Tricking ourselves. For modern urban people, Chicken becomes as much a modern trickster figure as Coyote, turning our preconceived ideas and limitations on their heads, inviting us to rethink the normal rules of urban life. We live in the tidy, slick-built city, and suddenly here are chickens—farm animals—turning up. And if we feel inspired by this and decide upon chickens for our own urban plot, we are pitched into another kind of upheaval. We want eggs and snuggly chicken sounds, but we get raccoons and rats and sharp-eyed hawks. In keeping chickens, we are drawn into a more vivid awareness of the home wild, and we are required to respond creatively, brightly, and sometimes with life-or-death consequences (for the chickens or their predators) to this presence. This meeting of practicality and intimacy is uncommon in urban life; even gardening doesn’t throw us in this deep. Domestic chickens make us wilder ourselves.
Though they have been bred into all manner of sizes, shapes, colors, and personalities in the past several hundred years, chickens are all one species, Gallus domesticus, members of the gallinaceous order of birds that includes pheasants, quail, partridges, peafowls, turkeys, guinea hens, and grouse. There is general agreement that humans have been domesticating chickens for somewhere between six and ten thousand years. Domestic chickens were even raised on Easter Island as early as 400 CE and appear to be the only animals intentionally brought there (Polynesian rats were probably stowaways). The islanders built great stone-fortress coops for their flocks.
Symbolically, female chickens are associated with fertility and fierce-but-gentle maternal protection. As she lay dying, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux found comfort and sacred solace in observing the hens and chicks that wandered the cloister grounds, taking direction from the words of her divine spouse: O Jerusalem… how often would I have gathered your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings. Even more than this, chickens and eggs are linked in the classic and cross-cultural symbolism of rebirth, renewal, creativity, and regeneration. In their dawn wakening, they are creatures of transition and enlightenment—messengers from the magical, liminal moments of dark-into-light; the break of day; the moments we ourselves awaken into newness and possibility. When I think of the supposed conflict that urban chicken farming brings up, I want to reframe it in light of this symbolism.
As we work to keep the raccoon (rat, hawk, coyote…) out, the ways and needs of the raccoon itself come into relief. Why is it here? Not to vex us, and not because it is a violent beast (though anyone who has viewed the bloody aftermath of a raccoon’s visit to the henhouse knows it is hard not to think so). The raccoon’s interest in the chickens is exactly the same as our own. Food and, more broadly, sustenance. The henhouse brings us into the lively, sharp, live-by-our-wits creativity that is the essence of evolutionary adaptedness. This is not conflict but participation, and within it we grow not just eggs but the deepest kind of renewal—an ability to glimpse new possibilities for what our urban homes can mean for ourselves, our community, the more-than-human creatures, the earth.
PART IV
The Branching and the Rooted
Tree
The Branching Beast
When Ann Linnea was forty-three years old, in 1992, she set off on a ten-week kayak trip, exploring the perimeter of Lake Superior, upon whose shores she made her home. Near the end of the first week, she listened to the weather report on her little marine-band VHF radio, calculated that she had several hours to find shore and shelter before the predicted rain hit, and set out in her plastic Aquaterra sea kayak. Within fifteen minutes, the wind picked up, the lake jumped in foot-high chops, fog and heavy mist enveloped her. On Lake Superior, which makes its own crazy-dangerous weather, Linnea read these signs for what they were—serious; she paddled like mad for a landing place. But the North Shore is rimmed by rock, cliff, and cobble—to land her kayak in these conditions, Linnea needed a smooth shoreline of sand or small stones. After paddling wildly for two hours in the freezing damp, her strength all but gone, she spotted a thin gray line in the distance, used the last of her energy to paddle toward it, and, to her delight, landed the kayak. She managed to struggle out of her spray skirt and mitts, tie the boat, and put up a tarp with bone-numb hands before she was seized by muscle spasms that froze her belly and legs into a fetal position and racked her with excruciating pain. Linnea was frozen, unable to move, unable to breathe, fearing hypothermia as her mind lost its grip on the situation and any possible solution. In this pitiful state, Ann looked up to the slender aspen trees to which she had cinched her tarp. They moved in the wind and seemed to simultaneously feel and transcend the cruelty of the storm. To Ann, their branches appeared to incline toward her in a gesture of sympathy. “What should I do?” she addressed the trees nonverbally. “Please help me.” And immediately, she felt a response. The trees said to her, Breathe. The first breath was so painful, she dreaded another, but there, as Linnea tells it, were the trees, breathing in their own way, and she knew—as she had not known minutes before—“I am not going to die.”
“Finally I could relax my stomach, and slowly straighten out my legs. I lay on my back under the tarp and looked at the trees. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered aloud. Keep breathing. I lay on the cold, wet ground for what seemed a long while, afraid to sit up for fear the cramp would return. But I was calm. Among these aspens, I was a lone human, but I was not utterly alone.”
