What Time Is It?

When the world goes dark one Sunday afternoon, I have the strange sensation that we should have been expecting it.

Claire Kovac’s “What Time Is It?” is the third in a series of reported stories by new writers on the direct and indirect trickle-down effects of the Trumpocene in the Upper Valley, a region of New Hampshire, tilting right, and Vermont, strongly liberal, divided by the Connecticut River. You can read more about the series and theDartmouth College course out of which it emerged here.

If our first entry, “Larry and Arthur,” by Finn McNany, addressed the moment head-on through a portrait of two old activists, and our second, “Nothing is Holy,” by Ava Razavi, named the despair felt by so many, Claire Kovac’s approach is more like that of a slant rhyme. What’s that? From our syllabus:

Slant rhyme is a poetic term for a “type of rhyme formed by words with similar but not-identical sounds.” Also known as a “lazy rhyme,” which is apt since I just quoted that definition from Wikipedia. Lazy, indeed. But I’m glad I did because I found this delightful example, from a Sex Pistols’ 1977 punk anthem:

God save the Queen / the fascist regime.

Overstatement, perhaps, or maybe a perfectly imperfect rhyme, a recognition of the monarchy’s constriction of a deeper democracy. A following lyric reads:

There is no future / in England’s dreaming.

A different kind of overstatement, one that clarifies the meaning and literary potential of slant rhyme, the pairing of like/unlike sounds/images/ideas.

Claire Kovac’s slant rhyme is of the Trumpocene, this moment so shaped by Trumpism, with the much deeper time of dendrochronology, the practice of reading history in the rings of trees. Not that Claire is really counting tree rings. Rather, she began her inquiry with her own love of trees—here is a writer who since she was a child has spent free hours mapping the trees of where ever she found herself. The head-on question might have been about Trumpism’s effects on our forests. Claire had other questions. “What Time Is It?” is an allusion to now-old revolutionary rhetoric. Claire consider’s a tree’s answers.

—JS

What Time Is It?

By Claire Kovac

When the world goes dark one Sunday afternoon, I have the strange sensation that we should have been expecting it.

I abandon my perch in the sudden darkness of my dorm room and go to the windowsill. Leaning forward, I watch the leaves of the oak tree outside my window dripping in the rain.

The town-wide power outage seems almost fitting, I think, a physical embodiment of the long list of things going wrong, from student visa revocations to university funding cuts to speech suppression. I’m thinking about stories I’ve read, in dystopian novels and newspaper headlines, about how power outages and political unrest go hand-in-hand.

The cause is a mystery, but students are posting on the college’s anonymous messaging app about “cyber wars” and “Russian cyber-attacks,” about power outages across the globe. “Energy infrastructure has only a few software vendors, so once you can hack one you can hack them all,” an unknown classmate asserts in support of the Russian theory. This theory receives more than 100 likes. “It’s pretty accepted internationally,” writes another, “that an attack on a power grid is a major escalation. People die during power outages.”

There are jokes, too, about a coming apocalypse, about breaking into Novack, the campus cafe. “Y’all are so soft, if this was three years ago and the power went out, we would all just loot Novack,” says one with 500 likes.

I can’t tell how much of it is serious. It’s a little hard to believe that our rural New Hampshire town would be a Russian target. Sincere or not, though, these apocalyptic imaginaries are the real, immediate reaction to the power outage; there’s something about this moment in time, this atmosphere, that makes these the first conclusions we draw.

But we had forgotten about the trees.

When it’s announced days later that a pine tree had fallen on a power line, none of my friends believe it. A single tree, powerful enough to cut a whole town’s electricity? A single tree, dying without warning?

I puzzle over it. Why the death of a tree as an explanation feels so wrong. Perhaps it’s simply a question of age, of time—everyone knows trees live long lives. Sometimes they seem as unchanging as the landscapes of mountains and rivers.

I picture the pine, imagining it groaning in the wind, falling, falling.

Was it ready to die? Was this moment in time too much for it? What was “time,” really, to a tree?

******

I’m not gonna be some taxi driver, the forester had told me on the phone. It was a week after the power outage. I’ve got things to do, places to be. I’m not gonna be some taxi driver.

