The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2018 (The Best American Series ®) by Sam Kean

Author:Sam Kean
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2018-10-01T16:00:00+00:00

PAUL KVINTA

David Haskell Speaks for the Trees

FROM Outside

DAVID HASKELL’S BRADFORD PEAR tree stands at the northwest corner of 86th Street and Broadway on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and when we meet there one afternoon in July, he mentions that he hasn’t spent quality time with the tree in nearly three months.

The previous occasion he visited, he and his girlfriend, Katie Lehman, were traveling by car to Maine from Sewanee, Tennessee, where Haskell is a professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of the South. They parked on the street, made their way to this corner, and proceeded to loiter, since there’s nowhere to sit. It was late in the day. Trucks and buses barreled down Broadway. Sirens wailed. Pedestrians flowed past the tree, faces in their phones, while below ground the Seventh Avenue Express hammered by. The tree’s fallen white blossoms whirled in the evening gusts, and discarded wads of gum littered the dirt at the base of its trunk. For an hour and a half Haskell watched. He listened. Then he and Lehman got back in their car and drove to Maine.

“It was amazing sharing the tree with Katie, introducing her to this creature I’d spent so much time with,” Haskell tells me now. “To be able to wrap other people into my relationship with the tree, and the tree into my relationship with other people—it’s very enriching.”

Introducing me to the tree, then, is a pretty big deal.

“This is it,” he says, beaming.

We eyeball the tree.

“Yes,” I say.

It’s not exactly beautiful. It’s not exactly ugly. It reaches maybe 30 feet tall, with an oval canopy of dark waxy leaves and a gray trunk streaked green with algae. A couple of diseased limbs have been removed, leaving pitted nubs. It grows in front of a Banana Republic, between a newsstand and some newspaper boxes, and nearby there’s a flight of stairs leading down to the 86th Street subway platform. At the base of the trunk, some well-tended pink and white periwinkles share a patch of dirt with two cigarette butts, half a grape, a plastic drink lid, and a couple of straws. Locked to the short iron fence that surrounds the trunk is a blue bicycle missing its seat. Another Bradford pear sprouts from the sidewalk 30 feet north of this one, then another one north of that, then another. There are six of them on this block alone.

Haskell’s tree is utterly average.

He is not offended by this assessment. In fact, it’s one of the reasons he includes the Bradford pear in his book, The Songs of Trees: Stories from Nature’s Great Connectors, which comes out in April. “This tree appeals to me because it’s a regular street tree,” he tells me. “There are some trees in Manhattan that are famous, like the 9/11 Survivor Tree. People actually travel great distances to see that tree. No one travels to Manhattan to see this tree.” Except Haskell. And now me.

He had invited me to spend a couple of days with him here.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.