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| This is a loblolly pine's male cone |
There are things where you are which were before you and which will continue to be after you.
The road on the eastern edge of our property, the one parallel with the ridgeline of the mountain, is named Pine Grove, and wouldn't you know we have groves of Virginia pines on either side of our property. These pines are not young; they are not shrubby about the waist. Rather, they are aged and hairy in the head and their boughs lean with the weight of their years.
Our groves could be split in two. There is one in back and one in front. I count 10 pines in the front grove, very near each other, one of which is dead and remains standing only because the others are holding it up. When the winds are high in the early spring, we can always look up out of our window and see the tops of our front grove bobbing and whirling in the wind. But they don't fall, not the ones in front, at least.
(This is how much time I have on my hands while staying at home during this pandemic.)
The back grove, on the other branch, used to be nine. When we moved in there were already three stumps leftover from fallen pines, and another three are down since then. Only three remain and it must be they who have watched the rest of their brethren succumb to age and weather.
The last to fall, I'm sure, will be the biggest of the them: the Grandfather. He who stands 10 or 20 feet higher than the rest. He whose bough is so curved you can stand at the base of him but then need to walk three or four steps downhill to be under his crown. He whose crown is so mighty and full of cones, it is like a roof over the other trees.
The crows like him.
My wife and I used to swear he was the next to fall. We would watch him twist and turn, his head flipping this way and that in one thunderstorm after the next, and we'd swear: "He's going to crack and fall just like the rest, you watch. He'll come down on us while we're sleeping."
But he never has.
It has taken a few years of living under Grandfather for me to learn it, but I now realize—rather a threat—Grandfather is a protector. I sleep better at night knowing he's slowly lobbing back and forth out there.
I try to count the branch whorls up the boughs of our pines, to determine roundaboutish how old they might be. I lose count somewhere around 25, which means there are probably five or 10 more whorls up there I can't see and another who knows how many to add on for the sapling years.
But by examining one of the sawed stumps on the property, I count about 65 rings for about 65 or perhaps 70 years (the 10-month-old in my arms remains still, and watchful, as I count). So it seems to me that the whorl-counting method does not work particularly well on Virginia pines, that or you must double the number of whorls you count to gain anywhere near an accurate age.
One last thing that I've noticed about our pines is that they have no saplings.
In another part of this mountain's woods, my wife, the baby and I came across another grove of Virginia pines. But these were of the age where they are more shrub than tree; you could flick their strobilus (that of the male cones) they were so low to the ground; then watch as their yellow pollen plumed out and drifted on the air; we walked down the trail like that—flicking pine penises, poof, poof, as we went.
But this experience has me imagining a past, some 50 or 60 years ago, when the vacation cabins were first built, and the creek first dammed up to make the Shannondale lake, and the roads first laid. Did they come across a young pine grove then where our Pine Grove Rd. is now? Are these 13 elder pines in our yard all that's left of the original?
The thickness of the younger groves prods me to ponder whether they do not all start up together like that—young pines vying for a spot in the sun. But only the tallest and strongest grow into what we have today.
I've heard said that for a young pine to thrive it's best if it's far away from its parents, and that may hold true for humans as well, but it certainly holds true for the pines in our yard.
Cones litter our yard but there are no seedlings, no younger pines, no progeny. It is as though the other saplings around the pines—the maples and chestnut oaks and red oaks and tulip poplars biding their time, waiting for their moment when a taller tree falls and a gap opens in the canopy—crowd out any coniferous competitors. Could be the elder pines make the area too shady for infant-pines. Or could be the soil has changed ever so slightly. Or that the vinca, which now grows rapacious throughout the front grove, suffers only the weediest of deciduous saplings to root.
Pines—unlike, for instance, the maple which cracked in half during perhaps the severest thunderstorm I've ever been under two springs ago—will not regrow out of a cut or snapped stump. So it goes that the pines in our back grove—those split, cracked and downed—have nothing growing from them.
No new pines.
Their stumps simply sit in the ground and are splintered to mulch by the pileated woodpeckers until, one damp gray morning, I come out for a stroll, sight the precarious look of the stump, then set my boot against it and give it a push and off it rolls down the slope.
Things rot so fast in the damp of these woods...
Enough years go by, enough stumps rot to mulch, then dirt, and you wouldn't know there was a pine grove here at all.
Maybe that's the way of most things. Walk over any patch of ground, any turf, any slab of concrete or terraformed park and you'll be walking over something that was. Something that is not anymore. Whole histories used to be rooted in this spot, in this stretch of earth, but even the histories, the rings in the stumps, can't be read anymore. They've all gone to dirt.
Perhaps the mountain will still be here. Perhaps not. Those, too, can be torn down.
And that's all from the mountain this perhaps week.