So there I was, scanning a parking lot for the forester’s silver Tundra Toyota from the driver’s seat of a borrowed beaten up old Saab, jumping every time a silver truck pulled in. I was a half hour early. The trucks were all Fords.

I had always loved trees – climbing them, reading about them, thinking about them. After the tree caused the power outage, I met with arborists: to understand people who loved caring for them. And now, I was meeting with a forester: to understand people who loved cutting them down.

It was raining, and Stuart-not-a-taxi-driver had almost cancelled, on my behalf it seemed. I’ve got sufficient rain gear to walk in the woods. But if you don’t have good rain gear – it won’t be much fun, he’d texted two hours before we were supposed to meet. It could’ve been kindness, could’ve been an attempt to flake, but to me, blinking in the parking lot in the gray early morning drizzle, it read like a taunt: a challenge for the city girl, the Dartmouth girl, the girl from “the bubble,” as he’d called it.

I didn’t notice Stuart had arrived until he’d noticed me. I was scribbling in my notebook when the truck pulled up right next to the Saab. He was hopping out before I got a chance to check if it was a Tundra.

The first thing I noticed was his suspenders. Later, I’d realize they were for waders, for the mud. He wore a frayed baseball cap and a toothy grin. Watery blue eyes and scruffy silver stubble. He was talking right away. “You know what, let’s drop your car off in a parking lot twenty minutes from here,” he said. “I don’t think it’ll get towed away. Probably not.” He shrugged. “You can ride in my pickup to the timber sites. Because that car”—he pointed at the Saab—“it’ll get stuck on all the dirt roads.” When he laughed, it was like a dolphin. I didn’t know what had changed his mind about the “taxi driver” hangup and I wasn’t going to ask.

*****

In 1868, 15,000 seedlings arrived from France to a small New England town. Sent by a judge, an alumnus of Dartmouth College, they were intended to build “a grand old forest” for the college on what had previously been town pastureland for sheep. Overwhelmed by the sheer number, the college treasurer devised a plan. Each freshman was handed a seedling, told to dig a hole and plant the tree wherever they thought one should stand.

And so sprang up a forest around the college.
The students would call it BEMA, the Greek word for “altar” or “sanctuary.” It would be here that they would gather, for candlelight matriculation ceremonies, for secret society initiations and forest dances, for archery practice or poetry class. For a place to get away from campus and breathe and sketch and read.

My first week at Dartmouth, I stood in the clearing among the bobbing candle lights of the freshman class, looking up at the dark shapes of the trees above and imagining that the trees had been there forever, had seen each and every class pass.

But it wasn’t true. It was easy to imagine the New Hampshire forests as old growth, that they deserved to be preserved because of their age—but only if you forgot what the land had been years before.

Today, New Hampshire is the second-most forested state in the U.S., at a staggering 84.32%. But for a time, before the Civil War, less than half the state was forested; the original old-growth forests had been cut long before to make space for farming. Stuart would tell me that the oldest trees on the lands he cut were rarely over a century old. More often than not, he’d find overgrown old stone walls in the woods of New Hampshire—remnants of pastureland, stone dug out of the obstinate New Hampshire soil to make room for grass. After the Civil War, many of the farm boys that had joined up with the Union Army never came back to the “rock pile” that was New Hampshire soil, as Stuart put it. And westward expansion, with the burgeoning Midwest and its fertile soil, made the harsh dirt of New England farming pale in comparison. Most farms were abandoned.

Little by little, the forest reclaimed the land, creeping in and over and around. Most of the forests had grown on their own. The deliberate planting of an entire forest was peculiar to Dartmouth, it seemed.

And yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that the college might have been onto something.

Trees and time and students, growing, fluid. It was all muddled together somehow.

****

“I’m a balky bastard,” Stuart would tell me toward the end of the day, leaning forward on the wheel. He almost sang the words. “I’m as balky as the granite hills.”

I inquired what “balky” meant.

“You’re a smart girl. Figure it out.”

But he took pity on me eventually. “Stubborn,” he explained. “It means stubborn.”

