The Old Ones
And now we come to the matter of trees. If you look at a tree does it look back at you? Perhaps. But if you see the tree you may be sure that it sees you, because otherwise there would be no seeing at all. Trees, I think, are the nearest we will get to the Old Ones, who live otherwise Out There, dissolved in the Tao like old candle flames in the dark.
One summer I made an inventory of all the trees in my town. There were, to my astonishment, some two hundred thirty different species. A cosmopolis of trees in a provincial village of two tribes of sapiens. No one knew what I was doing that summer. I still have the reference book I used, Rutherford Platt’s Pocket Guide To the Trees (1952), which my mother’s boss had owned, in that confused winter in which he died. A short, stocky fellow of fountain pens and document cases. She was promoted to Cashier when he vacated the job so suddenly.
The wind is likely in love with the trees, in its way.
Some summers after that, when I was old enough to ride out into the countryside on my bicycle, I got caught in a cloudburst. I had had a flat tire and was walking home, probably five miles. Around four o’clock my mother showed up with the car, for which I was conventionally grateful, but an inarticulate part of me was annoyed. I had been going somewhere. I had been going to see the Old Ones, I suppose, by a road onto which I had turned, in the mist and pouring rain, by accident. I had found my way only to be picked up and bundled back to a hot footbath and sweaters. It was going to be a long while before I could find that way again.
I had been to Lake Campbell, an egg-shaped puddle seven miles south of town where there was a hamlet of lake cabins and a store. There was also a roller rink (it has since burned down). Years afterward I learned that you used to skate there. I could have seen you with your three sisters, dancing. Twirls, loops, toe-spins, jumps, reverses — there were boys, I suppose, to dance with, weren’t there? Maybe not. You were half the other girls’ age. Did you still wear your hair in two ponytails at the sides? A pinafore I suppose — girls didn’t wear jeans then, or even shorts much. Twisting in and out through the knots of teenagers a foot taller, in those round glasses. I imagine you wouldn’t have noticed me, if I had been there, in the bleachers. Why wasn’t I?
There you are, among the Old Ones, dancing. I see you dimly through the veil of rain, falling now hard enough to stun thought. I reach out, but you are as far away as the wind in the treetops.
