The Redwood, or A Tall Tale

Chapter 5: Ohmer the California Bay

The Landscape

Prologue

Book One: The War in the Sink

Ch 1: Orus the Redwood
Ch 2: Oannes the Pacific Yew
Ch 3: Bostick the Valley Oak
Ch 4: Orchard the Canyon Live Oak

Stones have been known to move and trees to speak.

—Macbeth

Now Orus having spent his days so long
on the banks of the Sink, away from home,
wending his shade through the fine tracery
of mycelia that threads the banks together,
returns to his treeself in winter and finds it
forgotten, abandoned, fallen into disrepair,
just as Oannes the yew had warned him.
Fix the foundations of thy woody home,
the old tree had told him. But Orus, eager
for water for his grove, had not done so.

Now beetles swarmed his wood and multiplied.
Without pitch to push them out they burrowed
deep in the fibrous bark and feasted within
on the meaty cambium. Nor had he made
to embitter his leaves tannins to keep the elk
from nibbling his slender crown. His bark,
young and smooth, was coming off in flakes,
and his needles turned a pale, reddish brown.

“What a mess I’ve made,” said Orus unhappily.
“I’ve been so busy I haven’t made time
to tend to those things that make me a tree.
My habit, so long unattended, for I was out
and about, appears so oddly foreign to me!”

So he spent the cold months minding his home,
and grabbed what dim light fell in splinters
upon the frosty, dew-soaked floor, running
the tips of his green fingers through silk strands
of the Great Sun’s light the same as we stretch
and articulate our own human hands
to feel the gift of liveliness and of life.
And he oversaw, too, the work of days,
the household chores that make one’s place
feel lived in, that make one feel like home.
It is a tending to, a taking stock of, 
refilling this, replacing that. Restoring
what’s been forgotten, all that’s diminished.
How the upkeep like sweet nourishment
revitalizes the weary body and the spirit!

He measured with considered attention
the opposing flow of xylem and phloem.
The pores of his greens opening and closing,
calibrating his panels of green scales,
adjusting what had been knocked off balance.
Venting water, circulating the balm air.
He worked on himself long into every day,
and paid mind to his problems with care,
inquiring into himself what bothered him,
wondering if the evil that plants do
is what they truly intend to. “Or are they,”
he thought, “under the wrong impression
about what’s good?” The question vexed him.
But at night, when plants settled down to rest,
he put away his work and thoughts and stopped
to listen to the songs of Ohmer the Pacific Bay.

Now Ohmer the Bay loved telling stories.
Her habit deeply-rooted, her trunk stout,
her globed crown of yellow greens spinning,
her roots thrumming with fantastical song.
Plants would listen to her after sundown,
long, long after their leaves had gone to sleep.
And her fragrant crown, with aroma of pepper
so lovely to smell, brought even the fauna
around to listen to tales she had to tell.

Orus’s favorites, and those most often told,
were of the Last True Mother Tree of the Hill.
Oasis he was called, a redwood braided
together of six redwood trunks. A tree
among trees who once stood near the stand
where Orus stood, who, once upon a time,
joined plants from all corners of the land.
Ohmer told the story of how Oasis
became braided of six redwoods like this:

“Sing, Soil! 
                            Sing of giants past. 
Sing voices out of the earth,
out of the richness of humus,
of the force that drives the green fuse, 
of plants growing green and tall.
Sing of the age of the tallest trees
who lifted the Sky on their backs,
who washed their heads in the stars.

Remember Oasis, he whose six trunks
were knotted into one. Oasis renowned
for the marriage of Middle Hill,
Oasis who brought flora and fauna
together in harmony under one wood.
How was it his habit was knotted?
How did his trunks rise tall
out of the life-giving humus
like a corkscrew, gyring as they grew,
churning the weather itself,
stirring the heavenly cumulus
season in and season out
into their imaginary shapes?

Was it not Djed the Javelin
Oasis wrapped himself around?
Djed the Giant, the Dread Monolith.
Tallest of trees, the father of Oasis.
Djed who was cast by the Green Spirit
skyward, hurled like a javelin to pierce
the Sun and unyoke its brightest light?

And though Sylvia’s aim was true, not even
She could reach the flaming eye. And down
Djed fell, wounding Earth as it landed,
straight as an arrow, into Middle Hill.
And that is why they say the Hill has two tops,
one side higher than the other. That table
where Djed landed we call the Terrace,
and the mountaintop we call the Summit.
And after 10,000 years the Mighty Pine
hardened into a lifeless snag and died.