We’d been driving for a while, enough time for him to explain to me the difference between forestry and arborists, forestry and timber. Arborists preserve trees, individual trees, he’d tell me. The timber industry works with entire forests.

I’d thought he, the forester, was the one cutting the trees. But a forester is really more like a contractor, the one who hires a timber team, coordinating between the land’s owner and the people doing the work.

“I look at the forest and the forest tells me what needs to be done.” A good cut made profit in the near term but also left enough for the forest to grow back – a healthy forest meant healthy future profit.

“A lot of the lands I manage, we’ll be back for more in 10, 15 years,” he said. “I’m 51, so it’s going to be another 15 years. And that’ll probably be the last cut that I’ll do in my life.”

In front of us hung a turkey feather and miniature antlers, dangling from the mirror.

“I found it in the woods and put it there,” he said about the feathers. He wouldn’t expand beyond that, as if suspicious of the question.

He was more open about the antlers, former Christmas ornaments that reminded him of hunting. He loved to hunt, to track “big bucks” in the snow.

“It’s my favorite thing to do, actually. When you get good, you can know if it’s a buck track, even how fresh it is, and then you track it until you see it. Oftentimes they’re bedded high, like 3,000 feet, thereabouts, and you just track them right up to their bed. They jump up and you see them and you shoot them right in the bed.”

“Do you cook it afterwards?”

He laughed, his big dolphin laugh. “I eat them, yeah.”

I’d never gone hunting before, I admitted.

He smiled. “You sound like you feel like you missed out.”

I wasn’t sure if I did. Growing up in Los Angeles, hunting had always seemed foreign, almost anti-environmentalist. But was my view on hunting just a product of where I where and how I was raised? Stuart and I both loved the outdoors, we both cared about the forest. If I had grown up in rural New Hampshire, would that love have turned into a love for hunting too?

I flipped the question on its head to Stuart. He wasn’t a preservationist, by any means. He never had called himself an environmentalist. Yet there were quite a few similarities between his love for the woods, his goals as a forester, and those of environmentalists, I pointed out. Did he agree?

He considered. “There’s a place for preservation in small areas that are unique,” he conceded. “But the forest doesn’t stop growing, the forest doesn’t stop changing: to preserve just everything is laughable.” Stuart saw himself not as an environmentalist but as a “steward” of the forest.

“I have no qualms about utilizing what is here. It’s here for our use, you know? Don’t want to abuse it, but you use it wisely, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

*****

One day, a weathered cardboard sign appeared atop the vast, newly-cut stump that stood on the corner of the Dartmouth Green. “I am the Lorax, I speak for the Trees,” it read. For Dartmouth, a college that lays claim to alumnus Dr. Seuss—our medical school is named after him—the stunt felt apropos, if not a bit too on the nose.

Two seasons have passed now, and yet I arrive at the stump expecting to see the sign’s familiar outline fixed atop it. The sign is long gone. It feels silly now to have imagined anything different. I stand in the rain as cars whiz past and peer at the stump, run a hand over the pale concentric circles radiating from its center. The rings are broken by uneven cuts, a few scrapes and a butterfly-shaped hollow, but the outlines are still clear if you squint.

I turn the insides of my palms upwards and think about what it would be like to have my story tattooed on my skin. In elementary school, I spent many an afternoon tracing the lines of my friends’ palms. Standing in line as we waited for class, underneath the paperwhite flower trees whose blossoms stank of fish in the spring, I would reach for my friends’ hands, attempting to read the story of their lives in the creases. Phoebe was a writer who would have to choose between following her heart or mind in her early twenties, Camila had a big heart and a straight path with most of her worries behind her, and Yuna – well, Yuna’s lifeline ended at about age fifteen. I told her that her palm was unreadable.

But even then we knew it was just a game. To us, the creases of human palms were hazy and mysterious and we knew better than to expect a straight truth, or any truth at all. The only way for your story to be written, we understood, was to write it yourself.

The thing about trees, though, is that their stories are already written. The rings carved into their skin are a true map, clear and exact, if only you know how to read it. Each growth cycle is a ring, I remember my sixth-grade science teacher telling me, each drought or year of plenty measured by the distance between each ring.

