Paper Birch

As her emblem, the writer wanted an image of the beech. She wanted to pay homage to a great beech tree where she lived and, frankly, hoped to invite some of the beech's totem power into her work. In Peaffie's Natural History of Trees she had read that "Our word book comes from the Anglo-Saxon boc, meaning a letter or character, which in turn derives from the Anglo-Saxon beece, for beech." Scribing signs on the blue gray smoothness of beeches is a very ancient pastime.

The writer approached a friendly artist, thinking that perhaps she could trade some of her work for his, and get from him a drawing of a beech leaf, nut and bud. As a matter of fact, the artist said, he was making a book that would combine his drawings with short pieces by various writers. Would she like to write to one of his images? Yes she would. This seemed to be a perfect trade, and fun besides. She went to the artist's studio to look at his pictures.

There were magical night scenes and surreal landscapes, all finely drawn and delicately colored. Considering them, the writer was at a bit of a loss. Intuiting this, the artist drew her attention to a tinted etching of a section of a paper birch trunk, which perfectly evoked that tree's calligraphic bark, with its subtle undertones. In another work, a painting of many paper birches together, curly and peeling, the artist had secreted a piece of bark. He challenged the writer to find it. His artifice was subtle. So much so that she abandoned the attempt after a while and departed to let him return to his work, and to return to her own.

The painting and the etching had put her in mind of paper birches that she had noticed by the roadside during a recent storm. They were clad with wet snow, the delicate garnet of their outermost branches incised with white against the bosomy gray sky. Driving by that late February afternoon she thought she had detected a faint pulse of spring in the semblance of warm rosy flesh under the silky pale surface of the birch bark.

There are records of birch trees growing to be eighteen feet in circumference. Assuming they could find a foothold, it would take four or five druid scientists to dance around such an elder. The writer imagined the time, not so long ago, when this land was deeply forested with birch and hemlock, maple and beech, great tall trees and their many companions, blossoming, buzzing, and caroling. She imagined a place where ancient trees were not vanishingly rare.

A story tree like a champion birch, or a great old beech, is not just any old elder, but a being who manages to live marvelously long, becoming more wise and benign decade after decade. A grandfather birch grows more lined and papery and pale, exploring, through the passage of the years, his changing essence until one day his time for living is done. He dies, quietly and turning soft and dry within, standing for a while as a refuge for birds and insects, and one day with a gust, is carried down to the ground. With the help of beetles chewing and fungus threads questing, the grandfather subsides back into the earth. The chattering of the wind in his leaves is long gone, bright truths all carried off on a dying breeze.

The morning after her visit to the artist's studio, the writer went walking on her land with a friend who was sharing his knowledge of tracking. Their heavy-booted progress through an overgrown plantation of scotch pines was slow and easy, reined in by the depth of the snow and the purpose of seeing. At a place where footprints showed that an animal had passed close by the low branch of a maple sapling, the tracker showed the writer how to read the creature's other traces. Studying the little tree, she discerned a fine hair clinging to a twig. Her breath caught the wisp and lofted it away.

The friends walked on and emerged from the pines, then ascended a slight rise to the grandmother beech. To make a venue for a practice of sitting and watching, they trod down a spot in the snow, spread out a neat waterproof ground cloth and sat, separate and still. Akimbo shadows of beech shoots became sharp, then vague, on the pristine surface of the snow, according to the waxing and waning of the sunlight with the passage of filmy clouds. The writer listened to the rattling of the branches of a nearby sugarbush in the freshening breeze and was sure she heard there another portent of spring. At length the two walkers rose to return, this time zig-zagging a different route through the parallel rows of exotic conifers.

Nature has always gone to marvelous lengths to thwart desolation and sameness. The irrepressible hardwood forest so testifies. Its outriders--popple and cherry, young maple and beech--assert themselves at every opportunity, and its other, more reticent members follow on. They thank the pines for their service in securing what remained of the soil after the land was cleared and tilled, and hasten to enliven the man made monotony.

Thus it was not all that improbable, but a graceful coincidence nevertheless, for walkers to chance upon a youthful paper birch gleaming in a clear place. The writer couldn't recall ever having seen it before. The discovery was wonderful to tell. Alone that afternoon while the west's glory dwindled, the writer strove to put characters together to detail the apparition of paper birch. She mused long into the dusk, envying the slow, calm artistry of trees.

--Stephanie Mills
Maple City, Michigan

Return to the Index of Synapse 37, Fall 1996