Kinship With Trees And Crows
Alison Hawthorne Deming
To be rooted is perhaps the most important
and least recognized need of the human soul.
— C.D. Wright
When I think about what I miss most
what I wish to be in conversation with
at my summer home in eastern Canada
from which I’m exiled by the pandemic
and our government’s failure
to protect our people unlike our kinder
northern neighbors who have done well
to shelter themselves and each other
what I miss most, calling to mind the land
I’ve known since I was a child
are three smart trees and a kindness of crows.
I refuse to call them a murder. I wonder
if they sense my absence? The crows
I mean. Should be the same population
summer after summer that speaks
in my dooryard, the caw-caw of their
intelligence familiar and inscrutable to me
yet familial. When I arrive I see five or six
gathered in the tamarack snag that I call
the Crow Tree. They love its bare
upper branches reaching as if choreographed
to gesture for the sky, one arm straight,
the other bowed so that together
they look like some kind of implement
a primitive pitchfork or a partial trident
or a giant’s gaff hook. You get the picture.
I’ll throw a caw or two or five
in their direction, trying to match the number
of times they iterate the syllable. That’s about all
we can say to each other. They pretend to ignore me.
But I know they know me and that I am part of
the rhythm of their year as I arrive and plant seeds
and spread some extra for them to eat. That snag
is the first of my three smart trees. It refuses
to fall, dead now for a decade and its companions
long cleaned out with chain saw and splitter
after the infestation of bark beetles turned
a forest into a field of death. Our pandemic
is novel only to the human eye. Even the crows
suffered such a scourge when the avian flu
burned through them like wildfire. That’s when
ornithologists learned that no crow dies alone
a companion always by the side of one dying.
The tamarack has a purpose as launch pad
for crows, as object of my admiration,
as place of reverie and prospect
for all of us in the small interspecies
family who dwell here. Then there’s
the black spruce, a lone survivor
of predation’s purge, a tree too broad
for my arms to encompass. During
the purge it lost its spire, standing
blunted and doomed for years
telegraphing crown decline which I
took to be a sign of its death.
But slow by slow the spruce trained
an upper limb to migrate from
horizontal to vertical. It seemed
as surprised as I was at this sign
of vitality. The makeshift spire
sprouted a mass of fresh cones
a gonadal extravagance or boast
that filled me with a strange erotic
joy. Finally the old cedar, rare on this
working island where fence posts
and shingles have been the plight
of cedars for two hundred years.
I imagine the farmer who once owned
this land prized the copse of cedars
rising up from swampy ground
at the perimeter of his stable corral.
Oh but that’s history when I’ve been
on this land for more than sixty years
the farmer and stable gone decades
before that. But the cedar’s hung out
for all the transitions, from my childhood
laughter to my old age astonishment
to still be alive and well and rooted here
even if seasonally transient. I like the way
the cedar is dying. It’s been leaning
seaward year by year, now at forty-five
degrees from fallen. Its root-ball
is lifting and along its skyward
flank new branches have sprouted.
It‘s reaching for light but I think also
working to counter gravity’s pull
preparing to become a nurse tree
when it finally loses its grip. The death
will be gentle though the force
of such a weight hitting the ground
will echo and make stones tremble.
There will be a whoosh when the still
green branches touch down as they ease
the last passage from a life seeking light
to one embracing dark loam of earth.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is a recent Guggenheim Fellow, is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona. Read more.
Alison Hawthorne Deming’s “Kinship with Trees and Crows” will also appear in the forthcoming anthology Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer, published by the Center for Humans and Nature.