In Green Company
"And for all I know he is sitting there still, under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly. He is very happy."
This was first published in 2021. I wanted to revise and reshare it for newer subscribers.
I was an anxious child. In elementary school I’d chew through t-shirt collars. I remain relatively anxious: pace, schedule emails, get places early. Social gatherings can cause anxiety. A well-executed Irish goodbye is a joy—to surreptitiously abscond to a location known only to oneself.
When young, during family gatherings I’d climb a tree, spend the event behind leaves. I think of Andrea Cohen’s poem, “First Thought, Best Thought,” in Old Growth.
First Thought, Best Thought
I’m three or four,
hidden in the branches
of the cherry tree.
I don't ask: how
did I get here?
I don't fear falling.
The job of the blossom
is to bloom, to be
beautifully unschooled in ruin.
For a couple years I worked on the second floor of a college library. During breaks I’d walk—a version of pacing. To my truck, then a bench where I’d eat a pear. Finished with my pear, I’d walk more. Around a pond, back to the bench.
There’d be House Sparrows, Passer domesticus, in sumac. House Sparrows have their downsides but can be nice when you need a bird. A Cooper’s Hawk, Accipiter cooperii, would perch atop a fence. I’d roll the five-needle bundles of eastern white pine, Pinus strobus, in my fingers. Native Americans made flour of the bark, used the tree to treat wounds and illness, mixed its resin with beeswax to seal canoes. It’s the only pine in the east with five needles per fascicle.
My favorite pine is pitch pine, Pinus rigida. Three needles per fascicle. John N. Cullity writes, “I think the pitch pine is given the least respect of our native trees.”
Pitch pine has lots of pitch, hence the name. It was used for resin, turpentine, and axle grease. “Pine knots, when fastened to a pole, served as torches at night.” This “hardy species” does fine in dry, rocky soils “that other trees cannot tolerate.” You can find pitch pine “in dry, barren areas, even in the white sands of a beach.” Its twigs are fibrous, they don’t just snap. Per my Sibley Guide, Pinus rigida is the only pine with three needles per fascicle to also have fibrous twigs. The bark is chunky and plated. American starburst lichen is “almost restricted to pitch pine, jack pine, and Virginia pine in the east.” Needles can grow in tufts right from a pitch pine’s trunk. Large ones remind me of dragon necks.
On my walks I’d pass the sumac with the sparrows again and again. Staghorn sumac, Rhus typhina. I prefer winged sumac, Rhus copallinum. Wing-ed sumac. This pronunciation doesn’t always carry over. Golden-wing-ed Warbler? Golden-wingd.
It does carry over to White-wing-ed Scoter, Crossbill and Dove. Blue- and Green-wing-ed Teal. Blue-wing-ed Warbler, despite Golden-wingd Warbler. Blue is one syllable; golden, two. Gol-den-wing-ed? Too much. When Red-winged Blackbirds arrive, they’re Red-wing-ed. Redwing the more I see them.
Thinking about sumac, syllables, or pine takes me out of my head by permitting me to burrow further into it. Better to burrow into syllabic inanities—wingd vs. wing-ed—than whatever I could be preoccupied with.
If I got back to the library with time, I’d zig-zag through the stacks. How to Know the Ferns, Frances Theodora Parsons. A common naming convention for books. How to Know the Beetles; How to Know the Wildflowers; How to Know the Protozoa; How to Know the Minerals and Rocks; How to Know the Seaweeds.
One afternoon, I picked up Parsons’s book. “It seems strange that the abundance of ferns everywhere has not aroused more curiosity as to their names, haunts, and habits.” 2001 was the last time the book had been checked out. Before that, 1984, 1977.
Ferns add to my life. Looking for Wood Ducks and a Pileated Woodpecker, taking pictures of scat, I was surrounded by lady fern. It seemed improper to be stomping around in her. Lady Fern, like royalty.
Massachusetts fern, New York, hay-scented, bracken, ostrich, maidenhair, cinnamon, more. While fishing a stream, I noticed royal fern after a kingfisher flew by. Kingfisher, royal fern. Regal company.
