The Redwood, or A Tall Tale

Chapter 6: Hammett the Western Hemlock

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

Book Two: The Song of Ohmer

Ch 5: Ohmer the California Bay

Then what I thought was an old root that grew
To strange distortion out of the hillside,
Was indeed one of those deluded crew

—Shelley

Ohmer the Bay, the Laurel of Song, then told
the story of Hammett the Elder. She sung of how
that Hammett overthrew Oasis the Mother Tree.
Her story began, as it always did, 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 Hammett, crooked on the scree.
Hammett the lonely, forsaken hemlock tree.
Remember how he grew on that barren cliff,
out of the mask the Hill let fall in rockslide
and wash, blown apart by Djed the Terrible
who crashed from the Sky and split the Hill
into two tops. And that craterous table
where Djed landed we call the Terrace.
The other side, its back and its spine,
we call the Summit. What divides them
is a cliff of sheer graywacke, the austere
and striated brow of the Hill, whose visage,
shattered by Djed, became the ruinous scree.

Oh, on that fateful day the Green Spirit missed her throw,
when She, in hubris, thought to strike the All-Seeing Sun!
How could She have possibly known? How could She have
known how, at the foot of the cliff, among discarded talus,
in that spill of shale that was the Hill’s discarded mask,
Hammett, crooked from the scree, would sprout and grow?
Hammett the Elder, the lonely, abandoned hemlock tree.

He grew at an angle, his base like an elbow,
his trunk an arm raised out of that debris,
calling for help, straining beyond shadows
of the cliff whose saturnine and mocking mouth
derided him as a treeling. It shouted abuses
at his deformity, and warned both Sun
and Moon away. Their swinging lanterns
with roving searchlight could not find him,
and Hammett grew slowly on the scree.

And that side of his trunk closest to the cliff
flagged and shed its greens, let fall its branches
so that half of Hammett’s habit was missing.
The other half, overcompensating, shagged
and strained its arms upwards, and he looked
like a man in rags condemned on hands and knees,
with neck in stocks, leaning forward upon
the guillotiner’s block. Poor Hammett looked
like a tree about to have his last good half
lopped off by noon and midnight’s cleaving.

                              ‘Oh how the Green Spirit 
has cursed me!’ cried the crooked hemlock.
‘To have let me drop from the comfort of my cone
the very moment the wind decided to gust.
How cruel, too, is the wind for snatching me up.
That same capricious breeze that enlivens trees,
sets them swaying, cast me on this desolate rock.
The same breath that bobs their crowns to and fro,
as if to music, played me on its current a false note,
marooned me on this wretched mantle all alone.
O dusty talus, O meager chert, whereon a cactus
would not grow, yet it suffers me!’

                                  So Hammett moaned,
his wood rotten with contempt and pity.
Yet he grew, in spite of his unhappy state.
He reached out limb and leaf like a half-lit torch,
a verdant light out of the bald hillside burning 
with indignant reproach.

                                    And then it happened
one day, out of the deep, when Hammett the hemlock
was a hundred and twenty-three, his roots met
the mycelia of fungi traversing the scree.
Down they slung their webs of white filament 
into the dark crevices of the crumbled detritus
and rescued Hammett’s roots. For the first time
in his life he felt the touch of another vegetal soul,
its prickly sensation strange but not unwelcoming.
And as we hear a voice disembodied on the other end
of a phone, someone called out to him, and announced:

‘Greetings from the Grove. The Mother Tree of the Terrace,
Oasis the Braided Redwood, welcomes you home.
He has in his wisdom decreed the building of a road
from the Terrace to the Summit, a tunnel stretching
beneath the Hill, uniting the realms into one wood
in the spirit of free trade and mutual prosperity,
that all may have access to what they need,
that every plant may pursue what makes him happy.’

At last Hammett was saved. No longer alone,
he was made a rootal member of a grove,
joined to the stand that borders the scree.
That stand was ours,” says Ohmer. “Our grove,
that runs to the gully and borders the Holt,”
and continued with her story. “And Hammett said:
‘Some luck at last! To know another finally.
Oh to be bothered! Though it took ten scores to pass.
How much in that time have I girded my trunk
with bitter bark, and wormwood. The parched hairs
of my roots, choked with dust, like survivors rescued
from the rubble, were almost too traumatized to talk,
too alone to trust! I’d lost all hope, but now am saved
from despair.’

