Taos 1

Posted by Chris Clarke on November 9, 2008

There were two trees here, once; twin and slender boles straining together toward the light, leaves feeding on sun and their branches broadening. Each bole bore a canopy of heart-shaped leaves brilliant yellow in October. Each canopy turned a hollow face toward the other, knitted and entwined twig fingers with the other at the margins, the seam imperceptible, two trees striving to become one.

The trees aged. They grew. Their trunks gained girth, began to press themselves each against the other, a mutual grafting. Each trunk flattened where the other touched it. Rough bark melted between them, turned to soil. Each season brought a new enfolding, trunk growing curved and folding inward against trunk until a common skin of rough gray bark enclosed them both to head height, then twice as high.

One day just one of the trunks still stood, the wrack of a blinding storm all around it. A broad scar ran half its height, smooth and vulnerable cambium exposed above a desolation of splintered heartwood. Where once a full canopy of golden leaves caught breezes there was a shell, branches once sheltered exposed to the elements.

In time the asymmetry the loss had wrenched from the surviving tree conferred on it a rough beauty, an austere beauty, a feeling of resolution and survival. Bark once sundered grew back, curled over the edges of the still-splintered wound, furrowed itself out of the smooth flat face where the tree’s mate had once held it close.

Winds rolling down off the mountain raked the old cottonwood, ruffled bright blue feathers on the backs of jays. A decade’s pulses of leaves growing green, then yellow, then a yellow carpet on the soil; a decade of the sun sinking lower each autumn day toward the river gorge off to the south then rising toward the mountain in spring of deepening red sunsets and the slow upward trickle of aquifer into its roots; the tree lived. Once the worst of the damage healed, the tree could even be described as thriving. And yet its twin still shaped it after a decade’s absence, still defined the survivor’s form in ways both subtle and profound.