The Tree In Changing Light (14 page)

Trees and people were of the same spark, the essence of light made conspicuous in material existence. A tree's woody skeleton and the human frame returned the gift, craving light for growth.

Nothing until the end stopped the tree taking light and sending the light down through itself.

 

Watching a baby in its first year of life, the comparison with a seedling crinkling open or a bud unfolding was made.

 

‘It is clearly possible to do without them, for the great companionship of the sea and sky are all that sailors need; and many a noble heart has been taught the best it had to learn between dark stone walls. Still if human life be cast among trees at all, the love borne to them is a sure test of its purity.'

 

Buds appeared along the living branch, and which of these buds flourished and by how much determined the shape of the tree. Holding a twig against the tree was to see the tree.

 

In their school magazine the Year 12 girls stated their life's wishes: ‘To touch a star'; ‘To be infectiously happy'; ‘To be taller than the tallest poppy'; ‘To be satisfied with my life when I reflect in old age'.

As for ourselves, so for the tree. ‘Everything in the world must excel itself to be itself.'

 

‘The young girl lies straight, bending neither at waist nor knee, the sheet rising and falling over her in a narrow unbroken wave, like the shape of the coverlid of the last sleep, when the turf scarcely rises.'

 

This also was the tree.

 

The tree goes flying along without straying from its place; the tree goes talking in the wind, tossing its crown; the tree awaits inspiration. The tree creates a balancing act, a strain of opposing forces. Under pressure a tree falls in on itself. Then it is renewed for a time. Then it dies.

 

‘Some big old Boabs become quite hollow, but still they bear foliage and continue to flower and fruit. I have seen one, about eighty kilometres west of Fitzroy Crossing, that has spread so wide and lost so much of its filling that it seems to have forgotten that it is a tree. The trunk now consists of a rambling, lumpy wall enclosing space. The interior is open to the skies, and you can peer into it through holes high in the wall. In the bottom of the sunny hollow grow grasses and other plants whose seeds have found their way inside and germinated. Were there only a doorway, you could stable horses in this tree, and not have to worry immediately about
supplying them with feed. And still the tree lives.'

 

At night I climbed the ringbarked paddocks with a galvanised iron bucket of hot ashes, carrying fire from tree to tree, shovel-ling coals through the doorways in roots. Fired trees smoked all day like old people's cottages. Next night they blazed red, collapsing in pillars of flame. Before daylight they poured themselves down in piles of embers that glowed like cities.

 

‘On the lower slopes, and far up every glen, the Spanish chestnut-trees stood each foursquare to heaven under its tented foliage. Some were planted, each on its own terrace no larger than a bed; some, trusting in their roots, found strength to grow and prosper and be straight and large upon the rapid slopes of the valley; others, where there was a margin to the river, stood marshalled in a line and mighty like the cedars of Lebanon. Yet even where they grew most thickly they were not to be thought of as a wood, but as a herd of stalwart individuals; and the dome of each tree stood forth separate and large, and as it were a little hill, from among the domes of its companions.'

 

In midlife Boris Pasternak dismissed his earlier style as obscure and pretentious. But everything could be said of his work that could be said of a tree, that in it the natural seemed supernatural. So his earlier work survived the self-condemnation. All that was past remained present, with life
returning ‘with as little reason as once it was so strangely interrupted'.

He wrote of Mayakovsky:

 

‘It was as if he existed on the day following a terrific spiritual life lived through for use in all subsequent events, and everyone came upon him in the sheaf of its unbending sequences.'

 

Digging out the old well, the deeper I went the smaller the ring of sky grew above me. In that circle the growth-tips of poplars were visible. Meantime below, their roots were massed like heathen hair, red and furious, ball-hard as I axed them free. Sandy-blue water trickled into my boots. My head sank from sight, and anyone passing, calling, missed me. What if I drowned, smothered, got buried alive as the walls caved in? My mother told me how well-diggers moved around the countryside in the nineteenth century. I made a decision, trusted my predecessors, and pressed on with it. At intervals I used the firefighting pump to suck the well dry. The stonework of granite blocks was smooth and glistened freshly after one hundred and forty years. Digging out the old well was a satisfaction I was unable put into words. It was all there in my hands, at night in my dreamless sleep.