			And what a boon it was for him,
for that same spring that Hammett joined the woods
the Potlatch was begun, and every tree gave freely
what it had, making lavish displays of philanthropy.

Now a Potlatch, as you know, is a festival held
in the realms of the Basin every five years and ten.
Then in the summer season, until Solstice Day,
plants will convene in their stands, understory
with canopy, and hold council with one another,
sometimes for many days, to decide amongst
themselves the most important things concerning
their woods and the wider Watershed.

From the smallest herb to the highest tree,
it is a time for plants to speak on matters
and learn how things stand, to talk and dance,
swaying together in the warm summer breeze.
And the richest make great shows of their wealth,
giving away as much of it as they dare,
for it’s said among plants in our Terrace
that a greedy tree grows upwards quickly
but a generous tree grows everywhere.
So trees give abundantly through their roots
all the riches gathered over the growing season.
Sweet-tasting sap stored in tubers and burls
they pump into the roots of impoverished plants.
Needful elements, too, phosphorus and nitrogen
they heap upon the general health of the soil.
They give away for the benefit of their stand,
leeching gifts into the ground for all to enjoy,
for the sake of the woods. And by the Potlatch’s end
plants declare one tree to be the most well-connected
and they are named the Mother Tree of their land.

So in their race to give, Hammett greatly benefitted.
His roots received access to resources that were
once inaccessible, incomprehensible as dreams.
And it was discovered beneath his plot,
below the mantle of the cliff’s barren chalk,
a deposit of earth rich in dolomite.
And with the help of fungus newly fastened
Hammett reached down to mine the limestone
deep in the ground, extracting rare elements,
and sold them for sap, and he grew tall and rich.
In fifty years he climbed to such heights as might
have taken a hundred years or more to reach.
But all the while he harbored in his heartwood
a great sense of injustice, as though a wrong
had been done to his treehood.

                        ‘How many winters did I suffer
to shut my needles up, and guessed madly
whether, in spring, they would open again or not?
And all that time the woods just below, just out of reach,
was rich beyond belief, grown tall and green with plenty.
How often then did I beg the gods of the Watershed
for better soil beneath the desert of my scree?
And all that time theirs, slick with humus, lay atop
their beds as warm, as secure, as downy blankets.
And they have shot straight up like rife bamboo.
And what they spend on leisure took me twice ten
arduous seasons to save up. Now, grow as I might,
I will never reach the swaying heights they do.
If I but bend but carelessly I snap at the vertex
and fall. O soft, O frail wood! I had, of necessity, 
denied myself so much. Yet much do they feast on,
and make of their appetites degenerate vice.
O! a spirit shows its mettle in how much truth 
it can tolerate. And I have suffered much already.

It’s clear the woods are broke and must be fixed.
Why, how easily could they, in all their abundance,
make of every speck of bald rock a lush garden?
And Earth herself, adorned in vibrant greens,
would be the envy of the Forest of Arden.
The Eastern Peak would turn its snow lashed eye
to see even the Deadvale returned to life.
Who else but myself to do it? For I have been one
acquainted with suffering whilst they have never
met it. What has not been met cannot be known.
The circuity of their neighborhoods are high walls
obscuring unpleasant views. Their cul-de-sacs
and thick bark insulate with blind complacency.
They cannot see the forest for their own trees.
Thus it falls to my charge. It must be up to me.

I will, come next Potlatch, announce my bid
for Mother Tree, and when I have gained the crown
will utter new decrees and usher in a new era
where not a one will wither or cast down a seed 
where it cannot grow. All will sprout and have room.
Every root will swell, every bud will bloom.’

By the time of the next Potlatch Hammett
declares he will run for the seat of Mother Tree.
That season he campaigns on a platform of change,
spreading his message with stern and dire pleas.
He had become wealthy, a well-connected pine.
But urge as he might, plants paid him little attention.
His abundance and networking were no match
for their love of Oasis the Braided Redwood.
More honored and vaunted were his deeds among trees
than any other in that grove or the wider Terrace.

