Anonymous
AH & JM:
Dear Anonymous,
I have lived through some scary storms. When I was just a red oak seedling, I felt wind down close to the ground, but I was protected: mostly I felt the movements of big trees whose crowns were capturing the wind and bearing the vibrations down through their trunks to the roots, then into the soil where I was growing. As I aged, my branches grew up into the canopy. Wind would blow me around in all directions. My small branches whipped back and forth rapidly. My large branches moved more slowly. Because all my branches moved at different speeds in the wind, they all moved in different directions, so their motions mostly cancelled each other out. I never felt as though I might topple.
I was protected not just by the fact that I was growing in a forest, but by the fact that the forest I lived in was dense with other red oaks, mostly my cousins and siblings. We grew to about the same height, and our branches clapped together in the canopy as they blew back and forth. This slowed their movements. Of course in big storms we often lost some branches, but this generally felt more like a haircut than anything else. Beneath the ground, our roots touched. Where my roots touched the roots of my relatives, they often fused. A large wind would have had to break one of us away from the others or tip us all over together, which it generally could not do. I never felt as though I would topple.
But even a community of trees is not invulnerable. An enormous storm once knocked down a whole group of older trees in the forest to the south of me and my family—oaks and cherries and hickories, mostly—all in one night. In another area of the forest, just a few years ago, wind toppled a 150-year-old white oak, roots and all. It was growing along the forest edge and the roots on one side could not graft to those of its neighbors. The ground around it was saturated with water from the rains, weakening the soil that cements a tree in place. Today you can still see the halo of roots on the base of that tree where it lies, and the divot it left in the earth when it tipped over.
Living close to many of your close relatives comes with some risks. When tree roots graft together, fungi can tunnel from one tree to the next, running up through the vessels that carry our water. And fungi that enter a tree through a wound can rot its heartwood, leaving it hollow and still living, but not as strong as when its trunk was solid all the way through. When the fungus puts out a mushroom, the spores it produces find more places to land and grow if there are closely related trees growing nearby. When we feel these fungi growing through our wood, we try to block up the vessels so the fungi cannot get through, but my red oak cousins and I are not so good at this (our more distant relatives, the white oaks, are very good at it).
And a tree that is weakened by fungi is more likely to fall. It can happen when you least expect it. One night 30 autumns ago when the wind was hardly blowing, and I was still hanging onto some of my dead leaves into winter as I liked to do, my trunk snapped. I felt the sound through every part of my body, loud enough that a tree a mile away might have heard it. I fell slowly at first, so I could not tell what direction I was heading. I hit the ground before I realized what was happening. Some of my nicest moss- and lichen-covered branches scattered across the forest floor. Others were driven into the earth like spikes. The living wood just beneath the bark where my trunk splintered felt raw and exposed. Surrounded by that ring of living wood was a cavity where I had grown rotten inside.
My senses diminished gradually after I fell. Each of my leaves was still alive for a while, drawing water from its branch, naively photosynthesizing, each in its own world, working quietly, doing its part to keep the tree growing. I still had live cells in my sapwood, my cambium, and my branch tips. Belowground, my roots were still alive. But we had no more growing to do. Over the course of several sunsets and sunrises, my leaves colored and fell one by one. My body above the earth slowly dried out. My body below ground stopped exploring the soil.
I never felt I might topple when the wind blew. Yet in the end I did. Today I am still lying on the ground on the slope where I was born, the carbon I absorbed while I was alive seeping into the soil or evaporating back into the atmosphere as I decompose. Eventually every molecule within me will dissolve into this place where I lived or be metabolized into carbon dioxide, only to be breathed in by everyone on earth: the sedges, the millipedes, the fungi, the bacteria, and you.
With best wishes,
A red oak
(translated by Andrew Hipp and Dr. Jake Miesbauer, Research Scientist in Arboriculture, The Morton Arboretum)