“But can you read the rings without cutting the tree down?” I’d asked. My teacher had shook her head. I’d frowned.

The stories of trees are already written, that was true, but they were only viewable after their death.

Now, I slip my fingers in the hollow of the stump on the corner of the Green and dig up a fistful of leaves and mulch. Leaves from where, I wonder. It’s been two seasons since the tree has become a stump.

Time is a funny thing. If you hang around trees long enough, you start to think about it, how it stretches and expands. A moment for me is nothing for a tree – if they measure time at all.

******

“You ever read?” Stuart asked. “You ever read Brave New World?” I said yes to the first question before realizing it was a lie to the second and immediately regretted it. For some reason, he looked a little disappointed that I had (ostensibly) read Brave New World already.

He started explaining Brave New World anyways. “Well, it’s like, there’s these people that are just yearning to be alive, really.”

I nodded, watching the miniature antlers dangling from the mirror as they spun in front of me.

“It’s just yearning to live but they’re locked in this weird hive mind,” he said, glancing at me. “Weird like it’s trying to suppress the human spirit. Well, I’m one of the people they ain’t suppressing the human spirit out of me.”

A grin twisted at the corners of his mouth. “It seems like you’re one of the ones trying to escape.” He laughed.

I looked out the window and gripped the door handle. Did it really seem like I was trying to escape? Was I? Had he, perhaps, seen something in me that I had yet to understand?

Unless he had been joking. He probably was. I tried to nod without conveying agreement. I wasn’t sure what escape would even really mean. Escape from what?

“So,” I said, “the environmentalists are the hive mind?”

He shook his head emphatically. “No,” he said slowly, “it’s that whole world. The city, the Ivy League school, you’re just under this trance that’s there to keep a person thinking a certain way. And then outside all that, the human spirit, it’s not going to be contained.” He paused, glanced over at me. “Anyway, yeah, does that make any sense? Is it getting a little too metaphysical?”

******

I had been a bad Girl Scout. I refused to sell cookies on principle, suspicious of the large corporation that used little girls and their smiles to generate their profits, leaving the actual girls with a miniscule percentage of the proceeds. I told my friends we should have been Boy Scouts, with the hiking and backpacking instead of arts and crafts and multilevel marketing. I only completed one badge as a Girl Scout. It was called “Trees.”

“The badge is made for you,” my friend Sam had said. Everyone who knew me then knew I loved trees. I don’t remember now what I did to earn the badge, but I do remember that was when I learned the word “clear-cutting,” to “timber.” And it was because of the badge that I first thought to create a map of trees.

I started with my neighborhood, taking walks with pen and paper and clipboard, running a hand over the bark of each tree I could find. I googled the trees the city arborist office said they planted, pored over books of trees from the library. There was the melaleuca, the paper-bark trees that lined the streets, their soft swaths of bark always peeling, bark that I had collected to paint designs on as a small child. There were the serpent trees, too dainty to climb, their feathery leaves fluttering in the wind. There was the great big red oak in the park across the street from my house, obstinate and rough at the base of the climb, the reason for my scraped knees. But it unfurled into branches that seemed to spread across the park, branches with room to hold full birthday parties and neighborhood friends after dinner. It was from this tree that I fell for the first time and broke my arm, at age eleven, and then fell again a year later. It was a long fall, that second one, and yet I landed on my feet. I remember my fingers shaking with adrenaline, running my hands on the bark and thanking the tree silently. None of my friends that day, consumed with conversation in higher branches, had noticed I had fallen. I was glad. I kept it a secret. I didn’t want to be someone who could fall.

*****

Stuart pulled over and stopped the truck. A monstrous red machine loomed in the clearing in front of us. We’d arrived at the first timber site. I recognized the machine as a chipper, which gobbles up logs to turn them to wood chips.

“You want to get out?” he asked skeptically. “It’ll be wet, Claire.”

“Well, I’m ready, I’m ready for the wet,” I said.

“Are you,” he replied, and it wasn’t exactly a question, but he opened the door anyways and I jumped down into the drizzle.