Whenever I looked up, it was to remember who had planted those poplars years before. They'd started as thin whips when I first planted them. Now they were like wharf piles. Whenever I looked down, there I was tracking their roots. In the honeycomb rock at the bottom the roots kept unravelling. Scrawling against the sky, they were something I'd written.

‘Sometimes I cannot but think of the trees of the earth as capable of a kind of sorrow, in that imperfect life of theirs, as they opened their innocent leaves in the warm spring-time, in vain for men; and all along the dells of England her beeches cast their dappled shade only where the outlaw drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase; and by the sweet French rivers their long ranks of poplar waved in the twilight, only to show the flames of burning cities on the horizon, through the tracery of their stems; amidst the fair defiles of the Appenines, the twisted olive-trunks hid the ambushes of treachery; and on their valley meadows, day by day, the lilies which were white at dawn were washed with crimson at sunset.'

 

Trees clung to life and kept thrusting out growth to the end. The moment of completion was the beginning of the end of the tree's life, as it died from the top downwards while still obeying the imperative to stay fully alive. When a tree canopy reached maximum size it was balanced with its resources but the tree continued adding new layers of wood. It was a process of dying down, redefining dying as growth, that may have taken centuries after the tree reached its prime—ensuring that trees stood ever beyond us even as they sheltered and warmed us.

 

The aliveness of trees was a discipline and an economy, whereas our human aliveness led us to deny (in trying to overcome)
environmental effects. This way we made ourselves richer to the detriment of our surrounds. We burned trees in our hearths and burned them for agriculture. We gained room for contemplation (otherwise no culture). But our comfort in denial was transitory. The tree submitted to a more ruthless penalty and perfected its beauty, branches bared to the light of the sun.

 

Light, upon which the tree depended, and which the tree's function was botanically described as being solely to catch, stood blazing behind the tree and the tree disappeared.

The lines beginning ‘No genuine book has a first page' (on p. vii) are from Boris Pasternak, quoted in
Twentieth Century Russian Poetry
, edited by Albert C. Todd and selected by Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Doubleday, New York, 1993).

 

In ‘Planting Out' and throughout this book many botanical observations are gratefully acknowledged to Peter Thomas,
Trees: Their Natural History
(Cambridge, 2000); Andreas Feininger,
Trees
(The Viking Press, New York, 1968); John Salmon,
The Native Trees of New Zealand
(A.H. and A.W. Reed, Wellington, 1980); and John Ruskin,
Modern Painters
1843–1860, Volume V (George Allen, London, 1897) (all further references to Ruskin are from the same source).

‘The tree grew not by stetching …' is from Ruskin.

The image of moths is from the photograph ‘Moths on a windowpane', by Olive Cotton (1995).

The lines starting ‘Too much rain' are the poem ‘Crown', by Kay Ryan, published in
The New Yorker
, 22 May 2000.

 

‘Where the Fire Has Been' was originally commissioned for Gregg Borschmann's
The People's Forest
(The People's Forest Press, Blackheath, New South Wales, 1999). The family history in this chapter owes much to my mother, Dr Lorna McDonald (b. 1916), writer, historian, and exemplary country-woman; and to my uncle, Rev Graeme Bucknall (1909–1997). In relation to my father, Rev Hugh Fraser McDonald (1909–81), when I ask ‘What was his tree?' it is a question of a kind men put to their fathers usually too late for any personal exchange. (Though when E.O. Wilson, in his autobiography
Naturalist
, wondered of his long dead father what his ideal was—the template he fell short of fulfilling, which the son could use as an example years later—it was a kind of reply.)

 

‘Life of a Tree Planter' is dedicated to the memory of Wilf Crane and I thank Colleen Crane very much for accepting it.

 

Writing thumbnail sketches of inspired tree planters was my original plan for this book. For ‘Bush Gardener' and ‘The Red Bull' I thank Tom Wyatt and Robert Campbell. My thanks go to Tom Carment for ‘Trees Without Names'.

