Heidi Seaborn on “Dendrochronology”

Dendrochronology, the marking of time, especially major events and history through the rings of a tree trunk feels both scientific and spiritual to me. We are learning so much about the life of trees. How they communicate with one another, signaling needs and danger. How one will sacrifice for the other. A quiet symbiosis taking place in forests and jungles. It makes me think of how children have a life separate from their parents and twins often have a language all their own. But now I’ve stepped into my own trap—the desire to personify everything. 

So, when my friend wondered aloud, as we were walking in a park of old growth trees near the Snoqualmie River outside of Seattle, how a tree perceives time, I couldn’t help but humanize that idea. To think of what those old trees have lived through in terms of human milestones—the wars fought, the miracles of invention, the quotidian lives of my friend and me. 

Linking these old trees to me with the connective tissue of metaphor even as I fight against that idea in my very next thought. Fight against the practice of naming the massive Sequoias. Trees that lived through a millennium of wars named after Generals. Worse, named after the very statues of Civil War generals that are finally being scrubbed off this land. 

And so, I’m wrestling with the form of claiming that we do as humans. And how even the small claims that we stake out—to name a tree or, as I did in my childhood, to build a tree fort—tame the natural world. So, while it’s easy to be incensed or rather really pissed off when someone sparks an accidental wildfire during a gender reveal party or by tossing a cigarette out the car window, aren’t those acts just a more deliberate, uglier form of human dominance over nature?

Where I live in the Pacific Northwest, the summers are getting hotter and our forests are burning for longer. Three years ago, the entire month of August was clouded in smoke. I drove up into the mountains and stood where I can always see Mt. Rainier commanding the entire horizon and saw nothing. 

Last September, just after Labor Day, the smoke arrived from the wildfires in California and Oregon. We couldn’t breathe, so my husband and I packed the dog in the car and drove East. On the I-90, a man smoked past us in a GT, top down, past the hills of blackened trees and wheatgrass. “Everything is in the rearview mirror these days,” I thought as his car disappeared into the brown air. 

We had heard that there was a stretch of clear sky yawning across Montana. I wondered aloud about fish and expansive rivers. I imagined I could sleep under a yellow braided willow, hear the last kingfisher sing. And so, we drove to Whitefish and then Missoula. To stay, to catch our breath. Until the wildfires arrived there. The world burning. 

In a time of dry bones and masked lips, of windows and lives shuttered, of shattered norms and dreams, we burnt our children’s house to the ground. At least that’s how it feels to me. This earth that we’ve propositioned for ourselves, that we’ve claimed, lit like a campfire. And now, as I write this, it is winter and the pandemic lockdown continues. We are forced to gather around the fire pit of family. To burn firewood, timbered, cut, hauled and stacked. We huddle around the fire against the cold, against the COVID. Our wool coats will hold the smell of smoke well into the spring. As another ring forms on the trees.