The Cloister Walk (38 page)

Jim Burden, the narrator of Willa Cather's
My Antonia,
says of the Nebraska prairie to which he has moved from Virginia that “trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.” He adds, “It must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made detail so precious.”

Burden is speaking of the American frontier at the end of the nineteenth century, but his words ring true for a prairie dweller one hundred years later. The small town where I live, like most towns in the western Dakotas, was plunked down on a treeless plain. Settlement followed the path of railroad lines, not rivers, and nearly all of the trees, like all the buildings, had to be planted. Photographs of our backyard taken in the 1920s, when my mother was a child, offer a view of buttes, a stark horizon. No houses. No trees. Even now, standing in the dirt alley to the east of our house, I can look north, down a three-block length of hedges and trees, to open country.

My mother can remember when most of the trees on our street, and in the town itself, were mere saplings. My husband and I had to take down a lovely cottonwood a few years ago—it was crowding a basement wall—and a neighbor came by to mourn with us. He was five years old when that tree was planted; he's now in his seventies. It was strange to think that we were erasing a part of his childhood. My husband says that destroying that tree still makes him sad, that he imagined it to be like killing an elephant, something larger, wiser, and more mysterious than himself. I miss the tree for the marvelous play of light and shade it made on our kitchen windows in the late afternoon.

But it's folly to miss trees here, where as one friend says, out of a hundred things that can happen to a tree, ninety-nine of them are bad. A lengthy drought in the 1980s killed off many of the aging shelter belts around farm houses, as well as windbreaks in cropland that were first planted, with government assistance, in the 1930s. Though it's been a good conservation practice, I doubt that there will be money available to replant them. Like so many human institutions of the western plains, these rows of trees will simply fade away.

Even the monks at a nearby monastery, who have planted and tended trees here for nearly a hundred years, tend to be fatalistic about it. They work hard—one monk I know says that in his nineteen years at the monastery he's planted nearly a hundred trees—and on hot summer days it's a common sight to see a monk on a small tractor hauling a home-rigged tank that holds 1300 gallons to water trees in the cemetery, the orchard, the western ridge. But the monks also know that to care for a tree in western Dakota is to transcend work; it becomes a form of prayer, or as St. Paul said, a “hope in things unseen.” Maybe that's why they're so good at it, so persistent in their efforts.

I marvel at the fecundity of a crabapple tree that my grandmother planted at the north edge of our backyard that has drawn four generations of children to its branches and tart, rosy fruit. I worry about the two elms just south of the garden plot, weakened by drought and then disease. Will we have the energy, the hope, to replace them? Maybe with cottonwoods, the Siouxland variety developed for this harsh climate. But most of all, when I dream of trees here, when I visit them, they are the trees out in the open, trees I can take no responsibility for but consider to be my friends.

One of my favorites stands at the edge of a large pasture on the outskirts of Mandan, North Dakota. A young, small tree—what kind I don't even know, but from the highway it looks like a burr oak—nudges a fence, its branches straddling the barbed wire. There it has persisted for God knows how long with one half of it in vigorous leaf, the other rubbed bare by cattle. There are no other trees in that pasture. This tree, like a tough little juniper that emerges from the lodgepole pines of the Slim Buttes, far to the south, to stand alone on a limestone outcropping, reminds me of an elegantly carved figurehead on a sailing ship's prow, riding magnificently the dry prairie winds that will one day help to tear it down.

Many such glimpses abide: a tall, leafy locust split down the middle by a lightning strike, a lone Russian olive standing like a sentry near a pasture gate, its black branches vivid beneath the shimmery leaves. I picture the large burr oak in a ranch family's yard; it's been pruned and shaped to a striking perfection. It's the one tree I know of here that would not look out of place on a New England village common. And I mourn what I think of as the political trees, an eerie landscape of waterlogged dead and dying trees just west of Mobridge and the Missouri River, casualties of the Oahe Dam. They make me treasure all the more the profusion of trees—willow, boxelder, elm, cottonwood, wild plums—in the vast Missouri bottomland at Ft. Yates, Cannonball, and Bismarck.

