These have of late been some very long days of working at my computer, hunched over the little tables in the common space of the guesthouse, doing work on and off the internet to make sure my research plan will be both feasible and fruitful. Tonight after a long, long, long day in the very 70’s style lounge chair that has effectively constituted a “desk chair” for my work here I found I was in serious need of a break, and feeling a little low in spirit due to the slow rate of progress in my research. As I paused for a moment to lean back over the spongy plastic of the seat to crack and stretch my back, I noticed with pleasure that the wind had picked up and was beginning to blow through the open windows, at long last cooling the damp tendrils of hair which have clung to the back of my neck almost since I landed in Nepal. It was going to rain.
I have had an intense love of precipitation in all its splendid forms for as long as I can remember, and have never seen a storm I did not like. I am a particular fan of rain and snow, especially when accompanied by lightning, thunder, or hail, and have always struggled to understand the people who groan as it commences. To me, weather is magical, and to wish it away…bad juju, at the very least. The weather is one of so few remaining sources of change that we humans have not yet brought to heel – I hope we never, ever come to control the climate. To my mind, having so few things against which man is powerless induces a kind of cockiness into our species, which makes us fallible. Instead we need and should crave these regular doses of nature’s power to put us back in our place which, to my mind, should not always be at the top. Rainy wedding days be damned – Fred Astaire and Ginger Roberts had it right – we need to learn to stop trying to always be perfectly in control, and spend more time out dancing in the rain.
And so, eager to see, smell, taste, and maybe even dance in the rain myself, I closed my computer and walked outside and along the forest’s perimeter as the wind picked up, watching how the air blew through the treetops, testing the strength of nascent leaf stems and revealed the white underbellies of leaves while my hair danced with eager anticipation over my head, delightfully out of my control. This wind, the fierce, indefatigable column of air that was moving around me, made me feel as if the world sighed with relief at the promise of a good quenching rainfall, when the sky darkened, and then waited with baited breath as the gift it sought was withheld. There would be no rain.
Instead of dancing in the rain, then, I turned in towards the forest, which flanks my guesthouse windows and the hillside behind the forestry school, and stared into it, hard. At the time I was completely unaware of the intensity of my concentration, but stood looking slowly over the ground and plant-life the forest contains, eyes roaming up, and over, and through the various layers of strata, thinking about the plants and trees and secrets it held.
I was recalling a conversation I had with my friend Jesse from school, shortly before we all parted ways for the summer. We had somewhat tangentially been talking about careers in the field and how they related (or don’t) to careers in the office, as well as the difficulty of choosing effectively between the two paths. Either I or Jesse (I no longer remember which of us it was) commented that the more you learn about the field you love, the more training and education you obtain in your area of specialization, the farther you remove yourself from the source of your passion, and the reason you selected that field to begin with. To develop professional know-how, attend well-known universities, and work effectively for organizations and offices with strong brand associations is to send yourself farther and farther into the offices and the policy and the management and paperwork, and turn decidedly away from the hiking boots, campfires, field culture, and community of field scientists that made you choose this life’s work when you began it. It is a decision I am loathe to make, but one which confronts us all. To be promoted, in professional conservation work, is to go increasingly far from the things and places which are most dear.
My long look into the forest also made me think of what we students referred to as “TNC Day,” this semester, when staffers and the president of the Nature Conservancy descended upon our brand new eco-friendly school building, Kroon Hall, and did presentations on their work, their approach, and what it is like to work for TNC. I attended several parts of the larger event, including a lunchtime panel discussion attended by both the organization’s bigwigs and some of the state-level staff. In commenting on the presentation being given, for a warm up laugh, one of the presenters pointed to a compelling image of a happily bubbling, back-lit brook in a forest, and said, “I’m sure this speaks to everyone here, but it’s not exactly what our day’s work entails. When we made this powerpoint yesterday, we were talking about how long its been since any of us have seen anything like this.” And as I watched, the other panel members chuckled wryly, and nodded in agreement.