 

I am grateful to Phil Cheney for ‘Signs for the Gate'; references are from
Grassfires: Fuel, Weather, and Fire Behaviour
(CSIRO Publishing, Collingwood, 1997) by Phil Cheney and Andrew Sullivan; ‘Living With Fire' in
Think Trees, Grow Trees
(AGPS, Canberra, 1985); and
Burning Bush: A Fire History of Australia
(Henry Holt and Company, New York,
1991) by Stephen J. Pyne. The quotes starting ‘Once torched, the burning bush …' and ‘The fluffy ash accepts the falling seed …' are both from Pyne.

 

‘The Story of Rosie' is a true account with names changed, while ‘Secrets of Tu Bi-Shevat' and ‘The Park' are fiction.

 

‘Wild Man in Landscape' is based on the poetry of Roland Robinson (1912–92). Many of the words and phrases used are derived from three books of his poetry,
Language of the Sand
(1949),
Tumult of the Swans
(1953), collected in
Deep Well
(Edwards and Shaw, Sydney, 1962). I am also indebted to
The Drift of Things
(Macmillan, Melbourne, 1972), the first volume of his autobiography.

 

‘The Seed' is based on the early poems of Judith Wright (1915–2000). Many of the words and phrases are derived from
The Moving Image
(Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1946) and
Woman to Man
(Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1949).

 

In ‘At Sheep Camp' the image of galahs like town councillors is from a poem ‘Galahs' in
The Talking Clothes
(Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1966) by William Hart–Smith (1911–90).

 

In ‘At Ake Ake', the W.H. Auden poem, ‘If I Could Tell You,' is from
Collected Poems
(Faber & Faber, London, 1994).

 

The following notes refer to ‘Into the Light'.

 

In this final chapter the botanical references are the same as for ‘Planting Out', namely: Thomas, Feininger, Salmon and Ruskin (see note
here
).

‘The falling leaf is a whisper to the living' is an English proverb.

‘There is a beautiful type of neglect …' is from Ruskin, as is ‘From every leaf there was one slender fibre …'.

Some mangroves have ‘knee' roots (pneumatophores), as does the south-east USA bald or swamp cypress. There is a Caribbean ‘knee' tree in the Sydney Botanic Gardens, but the ground is not flooded and so the knees aren't up.

Angela Marshall saw the shimmering tree at Majors Creek in the unusually cold winter of 2000.

‘In very large trees, leaves were counted up to five million in number …' is adapted, with changed tense, from Thomas.

The walking coolabah trees I wrote about in
Shearers' Motel
(1992, republished by Vintage, Sydney, 2001).

The dream described was the subject of a poem ‘The Accusers' in my book
Airship
(University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1975), using almost identical wording as here.

The quotation ‘Longing to grow …' is from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.

‘The direct speech of feeling …' is an aphorism from Boris Pasternak.

‘The balance of the bough …' is from Ruskin.

‘To find nature herself …' is from Meister Eckhart, quoted in
The Tree of Life
by Roger Cook (Thames and
Hudson, London, 1974).

‘Depression is a husk covering the seed …' is from Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772–1811), quoted in
Rabbi Nachman's Stories
, translated by Aryen Kaplan (Breslov Research Institute, Jerusalem, 1983).

‘It is clearly possible to do without them …' is a passage from Ruskin.

‘Everything in the world must excel itself to be itself' is from Boris Pasternak,
I Remember, Sketch for an Autobiography
, translated by David Magarshack (Pantheon, New York, 1959).

‘The young girl lies straight …' is Ruskin's description of Carpaccio's ‘The Dream of Saint Ursula'.

The description of old Boab trees is by Pat Lowe,
Boab
(Lothian Books, Melbourne, 1998).

The description of chestnuts in the valley of the Tarn is from
Travels With a Donkey in the Cevennes
, 1879, by R.L. Stevenson.

Life returning ‘with as little reason …' is from ‘Zhivago's Poems' in
Doctor Zhivago
, by Boris Pasternak, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (William Collins, London, 1958). The description of Mayakovsky is from
Safe Conduct
, by the same author (Moscow, 1931), translated by J.M. Cohen (London, 1945). ‘When I was invited to say something about myself,' wrote Pasternak, ‘I would start talking about Mayakovsky.'

‘Sometimes I cannot but think of the trees of the earth as capable of sorrow …' is from Ruskin.