The site was a clear cut, he said. Normally, he’d do selective thinning, only cutting some of the trees, he added almost defensively, but the owner wanted to put in a barn and a house.

“Clear cutting gets such a bad rap and it’s just one tool of good forest management,” he said. “It’s like what you do with a garden filled with weeds, you rip out the weeds. Of course, if there’s a forest where you got good quality, healthy trees, you know, potential, then I thin it. When you thin it out a little lighter, I can come back in another ten years and there’s more wood that’s grown back, spreading out the yield financially over time. But we’re losing habitat here because we don’t clear cut anymore. National Forests were created to provide fiber and wood products to the country and yes, recreation and wildlife habitats are part of what they manage for, but they hardly do any clear cuts anymore.” He shook his head. “They cut so far below growth it’s laughable. 0.05 percent of the entire land base gets cut every year and they think to increase it to two percent and people go” — here he pitched his voice higher, drew out the syllables in an imitation — “ ‘oh my god the sky is falling.’ ” He stopped in his tracks. “Are you kidding me? It’s nothing.”

We continued on in the damp dirt to the edge of the clearing, where we reached a stream. The roar was deafening, the water swollen with rain. He explained that the loggers put down “ridges,” wooden mat bridges to be able to cross streams. There were no ridges that day, though.

“Wanna cross?” he asked, side-eyeing me.

I readily agreed.

But he shook his head. “You know what, you’re gonna get wet. We probably shouldn’t.”

Had he even expected me to say yes? Or was this moment just another chance to test me?

*****

The tree that was now a stump on the corner of the Dartmouth Green had gone by many names. DeWitt’s Elm was what they called it at its death. “The ascendant lord of the trees,” according to one inspired eighteenth-century writer. “The Hiker’s Elm,” for a time, for the signature double blazes of the Appalachian trail adorning its trunk, instructing hikers to turn a corner.

But it’d been rotting from the inside. It wasn’t clear exactly why at first. Death by thirst, some suggested. By Dutch elm disease, a fungi appearing on the outer branches first, fading them to a pale yellow and then creeping to the middle, paralyzing the cells that control the water intake of the tree.

But the tree had been carefully treated for the disease, injected with what was essentially tree vaccines. And yet, not even $13,000 and efforts from the Town of Hanover and Dartmouth combined could save it. The campus arborist tells me that perhaps it was simply its time. The tree had lived long, long in human time, long even for a tree. It was time to go.

And so the tree became a stump.

*****

We were speeding to the next destination, through endless stretches of trees. Looking at the sky, the dreary day, I brought up climate change, its impacts on the timber industry.

“Climate change.” Stuart scoffed. “That’s if you believe that the climate is really changing.”

“You don’t believe in it?” I was surprised, and surprised, too, to realize I was disappointed.

“I think it’s cyclical, it’s like a rollercoaster. Look at the whole history of the climate since time began, and you’ll realize that this is just a cycle. And it’s the ultimate sense of arrogance to think that man”– he quickly corrected himself, glancing at me– “woman, humankind, is so important that their little puffs out the back of their vehicles is changing the climate. Really, dude? That’s laughable. To think that, it’s just laughable. You have to follow the money, Claire. And the money all goes to the people promoting climate change.”

I frowned and tried to gently push back, attempting to remember what I’d learned in my ecology class in the fall, something about how there have always been cycles but that this moment in time is more intense. And yet I couldn’t quite remember the facts. I didn’t sound convincing, not even to myself, and it worried me.

He continued. “And when they realized the climate really isn’t warming, suddenly they switched from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change.’ And if you don’t think that using repeated ad nauseum labels is powerful rhetoric, well it is. Oh, you know, it’s clever. I’ll have to hand it to them.”

He turned to me. “Most of this environmental stuff, it’s not about the environment, it’s about attacks on the traditional rural way of life, that’s what it is, it’s a smoke screen. It’s just wearing a skin suit of protecting the environment.”

A skin suit?

“They’re all funded by NGOs,” he continued, saying it like a dirty word, “and the NGOs get money, that’s their goal.”