It’s funny how stuff like that sticks with you. Instead of feeling amusement at a sentiment I can certainly relate to, I felt a mild degree of horror, and a strong impulse to run the other way, away from everything (environmental nonprofit management and conservation in particular) I have been so single-mindedly moving towards. I already know well how, once in a cubicle, surrounded by piles of paper, working on one of many small projects and trying to maximize your efforts and hours to achieve one tiny conservation goal for one small place, group, or organization, it is so easy to forget why you got yourself into conservation to begin with. How quickly one loses track of why the condition of the natural environment matters, and why it matters to you.
So perhaps it wasn’t so strange that as I stood there looking at the forest, I thought to myself, almost as a reassurance, “this is why I actually came here. Because I love the trees.” And it was a good and timely reminder, for sitting for days upon days while hunched over a computer, overheating in the sweltering weather while your hiking boots become stationary obstacles for your bedroom’s rodent community, is not in the least inspiring. But forests – forests I can get behind. Forests are so deep, and beautiful, and mysterious, with innumerable processes happening at any one time, most of them invisible to our human eyes until we train them to search them out. I have been moved by forests since I was a child, and have sought to study forest ecology since the very first day I realized how much of a source of inspiration they are, for me.
I remember how during college I stood out on the sandy point of an outcropping in the Galapagos Islands, in the midst of unbelievable natural beauty, warm weather, cool breeze, and brilliant, brilliant blue ocean, and felt the absence of…something…so keenly. I couldn’t name it, at first, but for its absence I disliked the Galapagos, and couldn’t emotionally engage with them the way my friends did. It wasn’t until a few days later, when we drove up into the highlands of one of the occupied islands to see Lonesome George, the last land tortoise of his species, and passed through the low elevation forests of that island, that I could put my finger on what it was that had been missing. I was missing the trees.
And I am not a fan of just any old tree. I am a fan of the interestingly symmetrical ones, the outlandishly large and proud ones, the kind I can climb, and those that sport epiphytes (plants that grow on trees) and little floral and faunal communities all their own in the crooks of their branches. I love the trees that flower in stunning and unexpected ways, those that I can’t quite reach my arms around, and those that bend and wave in the wind. I love the trees of the Sierra Nevada, which, when down, were as “tall” as I am in their diameter alone, and the trees of Costa Rica, with the crazy latticework of the ficus, which is called matapalo (which means to kill wood) or “strangler fig” for the way it capitalizes on other trees’ growth to get up into the canopy. I love the dark spruce of Alaska’s boreal forest for the way they hide and shelter the life there, and I love the little shrubby, long-thorned bushes of southeastern South Africa, called “spekbom” by the locals, out of which any moment an entire herd of elephants might emerge, without notice. I love both plants and trees.
I have had a favorite tree in every place I’ve lived, in every house and every place of employment or study, for as long as I can remember. At Yale it is a huge, colossal pine, proud and tall and beautiful, which sneaks in along the perimeter of one of the science buildings, whose own scale masks the pine’s height and distracts the eye from its stature, right adjacent to where those familiar with Yale’s campus will be accustomed to finding the cupcake truck. It is also the large deciduous tree that flanks the Marsh Hall parking lot, predating the parking lot’s construction by far, and which you can see straight down into from the aerial perch that is that building’s cupola. I love in particular that the building and tree compliment one another so well – Marsh on its many floors gives you visual access to every element of that which the tree holds in its boughs.
