetts hovel, created by Daniel Mason in his novel “North Woods.” Mason captures the innocuous ways in which small things can change history. The seed of an apple, swallowed by an ill-fated soldier, germinates from within an earthy grave. The changes in the landscape over time, and the shifting inhabitants of the land, birth an orchard that arrives, thrives, and expires into spent and worn and spindly trees. We are carried through time and nature, in the vessel of this piece of land, from Revolution to the F-series, from the birth of one forest to the death of another.
The land itself is alive—a character—in such stories, a reminder that we overlook nature as a living, breathing thing. A thing that is recording history much more patiently than we do, if only we would pause to listen to it. It is what Muir compels us to do in “My First Summer in the Sierra,” written in the early 20th century, when the mountains were only traveled across by settlers, not through by wanderers. The Indigenous people who knew those mountains were long sequestered into reservations and “rancherias,” many of their own stories of a land before colonization lost to population decimation and assimilation.
We can visit the past by reading the books written in the past, those that curiously explore the possibility of extinction, but don’t yet wonder if humans are to blame. We can visit it through the deft craft of writers who take us back to an imagined world, where the Sequoia forests and their millennia-old crowns were not interrupted by a vein of roads and swaths of logging carnage.
Or, we can go sit with the trees and listen. In Utah, the world’s largest living organism is a tree named Pando that has spread to cover 106 acres of over 47,000 trees, connected by a single root system. It is estimated to be around 14,000 years old. Which is when Lake Bonneville breached, flooded the Snake River plain, and marked a climate shift. Pando was 1,000 years old before the first humans arrived, and twice that much when the last woolly mammoth wandered by.
It is ironic and circuitous that I’m inspired by paper pages harvested from the very place I am led back to. I can’t help but think things would be different if we learned to read directly from the trees themselves. We ought to all try it more ….
Ammi Midstokke recently wrote about literature on the history of taxonomy. She will spend this season treading water, learning to sail, and completing a manuscript.