He had for two centuries touched all plantlife
and made them flourish, and had, by his tunnel
connecting the Terrace to the Summit, brought
the woods of Middle Hill together as they had not
been since the days of Orion, ere Djed the Terrible
fell from the Sky.
                             So beloved of plants was Oasis 
that Potlatch he was crowned not only Mother Tree 
of the Terrace, but of all three realms of Middle Hill.
Terrace, Summit and Holt all granted their assent
and made Oasis Lord of Pines, Bastion of Plantlife,
and Chief Arbiter of their collective wills.

So Hammett, defeated in his bid, embittered,
from his solitary tower on the scree,
vows revenge against Oasis the Mother Tree.

‘Have the woods grown so recumbent with rot?
O senseless cabbage! O cretinous lettuce!
The forest floor is vile with unscrupulous stench.
Plants in the understory worship monoliths.
The tallest pines give not for the greater good
but for their own pleasure and enrichment,
to raise up for themselves a private wood.
And I like a dumb straw did drink it up
and called its complicit sugars generous!
If I’m ever fooled again let my body petrify,
my lopsided limbs be chewed by termites!
I and every credulous plant is to blame
if he let himself be shackled to sweet chains.
From this day on, I swear, as long as I stand,
upon my life they’ll not get away with it!’ ”

Thus Ohmer the Bay’s tale concluded for the night.
Her words sent trees off to sleep full of dreams.
Long her roots had thrummed, her crown smelling
sweetly of bay that soothed plants with tender song.

Orus the redwood was still awake when Hammett
the Younger, the hemlock whose four trunks climbed 
with great effort out of the sunken nurse log,
stirred up the soil with his rebuke:

					“For shame Laurel.
Know you not your lies of omission, like headwaters
that wash away the topsoil of vital nutrients,
starve your audience of much needed truth? 
You strip life by leaving out the most crucial part.”

“What part do you mean?” asks Orus, indignant.
Many times has he heard the hemlock complain
and many times taken offense. The two bickered
like children who don’t play well together, who never
can agree on what kind of game they’re playing.

“The foul part that would make sweet words reek,”
says Hammett the Younger, “How most honorable, 
most noble Oasis, humiliates my poor ancestor.
How he cuts him down to size in the forums 
convened for the Potlatches.

				‘A hemlock a Mother Tree?’
he whispers in the presence of the High Council.
‘Do not the roots of hemlocks grow short and shallow?
How can plants depend on a tree so prone to windthrow?
When any errant breeze might snap him at the base
of his crooked bole and severe all our roots? No, no,’
says Oasis, ‘a hemlock cannot make a good Mother Tree.
The green that has least root is soonest dead.
Especially one so far from any grove, who grows alone
upon the dusty heights of the scree.’

How full of malice. How unbearably unkind was he!
The Potlatch is no honest affair, but one of barbs
and backdoor dealings, full of unsavory happenings.
Nor will you hear such a song from Ohmer the Bay
who lulls you dumbly to sleep with only one kind of story.
The laurel’s a treacherous bard, a peddler of pretty scenes.”

But Orus is quick to reply:
                                           “Oh Hammett, 
even if it was the case such things were said,
would it change the wrongs your ancestor committed?
Would his crimes be any less corrupt?”

But Hammett is unmoved.
				        “Fie treeling!
If you had any sense the telling of it would be proof.”

And with that off he goes, and shuts up his roots.
Orus remains, with much misgiving in his heart.
He asks Ohmer, “But is it true?”

                                  “Aye,” sighed the Bay.
“Young Hammett speaks aright. The Mother Tree,
Oasis the Braid, was not blameless that day.
But who among us plants is so upright
he will not sway? Nor should we be so quick
to blame the customs and the barbarous laws
of their day. For it were, until now, the rough ways
of the woods. And even those of them who saw
the forest for the trees could not conceive
of our woods, and aught our judges would say.
There is but one who knows the shape entire,
and rise and fall of every plant within it.
She the Goddess of Growth, the Green Spirit.
I tell Her tales, as best I may, of what is good,
that I might refashion the habit of our youth.
Ourselves are full of social wrong, but perhaps
wild dreams are needful preludes to the truth.”