The immensity of land and sky in the western Dakotas allows for few trees, and I love the way that treelessness reveals the contours of the land, the way that each tree that remains seems a message-bearer. I love what trees signify in the open country. The Audubon field book describes the burr oak as “a pioneer tree, invading the prairie grassland,” and I try to listen to what these “volunteers” have to say about persistence, the strength of water, seeds, and roots, the awesome whimsy of birds scattering seed in their excrement, casting not only oak but small groves of Russian olive in their wake. Cottonwoods need more water; their presence signifies ground water, or the meanderings of a creek. Sometimes, in the distance, you glimpse what looks like a stand of scrub brush or chokecherry bushes. But if you turn off the asphalt two-lane highway onto a gravel road, you find that what you've seen is the tops of tall cottonwoods standing in glory along a creek bottom, accompanied by willows.

Nearly every morning I walk past a young tree—some sort of locust—that signifies survival against all odds. Most likely it was stripped bare in its earliest years, when, every summer, a farmer mowed the roadside ditch for hay. But it lived on, a leaf or two surviving each year, until the farmer noticed it and decided to mow around it. It's now nearly seven feet tall, the only tree for hundreds of feet around. Standing alone at the very bottom of the shallow ditch, this clever tree catches what moisture it can. It feels natural for me to converse with it, in any season, in the light just before dawn.

I share with this tree years of mornings, a moonset so enormous and red I mistook it for a fire in the distance, an ice storm with winds so sharp I couldn't keep walking westward and had to return home. Years of painterly skies at dawn. Foxes on the run, cats on the hunt. For much of my walk I am as treeless as the land around me, but on my way back into town I pass a large grove, an entrance to a drive-in movie theater, long since gone. If the wind is up, the trees roar like the ocean. Sometimes sheep are grazing there, and even though I expect to see them, they startle me with their cries, which sound remarkably like those of a human infant. This past summer the grove was the haunt of kestrels, and I often watched them maneuvering in the sky, wondering what it would feel like to ride backwards, forwards, sideways on the currents of air.

Our trees, our treelessness is, as so much in life, a matter of perspective. One summer both my father-in-law and my mother were visiting. He was raised in New York State and couldn't get over the lack of trees. I think he found it terrifying, as many easterners do. My mother kept telling him that there were many more trees here now than when she was a girl, so many that the countryside seemed luxuriant. Maybe trees are a luxury here; the question then becomes, How many do we need?

My mother has told me that she first encountered the notion of a forest from the illustrations in Grimm's fairy tales. She wanted so badly to see a forest, any forest, that she would crawl under the lilac bushes that her mother had planted by the front door and pretend she was in the Black Forest. I used to pretend—I can no longer remember what—with the honeysuckle bushes in the first backyard I remember, in Arlington, Virginia. But I spent a lot of time with them, watching from my two-seat glider swing. The one great tree in that backyard, an elm, was a powerful symbol for me, a tree of family myth, because when I was five and my brother nine, he had used it to run away from home. Climbing out his second-story bedroom window to get away from a baby-sitter he disliked, he'd spent an afternoon at a neighborhood drug store, reading comic books. I remember looking up at that tree, after the great event, trying to imagine that freedom. I also examined the branches from the upstairs window and doubted that I'd ever have the nerve to make the leap.

We left Virginia when I was seven, and moved to Illinois. I lost the honeysuckle and the other trees of my early childhood—dog-wood, magnolia, sassafras, sycamore, and the enormous weeping willow and white oak of a nursery school in the countryside where my mother had enrolled me. I have only faint memories of the fabled cherry trees of Washington, D.C., and suspect that my memories of the blossoms come mainly from having been told about them and looking at family photographs.

Beach Park, Illinois, just north of Waukegan, was still rural in 1954; I walked to a four-room country school. We lived in a small, new suburb on acre lots, where the trees were saplings. But across from our house was a ploughed field with an island of tall trees in the center. Oak, elm, aspen. It was good to know that the trees were there, a brooding, comforting presence just across the road.

