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Early Harvest

Barking up the wrong tree

The definition of wilderness has long puzzled me. It's relative, you may be surprised to learn. I say it's relative because I have spent so long developing an absolute view. For me, absolute wilderness is incompatible with human civilization. Wilderness must be endless. Maybe one planet isn't even enough. I want trees and wild animals without limit.

But there are limits. Today I was in a square in Arlington that everyone calls the circle (oh paradox, wouldst thou me?), and a row of trees was gently waving in the sunny breeze. They were lovely, but beyond them were apartments, and they would be so much lovelier if they concealed still more trees, and bigger trees, and prettier trees and more aweful great trees. But why? Is the beauty of one tree determined by the promise it offers of still more beautiful trees? There should be streams and rocks, and vistas of hills clad in still more trees and showing cliffs offering vistas in return.

Last fall I was on a pasture ridge looking across a valley, and closer at hand was a line of trees across a pasture, a road, and a corn field. One tree stood out for its fall foliage, bright among its neighbors. Again, undulating in the wind, colors shifting slightly, but always bounded by its limbs. The afternoon sun caught it just right.

In Yosemite, I was once hiking in the early snow. Picking my way through some unknown persons footsteps, because I was in sneakers, and on a ridge was a great pine, alone, with a bright reddish trunk. It was huge. I forget the species, but it was extraordinarilly beautiful, and so just right there by itself.

Great oaks more ancient than their neighbors living at the edge of abandoned roads and mid-forest rock ledges; glistening seaside balsam fir cones in the early summer; groves and groves of white pines I have loved; the biggest shadbush I've ever seen hanging blossomed over a stream-fed pond; the hillside beech I climbed on winter nights until I could see the stop lights on the highway miles away; and these are not even wilderness.

Let it be May. Wouldst thou me?