In DC it was the towering old elm that was next to the back porch, whose leaves would be lit up as a greenish yellow by the outdated streetlights that ran along the alley behind 14th Street, and whose pollen doused my back porch and rendered my housemates squeaky voiced and sulky with allergies. Spunky squirrels inhabited that tree’s ancient branches, occasionally making a sudden, spontaneous appearance on part of our porch, scaring themselves as much as they startled us. In my hometown in New Jersey it was the Japanese Cherry Blossom tree on my front lawn, and the two big Red Oaks which towered over our house out back, protecting it; in the Catskills region of New York, where my grandmother’s cottage was, it was the towering, wisened old pines, obscuring all light from the front of the house, rendering the front lawn dead to all but its own shed needles, with nary a shoot of green in sight. In between there were the trees of my college campus, so many of them towering and gorgeous that it is hard to pick just one as a favorite. But if I had to choose I’d pick one of the amazing, beautiful trees out and along the road to Houghton House, our art building, many of which were of a scale not to be witnessed anywhere else on campus, or in the region.
My love for trees makes me a crappy backpacker. I am just as happy walking into the forest, sitting down, and making myself comfortable, as I am with trekking through it all day. I found that I was tremendously gratified recently when, on our last group outing, Gil and Katrina and I all admitted to one another somewhat embarrassingly that, for us, it’s becoming less and less about racking up the miles and checking off the trails, and more and more about just being in the woods. After we spied a couple with a well-established campsite in the backcountry in New York, with tarp firmly attached to the tree and freshwater fetched from a nearby bubbling stream, I decided in the future my backpacking trips should consist of a one day on, one day off schedule – one day to hike the usual 10-12 miles, one day to explore every bit of the forest around me. One day to hike 10-12 miles, one day to play in the woods…
When as a young adult I first became conscious of the fact that I was almost de facto entering into a professional field that focused on something so plain sounding as vegetation, I felt as if I was in a way settling for second place, passing up all the world’s fantastic fauna: lions and tigers and bears, baboons and whales and frogs, manatees and bats and pandas and voles, to spend entire summers of research focusing on grasses, legumes, and forbs, as I did in Minnesota, the effects of burning and cutting National Forest trees, as I did in California, or on a whole hell of a lot of different types of vegetation on the tundra of Alaska, where there are no trees. “Who gets excited about vegetation?” I wondered after someone asked me what I’d actually been doing for work in Alaska at a party one night, and I lost them after the first five words. Right around “vegetation.”
But here I am studying vegetation, excited about plants, and forests, and trees, and look where it has taken me. To Minnesota, to California, to Alaska, and to Costa Rica, Nepal, and indirectly, to South Africa. Most of my international travel has been fully paid for through work or research, and I am so privileged, at the moment, to be living in Nepal to study trees, and they way they grow as a result of the decisions we make to manage them. What great luck, I think now, to have fallen for vegetation.
And so I stood there in the face of the forest, admiring how it crawled up the huge slope and curved down and around its spine, to cover the backside of the hill in thick sweeps of green, like a royal mantle, a cloak. I tilted my head back slightly as the wind once again blew in the promise of a storm, and looked into the canopy as bits of vegetation and birds were blown from tenuous perches and out to meet the rest of the world. I stretched my arms out from my sides just a little, enough for them to be caught by the wind and pressed back and away from my sides, and I grinned.
And as I stood there, hanging in the wind and drinking in the scent of the forest, like a line out of a fairy-tale up walked a toothy little girl of about ten, hair in two black pigtails up and above her head, red ribbon bows neatly tied around each bundle of hair. In my memory she is wearing a blue dress tied at the waist, as Dorothy or Alice or Goldilocks or any number of other inquisitive little girls have worn, but in reality I believe it was a school uniform in the form of a dark blue jumper and light blue shirt.
She smiled dreamily up at me without hesitation, unconcerned by this peculiar bideshi leaning into the wind, and asked in good English, “what’s your name?” And I looked away from the forest long enough to smile back at her and say in Nepali, “Mero naam Meri ho.” My name is Meri. She looked into the forest in the direction I’d been staring, nodded in assent, and continued on her way down the little path. When I looked her way again she was walking slowly forwards, looking backwards over her shoulder now and then to see if I was still there, and grinning. And I for my part stood there and hoped for her that she might be one to find out for herself what there is to love in the forest around her home, and find it within herself to study and protect it. Maybe even just for the plain old, everyday love of trees.
-M-