I fancied this bestiary might be the first to include an entry about an organism without a central nervous system and that it might be an edgy sort of thing to attempt, making readers say to themselves, Tree? A tree is not a beast. But it turns out that a thousand years ago, trees were given a long account in the Aberdeen Bestiary itself; we are informed, with that volume’s usual suspect etymology, that “a wood, nemus, gets its name from numina, deities, because the heathen consecrated their idols there; for woods contain large trees, whose boughs give deep shade.” But the question remains: Do trees have a place in the modern bestiary?
A couple of years ago, Ann asked me to write the foreword for her book Keepers of the Trees: A Guide to Re-Greening North America. It’s a beautiful project, full of human-tree stories from people who make their lives working with and protecting trees: a sustainable-furniture craftsman, a conservationist, a forester, a pruner, a community organizer, a wilderness researcher, a totem carver, and even a logger. Linnea crisscrossed North America gathering stories, interviewing these disparate people, and I read the tales of their lives with a sense of inspiration and gratitude for the opportunity to be included in this wonderful project. In the end, Ann—under gentle pressure from many of the other interviewees—added her own story to the collection, and she titled it “The Botanist Grandmother.” In the twenty-some years since the kayak incident, Linnea’s sense that trees are relational, have a kind of sentience, and can speak to us has only deepened. “Relationship,” she writes, “is commonly defined as a connection, association, or involvement. We humans generally view relationship to mean a connection with other humans or animals—beings that look back at us. I believe the possibility for relationship also exists between humans and trees.” It took me a couple of readings to understand that Linnea wasn’t equivocating on the meaning of relationship, as we do within the flexibility of the English language. One has a relationship with another person, or perhaps a dog—a thing with eyes, and brain, and nervous system—and we know what we mean by the word. In another sense, one has a relationship with, say, a landscape. Here, there is a response that is cultivated over time in the presence of a particular place, one that is personal and meaningful. We know the landscape, have grasped something in it toward which we lean—relationship is an appropriate word, albeit different from the sort a human has with another vertebrate creature. But Ann does not mean it differently. After the counsel of the aspens, she continued to study and cultivate her friendship with individual trees. Energy-field practices such as healing-touch therapy and Reiki, as well as traditionally scientific studies of botanical energy flow, deepened her rat
ional belief in the possibility of the relationship she intuitively felt. “The more I learned,” she told me, “the more I came to understand the commonalities between trees and all other life forms, including humans.”
Claire and I joined Ann Linnea on a forest walk near her current home on Whidbey Island, the trail populated by western hemlock, Sitka spruce, Douglas fir, and western red cedar, some of them ancient, old-growth “grandmother trees.” Ann is slender and athletic, with short graying hair and eyes that are simultaneously sharp and sparkling. She’s twenty years my elder, but I have no doubt that on a serious hike, she would drop me in the dust. Linnea walks meaningfully (though not always slowly) through the forest. When you ask her something, instead of babbling back to you as she walks like most of us do, she stops and looks at you as she speaks. She didn’t flinch a bit when I asked questions about her story that anyone might secretly want to ask: Don’t hypothermic humans tend to have visions when there is a dearth of oxygen reaching the brain? Or, when the aspen told her to breathe, could it not have been her own inner voice, the desperate wisdom of an endangered biological body, projected onto this tree in a moment of desolate loneliness and physical danger? Even for someone deeply sympathetic to the consoling and healing presence of trees, these seem fair questions to ask in relation to Ann’s experience with the aspens on the North Shore. Don’t we commonly project our own needs, or desires, or even wisdom onto organisms of all sorts? Is that not why the pretty vine maple in my backyard said to me this very afternoon, My dear, you deserve a nice glass of pinot and a shard of dark chocolate?
But Linnea is clear on this. The answer was not her inner response to the healing beauty of the trees; it originated in the trees themselves. The language of trees is not English or Urdu or any kind of spoken human language. Nor is it barking or chirping. Tree language, says Linnea, lies in energetics. The constant, biokinetic flow of energy from earth to heavens, and the resulting energetic presence, something humans share, is a dimension in which we can respond to trees, and they can respond to us—in actuality, not just in our imaginations, or our inner visions, or even in our summoning of mythic and symbolic traditions.
Ann Linnea is not the only otherwise sane, high-functioning, articulate human to have claimed relational possibilities for trees. Far from it. In his comprehensive study The Tree: A Natural History of What Trees Are, How They Live, and Why They Matter, Linnean Society of London fellow Colin Tudge speaks frequently of trees that he has “met” and writes that while trees are not aware in the same way as animals, as they do not have brains, “they are sentient in their way; they gauge what’s going on as much as they need to, and they conduct their affairs as adroitly as any military strategist.” The 2010 poet laureate W. S. Merwin, who has spent decades reclaiming the forested property where he has made his home in Maui, planting thousands of native palms and ferns, says of the trees, “They are ancient and very wise creatures.” Even the prickly John Fowles wrote that far more than ourselves, trees are “social creatures,” and he spoke of their woodland groupings as “societies.” Environmental studies professor and Buddhist teacher Stephanie Kaza wrote an entire essay collection subtitled Conversations with Trees, and she introduces the book with a description of how she “meets” a tree, approaching each one with calm respect and an openness to the tree’s own response. “My primary orientation in the book is not to tree as symbol,” she writes, “but to tree as Other, as one party in an I-Thou relationship… my effort here, awkward as it feels at times, is to try to speak directly with trees.” Buddhist teachers from ancient times and in a variety of modern schools commonly include trees in their lists of sentient beings for whom, and with whom, we are to cultivate connection and compassion. And of course, many First Peoples include trees in their creation stories, ask permission of trees for certain activities, and continue to speak of trees as elders, grandmothers, ancestors.