Unbent in the wind, Djed stood petrified.
Its pale thread dissolving the separation
of Earth and Sky, threatened the woods
beneath its horrible shade, for they knew
one day Djed would fall. Its brittle roots 
would give way. Its terrible weight would
crash upon the floor and sunder all plantlife.
So every day the shadow of Djed passed
like a fateful sundial across the canopy.

In that age of uncertainty plants lost heart.
Trees trembled to feel their hour come,
full of fear, obsessing over where
and when the blow would be done.
They lamented their pitiful state,
cursed the Green Spirit for their existence.
They mourned themselves while still alive
and, enthralled to fate, ceased to thrive.

But Djed did not fall. Plants in that grove
were spared a terrible fate. How was it so?

Around Djed’s buttressed feet,
encircling its stupendous bole,
a fairy ring of six saplings,
six redwoods newly grown,
sprouted from the knucklebones
of Djed’s dying roots, arose
fast as fungi’s fruiting bodies.

Up they grew, fast and straight,
each new torso quicker than the last,
with arms springy and upward angled
ready to embrace the Lightgiving Sun.
And they were six voices in their trunks
but were of one mind, and spoke
with one voice out of the ground.
And he together who spoke as all six
was called Oasis. A council of redwoods.
Six of them in the round. A fairy ring.
And when Oasis was a treeling
he reached out his roots around him
and learned how plants both short and tall 
feared the day when Djed the Snag would fall.
How they trembled in the shadow of Djed
pirouetting its dreadful hand across them.
How it reminded them daily of their end!
Oasis heard their complaints, and said:

‘Oh goodly plants, be not afeard of Djed.	
The snag is only now our burden. 
Only now, this very moment,
the still point of a turning world. 
But it shall be there, at the center,
my dance begins. I will perform
the sacred choreography of a son
doing the impossible for his parent,
to keep their image from crashing
from whatever height and causing
unforetold catastrophe.
I am the tree whose habit will be
the thinking on it as long as I grow.
And when I am a hundred feet tall
I will have made myself a wall
around my father’s ruinous abode.
And out of a desolate place I will
have made a more perfect space
than even the Great Glade knows.’’

At this some plants gasped and clamored:
‘No place is greater than the Great Glade!’
Many others believed anyway such a thing 
was impossible. It simply could not be done.
Pines don’t grow like that, they said.
You’re no willow or oak or witch hazel.

But he would prove them wrong.
Leaning his bodies clockwise he
corkscrewed around the Mighty Snag,
with tilting trunks, with crowns outstretched 
from their butts, twisting like a vine,
coiling like the tendrils of a sucker
until the six trunks were intertwined,
and the trunk of Djed entombed.

Fifty and a hundred summers he weaved 
his selves around the menacing pine.
Fifty and a hundred summers plants watched
with incredulity and suspicion, 
with hope and curiosity and expectation, 
and every bearing they brought was delivered
unto its opposite or concomitant,
turning on the very gyring of his trunks.

They watched his slanting bodies cross
and recross, the fibrous bark scraping
and squeezing against bark, threading 
themselves the thickness of their boles,
until, bound tightly together, he closed
their helixed habits around the Mighty Djed
and held it in place, safe from windthrow
or fire, though the monstrous pine was dead.

Word spread throughout the roots,
and legend grew of the redwood’s 
woven habit, how he saved his stand
from certain disaster, becoming a plant
upon which other plants could depend.
And that is how Oasis the redwood
was braided of six trunks into one.”

Thus ended Ohmer the Bay’s tale that night.
Plants around her loved to hear her songs
and listened long after their leaves had gone 
to sleep, until dawn brought the morning fog
and the first corpuscular rays shimmered
wetly through the mist, and their work began.

But there was one tree who did not enjoy
Ohmer’s stories. One tree who listened
unmoved except to bitterness. Not long
after the bay’s song had ended, that tree’s
voice called out from the roots to object.

“Oh bard, will you vex them yet again,
and keep them in thrall to delusion?
These dreams you tell, these fictions,
are they not cut from whole cloth?
Do you not, being a laurel, pepper them
with fragrant airs and perfumed pomp?
They go down most sweetly to our roots,
filling us up, making us overfull and sleepy.
And ere they’ve sent us off to dreaming,
stupefied, spellbound and unquestioning,
the first light breaks, and it’s back to work.”