The trees of northern Illinois were lost to me when we moved to Honolulu in 1959, and I learned a new vocabulary. Banyan. Hala. Koa. Bamboo. I loved (and still love) the long arbor of Punahou Street. But my favorite tree on all of Oahu was (and is) the magnificent spreading monkeypod of Moanalua Gardens. Even the stench and incessant roar of traffic on an encroaching freeway doesn't diminish its beauty. The other tree I came to love in Honolulu is the eucalyptus that stands by the wooden stairway of Old School Hall on my high-school campus, a building erected in the 1860s. It made me happy to study English in a building that had stood when Emily Dickinson was alive, and the stately tree, its bark variegated like a fragile nineteenth-century endpaper, seemed a suitable companion in that happiness.

I recall testing an ancient legend on the slopes of Kilauea, on the Big Island, with some high-school girlfriends. We picked several sassy, fringed blooms of the native lehua tree and, sure enough, were sprinkled with rain on our hike back to our lodge. I also recall harvesting bananas in our backyard, a process that involved arming myself with a machete and cutting down the entire tree—it is, in fact, a form of grass, a thick and pulpy weed. I shook out the spiders and let the tiny bananas, over twenty pounds worth, ripen in a paper sack. They're much sweeter than anything you can buy in a grocery store. Years later that experience rescued me. At a cocktail party in New York City a man recently returned from Brazil declared that the trouble with America was that you couldn't buy a decent machete. While I had no idea if the family machete was a good one or not, I was the only person in the group who'd actually used one, and what had been a dreary, sodden literary gathering became more interesting.

By the time I went to college, in Vermont, I had lost the language of deciduous trees. People had to name for me the maple, oak, sumac, and beech. I recognized birches from photographs and poems. As fine and fabled as it is, now that I've been on the Plains for over twenty years, New England foliage seems profligate to me, too showy. Here, in the fall, the groves of ash and poplars planted as windbreaks glow in a golden, Italianate light, and I feel as if I am in a painting by Giotto, or Fra Angelico. A dusty, spare, but lovely place in Tuscany, or western Dakota.

When, each December, I visit my family in Honolulu, I travel from the wintry Plains to what I call the green world. It is profligate to the extreme; in a yard not much bigger than my own is an enormous mango tree, and also lime, lemon, tangerine, pomegranate, pomelo, mountain apple, lichee, hibiscus, hala, lehua, plumeria, and Norfolk Island pine. Like many Hawaii residents, we often top a pine to make a Christmas tree.

After all of that, I find it an odd joy to return to winter, to a stark white landscape. And I dream of trees, wondering if sometimes I would rather dream of trees than have so many close at hand. Even when it means adjusting to a temperature more than one hundred degrees colder than in Hawaii, it's the dryness of the Plains that most affects me. My face and hands turn to tree bark. In the heart of winter the green world is dormant, not yet hoped for. Moisture is scarce—even our snow is dry—and the vast space around the bare branches of trees is all the more a presence.

This brings me back to where I began, with Jim Burden's reflection on scarcity. If scarcity makes things more precious, what does it mean to choose the spare world over one in which we are sated with abundance? Is this the spiritual dimension that Brave Buffalo leads us to? Does living in a place with so few trees bring with it certain responsibilities? Gratitude, for example? The painful acceptance that underlies Psalm 16's “Happy indeed whatever heritage falls to me”?

Monastic men and women tell me that one question that bites pretty hard in their early years in the monastery is why anyone would choose to live this way, deprived of the autonomy and abundance of choices that middle-class Americans take for granted. We're taught all our lives to “keep our options open,” but a commitment to monastic life puts an end to that. It is not a choice but a call, and often the people who last in a monastery are those who struggle through their early years reminding themselves of that fact. One sister told me that it wasn't until she had entered monastic formation that the words of Jesus in John 15 had any significance in her life: “You did not choose me, I chose you.”

Stark words in a stark environment. A monk in his early thirties once told me that he'd come to the monastery not realizing what a shock it would be to suddenly not have to compete for the things that young men are conditioned to compete for in American society—in his words, “a good salary, a cool car, and a pretty girlfriend. When all of that was suddenly gone,” he said, “and held of no account, I felt as if my whole life were a lie. It took me years to find out who God wanted me to be.”