Robert and Roots: Payback Isn't Always Hell

Both of us sat down on the ground, our knees weak. Al had just stepped back to tug a branch out of his way when the tree’s heavy root ball snapped the tree upright again. The helmet would not have protected him from an uppercut to the chin from a hefty, thirty-foot-tall tree. The powerful swing of its root ball was terrible to imagine. I was surprised I hadn’t felt the thunder of it through my boots. The thought of one of us--or maybe just our heads--being literally catapulted through the air still gives me chills.

Quaking Aspen: Questions and Lessons

We believe the trees’ movements are arrested and might even feel a bit sorry for them. But do they watch us scurry, jumping in and out of cars, we short-lived beings, spending our brief moments in running around, rather than taking a seat on the ground, letting our attention send down a tap root? Don’t we wonder if the rose-breasted nuthatch is out in this gentle rain, pipping up and down the bole of a tree, because it’s hungry?

Preferred Parking: Seeking Gratitude

David was incandescent with some adventure, but he didn’t tell me where we were going until he drove straight through the lake access and out onto the ice road of Cathedral Lake.*

“Oh shit!” I unbuckled my seatbelt and rolled down my window. “David, you can’t drive to the islands. Ice around islands can be weak.”

I knew he’d survived tumbling two stories to a cobblestone street in Germany when he was five. When he was 18, he was at the helm of a sailboat in the middle of the night when a wave washed him into the ocean. Watching the boat skim away, no one aware he was overboard, he flailed his arm and just happened to catch a rope trailing behind the boat. He survived being a door gunner in Vietnam, engine malfunctions in his helicopters, and misdiagnosed Lyme’s disease. The man was unsinkable. But was I?