Tree-Hugging: A User's Guide for the Pandemic
Outside the living room windows, in the dark-before-dawn gray, the trees along the ridge sway as one in a mighty and warm southern wind. Determined clouds, backlit by a sinking full moon, roil and churn overhead on their way to somewhere while the spindly fingers of the trees’ uppermost branches clack madly into each other, their remaining leaves stripped and thrown to the ground. Halloween, held over one more day.
I just got a new raincoat—brilliant red and fleece-lined, perfect for layering when the temperatures drop—and as I suit up for the morning walk, I know it will get a workout today. Those determined clouds above me look swollen and if I’m caught in a downpour blowing sideways, I’ll be ready (and stylish, for however much that matters to any of the deer I might meet). Walking past the old rabbit hutches, the dual compost bins and the spot where we plan to dig the new outdoor privy, my hiking boots connect solidly with the earth as leaves blow in clusters across my shins like schools of brown crunchy fish. I feel great, filled with anticipation of yet another thirty minutes or so spent in the company of sentient living beings whose language I only know a little.
It’s only the first of November and there’s still plenty of autumn to be had. A few mulberry and ash in the meadow are dressed in leaves still completely green, and I pat their hopeful trunks as I walk by. It’s still summer. It’s still summer, they say, and I whisper along with them in a moment of tender longing and wistfulness. Wasn’t I just marveling at the colorful leaf-treasures at my feet a couple of weeks ago? We are fickle about the weather, no doubt. But today, with tree bones unadorned and all manner of squirrel condos now visible in their precarious perches along the upper landscape, I have other plans in mind. With the wind roaring and pushing against the oaks and walnuts of the meadow and woods, it’s time for some good honest tree-huggin’.
Our friend and brother, Kevin, showed us how to hug trees shortly after we landed here, quite spontaneous, actually, as he and the wind happened to show up the same day, and he asked if we’d ever experienced trees that way. We shook our heads and walked with him to the woods on the far northeast edge of the field. At the time, we still hadn’t been introduced to a lot of the different trees that lived there—buckeye, cherry, shagbark hickory, poplar, and my favorite, musclewood (botanically knows as carpinus caroliniana, and commonly known as hornbeam or blue beech). It’s trunk and branches have the look and feel of a gym rat’s sinewy arms, all smooth and ripped, and now whenever I get to that part of the woods, the walk would feel incomplete if I didn’t run my hands along a branch or two before moving along.
We found a mixed stand of young black walnut and ash, and with the wind blowing more fiercely than before, looked up at the swaying canopies that towered above us. Following Kevin’s movements, we each stood at the base of a tree and wrapped our arms around the trunk in a scissor-armed hug (one arm at an angle upward, the other in a downward position). “Wait for it”, he said, and sure enough, the next gust of wind caught the trees in a sway that slowly moved down their trunks until we were gently swaying along with them. The sensation was unlike anything we’d ever experienced. Clinging to this vertical highway of water and wood wrapped in bark, our torsos pressed into it all, we were along for the ride with our feet still planted firmly on the forest floor at the trees’ feet. For an added vertigo thrill, we tilted our heads back 90 degrees to gaze up into the branches as they caught the brunt of the wind’s push, back and forth…back and forth…(not something one should do for very long if one leans toward motion sickness). Some of these trees, young as they were, still stretched over thirty feet high. That’s a lot of height you’re wrapped around the base of, and when it all gets a-moving, best to mind your inner ear fluid and know when to unlatch.
This morning, watching the shadowy ridge trees just before dawn through the living room windows, I just knew being inside wasn’t an option. Of course, the north woods is older now, and its lanky residents have known their share of wind-toppling deaths. Some of the stronger trees have caught the others, but it’s still a dangerous enterprise to walk among them in a mid-autumn windstorm. Widow-makers dangle and perch above my head, and though they look weightless and innocent in the grooved-bark arms of a sturdy black walnut, they are unforgiving as they crash to the ground, taking out whatever or whoever stands below. I made my heart as humble as I could before stepping off the path and over the remains of the rusty razor wire fence into their Their World, touching a familiar musclewood on my way to the black walnut that was just the right size for a morning embrace.
No rain yet (though by now it wouldn’t have mattered), so I lowered the hood of the sweatshirt I wore beneath that brilliant red new raincoat, and removed the unicorn headwrap my godchildren gave me for my birthday. The sound of wind and hundreds of branches meeting in the air above me was constant and almost deafening. I checked the bark for any denuded poison ivy vines (not putting my arms around that, I can tell you) and moved in, arms open wide. Pressing my bare cheek against the tree’s rough skin, I wrapped around and held on, feeling that gentle sway. Almost imperceptible at first, it grew stronger as I bent my head back to get that dizzying view of its trunk narrowing skyward into those fingered branches. A shower of leaves swirled down, and time disappeared. Writing this, I barely remember the walk back to the house.
It’s been months since I’ve hugged anyone besides Patrick (not complaining at all, truly), and any full-torso reunions with the fellow humans in my circle are still not even visible on the blurry edges of the future we face together. I don’t know if any tree needs a hug from me, but in their own way, on a windy day, I think they hug back, a reassurance that life still courses through our respective veins and we’re all strong enough to stand as the storms blow through and past us. We’ll tenderly catch those who fall, and surrender to the strange and different beauty of a leafless season until spring comes.
Such wisdom is worth embracing in a gentle swaying hug. That’s gonna get me through the winter.