*****

The funny thing about the 15,000 seedlings in 1868, about the Dartmouth students planting a forest, was that almost a hundred years before, the freshman class had been tasked with the opposite.

The Dartmouth Green, it turned out, was no stranger to stumps. For sixty years after it was first cleared, each freshman class had been tasked with clearing one stump each year, until none remained.

Clearing a stump is no small task. There was a reason a whole freshman class was needed for each stump. A reason too that the stump on the edge of the Green today had yet to be cleared.

When you clear a stump, you’re forced to remember what’s beneath the surface.

In fifth grade, I had planted my own tree, pressed a seed into a long cylindrical tube that had been given to me by a gardener, watering it every day at first indoors, by the kitchen sink. I remember puzzling over why the tube was so long. It wasn’t until I lifted the seedling to transfer from the tube to the ground outside that I realized, watching the spindly tendrils that stretched out far and long beneath the weedy seedling trunk, finally exposed.

The roots were longer than the tree itself. They always are. But you have to give them space to grow.

When given space, roots stretch for two to four times the width of the canopy, the Dartmouth campus arborist would tell me. What we couldn’t see was vaster than what we could.

And that was why the stump on the edge of the Green today remained a stump, and probably would for a while. To uproot the stump, the whole intersection would have to be destroyed. It would take a long time.

I walk to the intersection and imagine what’s beneath the surface, imagine the roots stretching and winding underneath concrete and asphalt, no longer soaking up nutrients, simply waiting, for the end.

******

Stuart and I were passing farmhouses and back roads and towns that for once weren’t charming, and I began to realize that I really didn’t know New Hampshire, not at all, and more than that, that at this point I was utterly lost. I thought about how my friend Annie had asked for my location earlier “just in case,” but I hadn’t given it.

But the thought felt distant. This conversation, this adventure, felt concrete, my normally never-ending stream of to do lists and worries dissolving like wood being fed to the chipper. I watched the car windows fogging up in the rain, and settled back into my seat.

“We grew up like it was the 1800s,” Stuart said. “We grew all our own food. We lived in a house that was cold. It was a rambling old farmhouse, and there was no insulation, heated by wood. You’d wake up in the morning and ice crystals would fall on your blanket, your bed. You’d put your clothes on real fast and run down, warm your ass around the wood stove in the kitchen.”

I pictured Farmer Boy or Little House on the Prairie, even Educated, the few books about rural life that I had read as a kid, listened as he told me how his father had grown up with money, “old money,” but had left it all behind to move to the middle of the northern New Hampshire woods to raise a family “like old times.”

Why had his father left it all behind? Stuart said he didn’t know.

He started to ask about my family, and I let him. I told him about growing up by the sea; my sister, younger; my parents, an architect and software engineer.

“Do you have kids?” I asked. He’d only mentioned a wife, current, and a past one, divorced.

“What?”

I repeated the question.

“No,” he said. The answer came quick but the sound was drawn out. I watched his face, his watery blue eyes. “No I don’t,” he repeated, slowly. He looked over at me. “Well, shit, you could be my kid, Claire.” He started to laugh.

I shifted in my seat and mumbled something back, in what I hoped was an agreeable tone.

“How old are your parents?”

“50, I guess.”

“51 for me, yeah, there you go.” He looked over at me again. Another laugh. “Yeah…yeah.” He trailed off.

*****

For a time, they were everywhere. In the 1930s and ’40s, the streets of America were lined with Dutch elms, popular for the cathedral-like shade provided by their wide canopies. Then the disease hit. Little by little, a tree would turn yellow, its branches bending in a “shepherd’s crook.” Nothing seemed to stop it. An affected tree would be taken down, but the disease continued to spread.

The answer was in the roots. Underneath sidewalks and roads, the roots of trees mingle together in mycorrhizal fungi networks, a symbiotic relationship between tree roots and fungi. The disease passed on through the roots.

But this connection that had led to the downfall of Dutch elms – today, you’ll rarely see them naturally, and only on city streets if treated – can actually be a boon in a forest.

