A Tree, a Moment

I'm sitting on an upper deck of friend's borrowed beach house. I have a beautiful view over the Carr Inlet of the Puget Sound with Mt. Rainier distant but still very prominent on the eastern horizon.

There is a large tree that stands in the yard below me. You wouldn't call it beautiful. It's one that you might say has "character" with knots, old broken branches, and limbs all akimbo. There's a knothole at the base of one branch that is home to a nesting pair of birds. A swing hangs from long ropes, its seat made from a split log.

A young man wearing a broad-rimmed straw hat and a woman, along with their aging golden retriever, have spent the better part of the afternoon on this and the adjacent properties. He's been mowing and trimming; she's been walking the yards and down by the water with their dog, enjoying the unseasonably warm sunshine.

Late in the afternoon, the yard was nearly done. Not long ago the woman, in her long flowered blue dress, returned from the beach with the old retriever following behind. She sat on the swing, and after a few leg pumps, set it in pendular motion. About that time, the trimmer ran out of gas, and the young man used that as reason enough to take a short break. He saw that the old dog was close to the path of the swing, so gently led her aside and--with a few light pats--settled her in the grass. He gave his wife three strong pushes on the swing, enough to make her laugh, and then stood to the side looking up along the lengths of the rope. I heard him explaining to her that the swing was veering off course because he needed to change its position on the branch. She just pumped her legs, head tilted back.

Meanwhile, far above their heads, the nesting couple flew in and out of their knot-hole.

Eventually, he went back to his trimmer, added fuel, and started it up. She spent a few more minutes on the swing, and then wandered off to another part of the yard, dog slowly trailing behind.

At last, his work is now done. The young man has returned to the gnarled tree, leans the trimmer against the trunk, and spends a minute or so looking at the swing and branches. After a couple of tugs on the ropes, he gets on, and kicks off from the ground. While he leans forward and back in time with the swing, his dun-colored hat flutters off his head onto the grass behind. For awhile, I lose sight of the young man. Instead, I see the little boy he was - not all that long ago. No more than a minute later, he brings the swing to a stop. He finds his hat, puts it on his head, shoulders the trimmer, and walks off from sight.

From the perspective of that old tree, this evening with the young couple and the nesting birds has been the briefest of moments, and yet--to me--it speaks about years of new life, losses, changes, sameness, and hope.

a quixotic story

Each day, he bumped up in his dirt-smeared Jeep to the terminus of the icy glacier. Then, making two or three portages in the slick mud and icy rivulets of water, he hefted his portable generator, orange extension cords, and red-dented cans of fuel up to the wall of ice. There, you would think him an incredible fool and entirely insane as he started up the generator, plugged in his tool of choice, and--switching it on--he stretched a hair dryer before him in clenched hands. Sometimes he concentrated against a single area of ice; other times, he would swing it side to side, up and down.  He had, by now, used up his first dozen hair dryers.

He held himself and his body, knees slightly bent, in what target shooters call the Weaver Position, intent, practiced, and steady. Could he not see the impossibility of his task?

On rare occasions, though, if you were close enough, you might have seen tears streaming from his eyes, to spread through the stubble of his cheeks and chin; you would have seen his lips pursing and stretching across tightly clenched teeth; and you might have heard sounds, something like constrained growls and whimpers, from deep in his chest.

There was also one late afternoon when, after concentrating on single spot for more than an hour, you could almost see an indentation in the ice, where water slicked its surface, and a drip was just about to let go. If you could have seen his eyes, they had a sudden glint of something like hope. At that very moment, the hair dryer died with a pitiful "pop" and spark. He stood a moment, refusing to put his arms down as he watched the slick surface whiten into crystals. As the drip finally hardened, he thrust his arms and the inert instrument down at his sides. Twisting his shoulders and face upward he barked and howled to the darkening sky, "Melt! MELT! MMEEELLT!"

Yes. He knew.

He was also more convinced that there was something deep and warm within the ice that he had to help free, something too delicate to risk against hammer and chisel or pickax. Still, you would be right. You would be right to shake your head at such ...hubris? optimism? paranoia? He would never melt such a wall of ice with his small stream of heated air.

However, maybe you were not aware, or had forgotten, that forces greater than he were already at work, forces on his side. This wall of ice was receding, and would, in fact, melt. With time and patience, he might see it, and hold what he believed was waiting for release. However infinitesimal and ridiculous his part, he prayed that he might be there...

-----

Sadly, what he did not--perhaps could not--know was that a fissure had opened from the top of the glacier, freeing that for which he labored and longed. It stared for a moment through the ice at him and his fruitless efforts. Then, with something like a shrug or a sigh, it unfolded its new wings and lifted from its small chasm to fields far and beyond.