Following the Water by David M. Carroll

Author:David M. Carroll [Carroll, David M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

A DAY IN THE SHADOW OF A PINE

Junto a las aguas quietas

Sueño y pienso que vivo.

[By quiet waters

I dream and think that I live.]

—Luis Cernuda

19 APRIL. I touch the morning sun where it touches the furrowed and plated bark of the pine. Sunlight finds its way through the tree's dense crown to warm the trunk and enhance its resinous scent. Sun warms the color as well, shifting small illuminations, washes of gold over lavender-gray here and there in the prevailing cool, deeper violet cast of white pine bark in shadow. How many suns are there in the day? Sunrise, morning sun, the sun at its zenith, afternoon sun, sunset, and all those intermediate points. There is a sun for every season and all gradations of them. This pine has not yet attained half its potential girth and height, but still the sun of nearly a century's seasons has played over its bluish green crown, marking the turnings of all those days.

Touching trees has always grounded me. Before I knew their names I knew them by their feel, by the colors and textures of their leaves and bark, the ground on which they stood. As I spent nearly all my time in turtle places, the trees I touched were mostly those of swamps. In the same way I came to know the shrubs, more numerous and diverse, which my hands were constantly gripping for a necessary physical steadying, as well as for other groundings. Trees and shrubs were something to take hold of in an insubstantial world, something to provide me rootings and something by which to take root. In time I came to know the names they had been given. I couldn't get enough of learning their names, common and scientific and eventually even in the foreign languages I studied.

Black bears mark trees, rubbing, biting, and clawing them to designate their territories. I touch trees, my signal trees, most of them sentinels marking points where I enter or depart from a marsh or swamp. I touch them at each coming and going throughout the seasons. When I can reach a shaft of sunlight striking a tree's bark, I place my hand there. Other trees mark a place along the way in my wetland circuits. At the same time they mark a station in the seasons. Some I touch day after day for weeks on end, others but once in several years. Some I have touched only once in decades; some I will never touch again because they have been taken away or because I cannot bear to go back to where they stand. Storms and lightning have taken some—there is no loss in this.

I am in the quiet here, the silent now of this slowly moving shadow. Time stays with me awhile. There is always a sense of returning for me in such a place. I come back again to tree bark and shadow, intervals of bird song and silence, the voice of the wind, the streamlet in its silent slipping by .

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