The tree spoke sharply from his plot, his voice
traveling down a nurse log not far from Orus.
The two trees could sense one another through 
their lens of greens, and taste of the other 
with the porous nostrils of their leaves.

On one side of a ravine Orus stood,
on a landing of shaggy boulders flanked
by heaps of ferns and bearded moss. Around
his feet were fleshy worts and springy sorrel.
At forty feet, he was still a young redwood
whose slender trunk swayed to stay upright,
whose new sprays of greens did not yet veil
the light of the floor but made it bright,
a lamp within the shadowed forest, a vigil
illuminating with vivid yellowgreens.

But below the landing, a gully and a stream,
and at the toe-slope where the stream pooled,
beneath a pile of woody debris, there lay
a sodden nurse log upon which the colonettes
of a western hemlock grew. 
                                            Four trunks in all
arose, shortest to tallest in a row, like the fins
of a sailfish. And the bare roots that ran
down either side of the nurse log looked like
the legs of a man mid stride, knees bending
midhike against some precipitous incline.

To see his habit running lengthwise,
the tangled roots, trunks, and crowns, all seemed
as though in stages of climbing or standing up
or ascending a staircase of some dark cellar
that led down to the depths of the Earth.
Each tree trunk looked as phases in a sequence
of hatching from the shell of the fallen log,
splitting open, emerging primordially
from the rank decay of that primeval bog.
And the fourth and final tree reached forward
from the bow of the log, his hands and the tip 
of his drooping head extending upwards
where light fell more bright and generous 
near the landing where Orus stood.

“Oh bard, I applaud you, being masterful,
but what a shame it is, what a crime
that talent such as yours goes to waste.
You wield it in the service of taller trees, 
to fertilize and enrich their hierarchy,
which cares not for you for your own sake
but for the value of the product you make,
for it keeps plants dumb and domicile.”

Having heard the hemlock make his remark
many times already, Orus felt
it had been one time too many, and replied:

“Hammett, this is not the first I’ve heard
of your complaint against Ohmer the Bay.
But I’ve always wondered whether
or not you believe in what it is you say.
Do you believe Ohmer sings her song
merely to deceive us, to do us a disservice
and serve the benefit of unsavory trees?
And if you do believe it, will you not then
give us proof of such a thing, or else
these accusations seem unjust to Ohmer.
I think she moves many plants, including me,
for our own good with her beautiful song.”

And Hammett said:
				“How is it possible
for a treeling to rise this tall and still be
so naïve! You have a lot to learn, redwood,
about how the Watershed really works.
I say the bay does her work unwittingly.
It’s mechanical. Nothing malevolent.
Just ignorance and weakness. I’m sure
she’s just as naïve and incapable as you.
She sings heroic songs of the good and brave
and we think that is how one must behave
if one wants to rise high in the canopy.
But of course this isn’t the case. The tree
who grows tallest does so because he’s willing
to do whatever it takes, including wicked things,
to secure his place and win a spot in the Sun.
But the bay doesn’t tell you stories like this.
Instead she sings about benevolent Oasis.
Do you think Oasis was benevolent as she says?
If you do then you’re beyond my help, keehl,
and beyond deserving any sympathy from me.
The bay lies about the braided tree’s true nature,
and in so doing, puts you at a disadvantage,
because the tallest will use that good that you
believe against you to achieve their own ends.
Whether the bay knows she lies or not,
whether out of ignorance or malevolence,
it makes no difference. She is still to blame
for making plants believe her silly stories,
and for that, at least, she should feel shame.”

Now day broke. The Sun with provident yoke
spilling over the horizon summoned plants
to their bright and early morning feast,
and Hammett returned to his treeself.

                                                But Orus 
lingered a little in the rootal networks,
remarking on the opinions of the hemlock.

“The Sun knows how a tree gets to be like that.
His talk so bitter, his opinion impenetrable.
Not even Oannes the Teacher could see
into that hardened cylinder of heartwood.”

But Ohmer the Bay, the Laurel of Song, 
replied, “Hammett has his reasons, redwood. 
He is descended from an accursed line
of hemlocks. The Children of Hammett.
Doomed to a lifetime of ceaseless wandering.
Doomed for that crime committed by
his ancestor, Hammett the Elder. Hammett
the Pine Who Grew Crooked From The Scree.
Much does our younger Hammett have
to weigh and bear in the recesses of his pith. 
It was Hammett the Elder, his forebear,
who overthrew the Last True Mother Tree
of Middle Hill, the Great Braided Oasis.”