Tree-age (“Triage”): When Life Gives You a Hurricane

Over three months since the Storm and today I felt ready to go and walk among the trees off the Blue Ridge Parkway. I knew it would be both medicinal and mournful.

What we found was a tree graveyard. Hundreds, maybe thousands of trees mangled and tangled with each other. Still. Broken. Battered. Eery in the residual story they tell. Without thinking, my husband and I began talking about death–trying to remember how old family members were when they died. Reaching back into latent memories about sacred transitions and loss. My mother was eighty-four. His mother seventy-nine. My grandmother on my mother’s side was ninety-three, and on my father’s side, sixty-one.

We climbed over and around trees. We walked past warning signs about danger and storm damage. “Unstable areas ahead.” It was an honest appraisal of everything here these days. Dangerous, dangling, bereft, still here. The trees testify to the magnitude, the scope and scale. Forty percent of all trees in Buncombe County were destroyed or seriously damaged by #HurricaneHelene.

I paused a few times to lay on hands. To bless the burial laid bare. To be the tree–because we all are like the trees. We are walking among the dead, we are sleeping in the ruins of what was, we are composting into something that will, at some point, grow out of all of this wreckage.

The heft of the massive trunks sliced in pieces and more pieces felt grounding and real. And also grotesque and impossible to accept. Proof that something had happened, that too much happened, too fast. The mighty ones fell hard and broke others as they went down. The sounds of those hours and hours of trees falling and the earth being upended echo in my memory–and it’s like I can hear it through the quiet of this sunny, cold day in January when nothing is moving except the occasional squirrel darting back and forth now horizontally along a trunk that use to be vertical.

Finding wisdom in this war zone is a way to steal myself from some depth of the grief. What felt most important was just to be there and pause without forethought. To look around and not find words. To walk slowly. To be unsteady at turns, and deliberate at others.

These days on planet earth invite such triage/tree-age, such truth telling. What lies ahead this year for this land? Mass deportation, white lash, and patriarchal reclamation of non-compliant bodies? More rain than the ground can soak in? Rivers cresting well beyond their banks and washing things away faster than we can remember what it was like before the storm hit?

One of the last places we paused along the trail was to pay our respects to an uprooted giant of a tree. Her lifelines unearthed and exposed–too heavy to tidy up, too massive to ignore. She abided here, no doubt, for generations, witnessing a small stretch of countless low grade adventures. She stood through many a storm, until this one. And now she stretches well beyond the trail she shaded, well past the bend in the path that presented a choice to those finding their way in the world.

Today that regal tree’s invitation was to not avert our eyes, but to remember what it means to be rooted and grounded in a place only for a time. That’s all any of us can ever have. Sometimes life gives you a hurricane–too much, too fast, and you’ll have to figure out ways to live with all the uprootedness that you can’t escape. And you’ll find new ways to position yourself in the wreckage. Everything around you will be adapting and improvising, too.

And when death comes, may there be fertile soil for who you were and how you lived to enrich the ground for what will inevitably grow from what was and what could have been. The rest is really not history at all, it’s biology–the science of life unfolding from whatever is here now.