The Life Within Trees
Basic tree biology offers a model for the energetic movement Linnea speaks of. In all the plant world, broadleaf trees and conifers have the most subtlety in the growth and functioning of their trunks. Beneath the outer bark lies a layer of inner bark made of generative stem-cell tissue, called the cambium. On its inner side, the cambium produces xylem, a substance made up of thick-walled woody cells that provide support for the tree while transporting water up and down, from the tips of the roots to the leaves. The cambium produces another substance called phloem on its outer side. Phloem is more thin-walled and viscous; it moves energy in the form of sucrose through the tree. As the cambium generates more phloem on the outside and xylem on the inside, the trunk grows thicker year after year—perhaps for centuries—while remaining supple and functional. As the cells that form the xylem die, they leave behind their stiff cell walls, which are pressed to the center of the tree, becoming heartwood and, closer to the outside, sapwood (truly full of sap)—the ever outwardly growing trunk. The crushed phloem is pushed to the perimeter, where it is incorporated into the bark that provides so much of the tree’s external protection (an analogue to human skin, and in fact, the Aberdeen Bestiary refers to the bark as the corium, or hide). Most trees grow seasonally, and the production of xylem is intermittent, so in a cross-section of the tree, the differences between the xylem laid down in the spring (wide but thin-walled) and the summer (narrow, but thicker-walled) is easy to observe in the concentric growth rings, typically one per annum. Good growing years and drought years can be discerned by the thickness or thinness of the rings. The medullary rays—the sun-like lines that move from the center of the trunk outward—work like capillaries, carrying nutrients throughout the trunk, so while a living tree is more supple toward the exterior, it is alive throughout.
Sentience, meeting, creatures, ancestors. We are not being asked to believe that trees have literal brains. We know they do not. Instead, we are speaking again of an expansive way of knowing, of relating, of a plethora of intelligences. We thought opossums and crows and chickens and pigeons challenged us. Now, here, all of these human mentors ask us, beautifully, expansively, with a rare and exquisite trust in our capacity as humans, to respect the singular intelligence of trees.
In The Tree, Colin Tudge spends hundreds of pages elucidating the biological activities of trees, all of which we humans easily recognize, as we ourselves are biologically occupied with the same activities: growth; the gathering of light, water, and nutrients; reproduction; preparation for seasonal heat and cold; regeneration after injury; death. Trees, of course, accomplish all of these things without moving, or without moving much.* They grow directionally, limbs toward the light, roots toward the dark earth. They grow in climates that accommodate the unique biology of their species. They grow in proximity to other individuals of the same species with whom they share chemical and biological communication, climatic cues, and pollen. Without brains, without legs, without defense against human whim (and ax), they grow as best they can in places that make sense for themselves as individuals and species.
In urban places, we have tampered with all of these natural tree tendencies dramatically. We plant trees one at a time, as garden specimens, natives and nonnatives mixed up together, rarely in large groups of a particular species the way the trees themselves often prefer. We plant them in an environment full of tall buildings, protected from limb-strengthening wind; in a world of concrete and runoff, with no organic soil replenishment; and with a dearth of native pollinators. We have left the trees confused. Blossoming early or late, new growth stunted, fruits ripening early or failing to ripen at all. And as urban dwellers, we, in turn, experience a confused, topsy-turvy relationship with trees—our elemental connection to trees near and native has been dismantled. Until very recently in human history, the trees we lived with were the same trees that sustained us physically in the form of heat, fuel, shelter, furniture, and food. The connection to close-to-home trees was a given. Like many of our parents and grandparents, Ann Linnea remembers heating her childhood home with birch and pin
e from the local forests. Today we might glean some fruits from our own small circle of garden trees or those of our neighbors, but for the most part modern urban people no longer rely on the trees we live with to provide our basic human needs.
Even so, our dependence on trees remains absolute. We need wood from trees for shelter, furniture, fuel, ships, fences, poles. We need trees for food in the shape of fruits, nuts, and fodder for agricultural animals. We need trees as sources of varnishes, resins, oils, glues, dyes, pharmaceuticals, poisons, incense, unguents. We need trees for our musical instruments—pianos, violins, guitars, oboes. We need trees to cleanse the air we breathe, absorbing carbon dioxide and many other pollutants while releasing fresh oxygen. We need trees, of course, for paper. But instead of most of these things coming from the trees that grow among us, they come from trees that we will never see, and can barely imagine. We depend on trees whose forests we don’t understand, whose locations we do not know, and whose species names most of us have never learned.
The Urban Bestiary Page 24