I grew up where pines grow up fast and tall. We lived under the pines. We didn’t live in the trees like the squirrels and the elves, and we didn’t live in the canopy like the birds and that tribe in National Geographic. We lived under the pines, and they outnumbered us.
The trees were quieter than we, but not much quieter. They whispered a little more quietly. They bent and bowed, but not demonstrably. They lived together and we could see how they did it.
The vertical was all on their shoulders because Tidewater is flat. The only vistas were across tidal rivers to a shoreline with pines that outnumbered the people across the river. The water reflected the pines and the other people reflected us, unseen beneath their own pines where they lived. We heard about each other from the same local radio and television stations.
But we had no business across the river. We heard their street names and high school football scores on the news and it meant nothing to us, ever. We shared the river, but each side had its own pines, and each tribe of pines had its own people, respectful and quieted with their eyes raised.
The pines carried the vertical handsomely. They suggested God when we were as still as they, just moving. The clouds also suggested God when we were on our backs in the grass. I remember staring at the clouds in the summer.
The pines were deep files, discreet and sound-absorbing. The crevices in their bark and the long horizons around their trunks made great dressing rooms for the locusts, which left their skin for us to attach onto one another’s shirts.
We used the pines other ways. We raked the needles for flower beds. We broke off the bark for sidewalk chalk. We threw their cones at one another. We knocked off their branches by kicking footballs at them. The pines took all of our noise and memory and channeled it up, diffusing it through their needles. They also took all of the resulting lightning strikes, channeling the sky’s energy the other way. Never a scream, never a word though entire childhoods.
Sometimes a tree would fall, and it was a to-do. The birds and the tribe and Jack’s giant came down with it, stunned and out of their element, and too startled to say a thing about higher worlds. We were stunned to see the vertical horizontal, to see a fallen angel. My father would call the tree service, and the tree service would cut its limbs off. We put the logs under tarpaulin to dry them before winter. If they were too green, they would pop a lot in the fireplace: the voice of angels.
Posted April 2005
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