Parsons hails royal fern as “perhaps the most beautiful member of a singularly beautiful group.” The best fern to me, as I’ve written, is sensitive. I devoured Parsons’s fernspeak. “From its creeping rootstock rise the scattered fronds which at times wear very light and delicate shades of green.” I took issue with her assertion: “There is nothing, however, specifically fragile in the plant’s appearance, and one is struck by the inappropriateness of its title.” Is it not possible sturdy-appearing things are sensitive? It’s one of the things I like best about sensitive fern.
An excellent book is Baseless. Nicholson Baker’s dive into biological weapons, uncovering truth via FOIA requests. By the aforementioned naming convention: How to Know Some of the Terrible Things That Were Concealed.
Baker intersperses details about his life in Maine between descriptions of atrocities committed for biological weapons research. We hear about his rescue dogs, Cedric and Briney, along with the seemingly mundane. “It’s wet and cold here. I’m looking at a bowl of tangerines on the kitchen table.”
What seem like mundanities provide reprieve from accounts of experiments on animals and sometimes human subjects. They’re a breath of fresh air.
How can such horrors as biological weapons, designed to spark famine and spread plague, exist in the same world as a bowl of tangerines and sensitive fern? As put in the New York Review of Books: “[Baker is] implicitly posing a set of intertwined questions about life and art: How are we to conceptualize the coexistence of the secrecy-shrouded horrors of modern war with all of our world’s little delights?”
I think of Ferdinand the Bull. Solitary Ferdinand, under his cork tree, smells the flowers. He ignores the roughhousing of his peers. They want to be taken to Madrid for the bullfights, five men come to pick one. Ferdinand goes to his cork tree to sit and smell the flowers. He sits on a bee, which stings him.
Wow! Did it hurt! Ferdinand jumped up with a snort. He ran around puffing and snorting, butting and pawing the ground as if he were crazy. The five men saw him and shouted with joy. Here was the largest and fiercest bull of all. Just the one for the bull fights in Madrid!
“Ferdinand the Fierce” is trotted out to much fanfare. In the ring he just sits, a horned Bartleby: I’d prefer not to. After seeing that the women in the crowd had flowers in their hair, he “just sat down quietly and smelled.”
There is no choice but to bring him home. “And for all I know he is sitting there still, under his favorite cork tree, smelling the flowers just quietly. He is very happy.”
For a while I thought we should strive to be like Ferdinand, but he is not a reasonable model. He’s a fictional bull in a story for children.
There’s a balance to be struck. You can’t just sit and smell flowers, can’t spend life in a tree.1 You can’t let your anxieties consume you either. Reality isn’t always anxiety-ridden. It can be lovely—ferns, birds, tangerines.
It is sometimes necessary to abscond; it is always necessary to return. Horrors and anxieties bring the good into focus. Baker’s book is about more than hog cholera, more than Cedric and Briney. They exist in the same world.
I originally wrote this years ago. Much has changed since. Worse, better, worse that became better, better that became worse.
Heraclitus’s words about change are cliche. “The only constant in life is change.” Cliches become so by capturing truth. Change can’t be avoided, but some things stay the same. Nature’s verdancy remains comforting—ferns, trees, the scent of flowers.
Bungkas tried. In 1970 he climbed a tree in Indonesia and built a nest. Far as I know he never came down. Googling him doesn’t yield much. Is he still up there? Alive?
It yields a math problem: “A man named Bungkas climbed a palm tree in 1970 and built himself a nest there. In 1994, he was still up there, and he had not left the tree for 24 years.” A villager throws him a newspaper straight up from 1.5 meters, with an initial speed of 12 m/s. Bungkas catches it at 3 m/s. What’s the height of his nest?
I really enjoyed this piece James. The style with which you brought us from one thoughtscape to another on slender threads, which then traced back into a beautiful woven whole. I also liked your comment about how cliches become so because they capture truth. That is a new thought for me, and I enjoy it.
This is the first piece I've read of yours. I liked it very much. Not only liked it, but felt myself calming down as I read. A good state with which to begin the day.
Thank you!