24—Roots

To: Friends and Family

Subject: Roots

From: walden@intermind.net

Continued from #22 and #23:

Something drew me back today to Bayocean and the road not taken—that road from the parking lot that stretches along Tillamook Bay. While Netarts Bay is smaller, with the more intimate feeling of a lagoon, Tillamook Bay is a wide expanse of water, perfect for the kind of holidays the town of Bayocean offered. For several hundred yards, the road from the parking lot ran straight and open to the sky, flanked on the east by the bay and on the west by a tangle of weathered pines and grasses. The air felt gray and heavy with the memory of last night’s rain and reflections on the town that fell into the ocean. A lone heron stood in the shallows, a hieroglyph of the distant but perpetual question of human existence.

Why did the Army Corps of Engineers agree to build only a single jetty at the mouth of Tillamook Bay when they knew the plan would fail without the second jetty to channel the water away from Bayocean?

Why do school personnel continue to implement policies that we all know are failing to give students the education they need and deserve? 
And why do We the People permit and peretuate such folly?

As a forested dune rose up to my left, the road narrowed into the understory. 

A town fell into the sea—and for no other reason than political and economic expediencies. 

For forty years, school policies have been based more on political and economic expediencies than on sound pedagogy and the well being of children. 

It would seem that in the ecology of human nature, as in the natural world, all is one.

Wandering deeper into the forest, I came upon a spruce tree that once stood on the four-foot-high bank that ran alongside the trail. With erosion of the bank, the tree fell, exposing a root system wider than my arm span. What was once a branch had become a standing tree. And the fallen trunk was now a bed for colonies of new plant life. Such a trunk is called a nurse log. As the nurse log decays, the new life within it grows.

A wind kicked up. 

The trees all around me began singing to each other, high and in timeless green, every twig, every branch, every limb moving to its own interpretation of wind, each moving around its one firmly rooted and concentrically aspiring purpose.

There are only two types of grief   the forest song said

bare branches alone against the rising or falling sun

bare branches quivering under a shifting Roarschach sky

Slam a door and you close a tree.

Open a door, and you know how trees love.

Morning begins, a question of light.

Dry trees know the fire....

The wind fell quiet. I stood among the trees wondering to what extent it might be possible to live outside all systems conceived by humankind, perhaps to emulate a tree—conceived in the mysteries of fire and stardust, finding my way through the eons of physics and chemistry to become alive in this moment, rooted through my veins and arteries into the heart of all creation.

I was distracted from my musings by an invisible movement through the thicket just past the fallen tree. I stopped. It stopped. I went on. It went on. After several starts and stops, I turned around. Not just because I felt uncertain and afraid, but because getting to the end of the trail simply to get to the end seemed irrelevant. I was tired of pursuing goals. 

Cambium: that thin layer under the bark a tree that manufactures the new tissue that increases the tree’s girth, ring by ring, every year.

www.city-data.com

Sapwood: the soft wood of a tree surrounding the inner core of heartwood. And what a great word—sapwood—to describe this process we call life. I mean, how much of the destruction and suffering brought on by our human follies might be avoided if we could simply laugh and shrug and hug ourselves and, by trusting in our higher nature, see ourselves as sapwood.

Which brings me to the heartwood: the dense, thick center of a tree, its inner core.

Herein lies the strength and majesty of old growth.

The surprising thing is that the heartwood is dead.

Yes, the past, for a tree at least, is dead. 

As I emerged from the forest, the heron was still there in the shallows, as if no time had passed. Or ever would. 

On my way home, I paused on the hill overlooking Bayocean. As I reflected on where I'd been, what I've been mulling over since arriving here two weeks ago became official: I’m leaving Las Vegas and moving here to Netarts. The people who own the house where I’m staying have said they would rent the place to me for two years. 

I still have four months on my apartment lease back in the town of cards, which should give me just enough time to dispose of all nonessentials and prepare for allowing the past to decay into new life. 

Next: Droppings