“In the forest setting,” the campus arborist told me, “it’s said that they’ll talk to each other through the roots, that they’ll help each other out.” Studies have shown that through mycorrhizal fungi networks, trees communicate. Across species, trees share water and nutrients. Trees send chemical signals to warn each other of drought and disease, insect attacks or fire. They’ve even been found to emit sounds, at frequencies humans cannot hear. They deliberately help each other – hub trees, or, as some call them, “parent trees,” that are tall enough to absorb sunlight feed the saplings stuck in the shadows below by pumping sugar into the roots through the network. Beneath the surface, seemingly unrelated trees are connected. But for the ordinary person, it can be easy to forget.

******

It was the second site, a hill with logs stacked high in a long and tall formation that reminded me of an inflatable bouncy bed. While he went back for his water bottle, I examined the stickers on the back window of the truck. Several stickers boasted “GUN OWNERS OF AMERICA” in bright letters. An organization for people who think the National Rifle Association is too liberal. I snuck a quick photo. If I’d asked, I don’t think he would have objected, but I didn’t, and something in me felt guilty about it. I was relieved when he came back around whistling, oblivious. He suggested I leave my notebook behind because of the rain.

Somehow the subject had gotten onto the Grateful Dead. In college – “I fucking hated college,” he had said, “I quit two classes shy of a degree. It’s not real anyway” – he had smoked a lot of weed and listened to a lot of the Dead.

He stopped and turned to me. “What kind of music do you listen to, Claire?”

I sized him up, briefly considering basing my answers on what I thought he would like, using this as an opportunity to find something in common.

But when I opened my mouth, the bands that came out were the simple truth. He nodded politely. “So what genre is that, then?”

“Alternative, some oldies maybe.”

“So, what are you,” he said, “like a hippie?”

I tilted my head. I didn’t mind the label, although I wouldn’t have described myself that way, and it fit what I knew of him — stoner, Deadhead, etc. — so I took a chance. “Sure, I guess.”

A little while later, as we picked our way through the trees that still stood, he was describing his college friends. He had hated college, he said again. He didn’t fit in with most people, they were too “soft.” His friends were an eclectic bunch, some years older than him, one who had served in the military in Somalia, mostly townies. The only one he named, Dave, was the sole friend from “your world,” he told me. He was from Brooklyn.

Why didn’t he like most people? I asked.

“They were hippies.”

We had reached a clearing. Clearings were good for deer, he told me. The owner of this property liked to hunt, so he had done a bit of clear cutting along with normal thinning.

I was distracted, only half-listening. The hippie comment gnawed at me. For a moment earlier, when he had called me his kid, I had taken it as a sign, in however strange a form, that perhaps we were finally seeing each other, that he was thinking of me like the kid he had never had. But here we were, back to square one. I felt it almost personally.

“So, are you still recording?” he asked.

I was.

“Just so I can remember.”

“Well, you probably got all my rants, then,” he said.

“It’s probably got all mine too.”

He laughed. “Yeah, but you don’t seem like much of a ranter.”

*****

When you hang around trees long enough, you start to think about time. About the stories a tree can tell you, the stories you can read in scars and rings. About what goes on beneath the surface, in the roots.

Maybe, to the pine that fell and turned the world dark on a Sunday, this moment in time is just like any other. Maybe, this moment, our apocalyptic imaginaries, the “bubbles” we’ve divided ourselves into, are familiar. Maybe the tree had seen something like this before; this moment was just one part of a cycle, part of the cyclical nature of time, as Stuart had put it. Or maybe, like climate change, even if there have always been patterns like these, this moment is particularly intense.

Most likely the pine thought nothing of our human lives. Perhaps it thought nothing of time, at all. Maybe, like the stump on the corner of the Green, it was just time for it to go.

All the same, I can’t help wondering what the pine had seen. How long it had lived, what had mattered to it. It’s the sort of thing we can only know now, after its story is written, after its death. It’s the least we can do, I think, piece together the story from the rings and scars of the fallen.

Time slows around trees. It stretches and expands. I have a feeling, that like the stump on the corner of the Green, the tree will wait for us, patiently, until its story has been told.