Balm for a World of Wounds

Pain and fear and time and trees

Dec 20, 2023

This is my column for the winter 2023 issue of Arnoldia, the quarterly magazine about the nature of trees, which I edit at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum.

The morning of her operation, my wife Rebekah decided that she wanted to bicycle to Faulkner Hospital, which stands little more than a mile from our neighborhood across the Arboretum. And so we packed up her overnight things and pedaled off toward Faulkner: through Bussey Brook Meadow, where frost whitened the relic reeds and the boles of Ailanthus1 creaked bonily in the breeze; onward up Valley Road, huffing and pedal-mashing past the magnolias still bare of their big leaves; and out through the Centre Street Gate, toward whatever was to come.

Ever since, passing this way triggers a welling of memory—my fear, her grit, and the shadowing trees. It seemed at the time as though cancer had declared war on our family: in quick succession, Rebekah, her sister, and my father were struck with diagnoses. Only Rebekah survived; she’s now fifteen years free of recurrence. I won’t say the trees made the difference, though I wouldn’t have wanted to face any of it without them.

After a recent surgery of my own, a morning walk in the Arboretum became my post-operative routine. The conifer collection was my special balm; as the days warmed and my stamina increased, I sought the secret chambers of the yews and the touch of the giant sequoia’s softly resonant bark. I wandered among the spruces crowded with new cones, releasing their pollen in cloudy sheets that sieved the sunlight as they drifted downslope. These gymnosperms, great survivors of life’s tumbling epochs, treasure hope and healing in their everlasting green. This medicine isn’t metaphorical: the air amid trees is vibrant with enlivened chemistry; their pigments tickle deep-rooted centers of neural appeasement; their fallen needles cushion every recuperative step. It’s a fast-acting pharmacopeia, with no unwanted side effects. I don’t believe it’s possible to overdose.

Since those convalescent days I have treasured my walk to work, incorporating encounters with the collection into my commute. A long-dormant case of sciatica recurred over the summer, however, taking away my walk with its wild, thickening pain. I tried describing it to a nurse who was contemplating a list of keywords: “it feels like I have an arrow buried in my back,” I said—“okay, that’s Stabbing,” she replied—“and there’s like a bare wire running down my leg”—“that would be Shooting,” she continued. “Shooting and stabbing?” I repeated. “I’m a crime scene!”

Keywords missing from the nurse’s form: Instability. Fragility. Hollowness. Uncertainty. Words for the psychic impact of pain, its cosmic extent—the way it narrows your mind, crowding out the questions that usually enliven you. Standing and walking brings out the worst of my pain, but sitting appeases it. This relief carries over into cycling, and so I’ve taken to biking again, a gift of miraculous, swift, pain-soothing mobility.

Yesterday, I set out on my bicycle for the oak collection. With a kindling curiosity about the history of Oklahoma’s oilfields2, I was looking for specimens of blackjack oak, Quercus marilandica, a scrub oak found across the southeastern quarter of North America. Along the Texas-Oklahoma state line, it comes together with post oak and a wild variety of shrubs and other plants to form the “Cross Timbers,” a savanna ecosystem of great age and complexity interlacing the oilfields.

Heading out from Hunnewell3 along Meadow Road, I pedaled through the invisible patisserie of the katsuras still pumping out their caramel fragrance; turning at the ponds, I climbed Bussey Hill Road past the lemon-lime foliage of the redbuds, under towering sassafras trees with mitten-shaped leaves, and turned down Valley Road past the bitternut afire with fall to its topmost height. Here I slowed, scanning for the particular blackjack specimens I sought.

The plant-record database lists twelve living trees distributed around the landscape, including one on Peters Hill that was accessioned in 1895. The specimens I sought in the oaks collection are younger, collected from the wild in 2018 by Tiffany Enzenbacher and Kea Woodruff during a collecting trip to Cross Timbers country near Tishomingo, Oklahoma. They’re saplings, only recently planted out, and still surrounded by protective cages of wire. Q. marilandica is sometimes called duck-foot oak, and I delighted at the comical webby footprint of the saplings’ still-green leaves, with which my imagination paddled off uncertainly toward the Great Plains.

And my pain? It hadn’t disappeared, but for a moment it felt right-sized on that vaster map. The analgesic effect of trees is compounded not only of chemistry, but curiosity.

Earlier, I said that it felt like cancer had declared war on my family. The metaphor feels fraught now, with the enormity of the war on Gaza growing daily. Recently, I received a pitch for an article from a young journalist proposing to write about West-Bank olive groves and the Palestinian farmers who tend them. I replied to his email, suggesting a January deadline. The day was Friday, October 6. A couple of days later, with the horrors of that weekend still emerging, he wrote again, asking for reprieve from the January deadline, with the hope that peace would come and he could return to the olive groves. I begged him to be safe. As I write this morning I see his byline from Tel Aviv, where he is covering the war.

Is there no balm in Gilead? the prophet cries in Jeremiah. Is there no physician there? Scholars believe the biblical balm was Storax, which Wikipedia describes as “a natural resin isolated from the wounded bark” of sweetgums. As for Gilead, it was a land that lay close by the River Jordan. We live in a world of wounds—and we share it with trees.

I expect the story of the olive groves will have changed by the time peace comes and the next normal is found (may it be soon). The malignancies of hate and fear, of war and unspeakable grief—I know that trees can’t take these away. I also know that there is no peace without them. Some of the West Bank olive trees are five hundred years old, after all. Think of all that those trees—and their caretakers in hope and in grief—have witnessed and withstood.

I’m excited to share the winter issue of Arnoldia, which includes a remarkable, Sebaldian essay about a lost New York tree by Benjamin Swett and deeply thoughtful reporting on the science of forest pathogens in the Anthropocene by Anelise Chen—not to mention smashing cover photography by the amazing art historian and philosopher of the eye Jennifer Roberts. To subscribe, join the Arnold Arboretum, and we’ll send you the issue today.

“His trained eye spied wandering gutters in the stone…. He traced eleven of the lines to a single point and then realized what they showed: the roots of an ancient and very large tree, at a time when forests were still new in the world.” A fossil forest found in the Catskills near Cairo, New York, dates back some 400 million years to the Middle Devonian.

“Unlike the other geologic intervals whose beginnings—and endings—are well defined, we don’t know how the narrative of the Anthropocene will turn out…. We still have time to choose which story we wish to tell.” Geologist Marcia Bjonerud, in “Ironies of the Anthropocene.” (In Rosol C and Rispoli G (eds), Anthropogenic Markers: Stratigraphy and Context, Anthropocene Curriculum. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. DOI: 10.58049/an7c-9w79.)

I’ve written a lot about these trees.

Specifically, I was unsettled by the film Killers of the Flower Moon and its depiction of the settler community in the time of the Osage Reign of Terror. Some of my ancestors were workers in those oilfields and counted themselves friends of the Osage; I’m working my way toward writing about these memories as they pass through today’s different lights.

My office is in the Hunnewell Building, which houses the Arboretum’s library, herbarium, and visitors’ center.