Rooted
On place and settling.
A note: as we are all now on a summer schedule, this newsletter will be moving to Mondays and Fridays for the foreseeable future. Some cool things are in the works for the next few months, so keep an eye out.
Hi Folks,
What is believed to be the oldest longleaf pine tree in the world is only two streets over from my apartment. It stands off the Boyd Tract in the Weymouth Woods Nature Preserve, out in the Sandhills region of North Carolina. This has been my home for the last year, even though I hate sand and I hate hills and I think I might be starting to hate longleaf pines, despite the fact that I spent years telling everyone around me that one day I would get a pine tree tattoo off the side of my wrist, a little etching of black lines that would trail alongside my veins until they reached a triangular peak at the top, fanning out over the lines where the bottom of my palm creases, the jut of my wristbone following the curve of the trunk.
This specific longleaf pine tree is said to have sprouted 468 years ago, which means it would have been the year 1553 when it first rose to life. I imagine that North Carolina in the 1500s was beautiful, all green and water. Westerners had just arrived to the area, on a Spanish expedition led by Hernando De Soto. With them, they brought disease, infiltration. Smallpox. Red bumps seething across the skin and strange languages, new tongues. The Cheraw tribe lived in the Sandhills then. When De Soto arrived, they moved south, towards the Pee Dee River. Today the Cheraw people are extinct. Before Roanoke, before the missing, before colonists and ships, there were just the trees and the people who lived amongst them. I wonder who first planted the longleaf, if any person planted it at all or if it just sprouted up one day, all on its own, ready to greet the world.
John Muir, best known for his love of California redwoods, once spent time in North Carolina observing the pines. Of them, he wrote: “In ‘pine barrens’ most of the day. Low, level, sandy tracts; the pines wide apart; the sunny spaces between full of beautiful abounding grasses, liatris, long, wand-like solidago (goldenrod), saw palmettos, etc., covering the ground in garden style. Here I sauntered in delightful freedom, meeting none of the cat-clawed vines, or shrubs, of the alluvial bottoms.”
Longleaf pines, scientifically known as pinus palustris, were used for lumber and pitch, tar, and turpentine, which later gave the state its nickname of the “Tar Heel State.” But less than 0.01% of the pines in the state are considered old growth. Once, longleaf forests would have covered nearly 92 million acres across the south; today they cover less than 3 million. It is a frantic race to save them, replanting and burning and replanting and burning; often, the woods around me smell of smoke and fire, billowing up into the sky, almost indistinguishable from the wood burning stoves of the houses that surround.
Longleaf pines are built to last. Their trunks, skinny and straight, grow up to 120 feet tall, their canopies nearly 50 feet in diameter. For the first five to seven years, they stay in stout tufts close to the ground, letting their roots sink into the earth. From there, they sprout up in quick succession, growing anywhere from 13 to 24 inches a year. Their root systems are extremely deep and strong, radiating and weaving beneath the ground. Even in hurricane-force winds, longleafs stand tall. They bend and whip, swirling in the gales. This is largely due to the companion plants that grow around them, holding them in place. Without that community, they can snap in a microburst, their roots clinging to the ground while their upper halves twist and dance in the wind. But the roots. The roots stretch out between 35 and 75 feet beneath the ground, nearly as tall as the trees themselves. The roots are the most important part. The roots stabilize and strengthen. The roots keep them here, still standing, after all this time.
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A few years ago, a friend of mine slipped me a note that had been ripped from the corner of a piece of cardstock. On it was a tiny drawing in black ink of a pine tree, and the words: you remind me of the pines. Like them, you are strong and stable and yet able to move in the wind.
Since then, that note has become a metaphor for the way I wish to live my life. To be someone reliable, true, and yet flexible, adaptable. For me, this speaks of the difference between being stable and being stuck. I tend to think of being rooted more in the camp of being stuck; having roots is often not by choice. Lord knows I have run from my roots all my life. When people asked where I was from, I always said San Francisco, where I was technically born. I never wanted to be southern. I didn’t think that anyone did. I refused with every part of me to put down roots. I have lived in so many different places, moving every year for the last six years of my life. I have never known where to call home. I still don’t. I do not simply move in the wind; I blow away with it.
Personally, I do not think I am a fan of longleaf forests. When you are in them, all the trees begin to look the same, spindly and sprawling, and I feel panic creep up the back of my throat like needles. I do not ever seem to know where I am. There are too many gaps between the trees, and I often think to myself that I could not hide here if I needed to. The trees are tall and swarming and they trap the heat inside of them, the air 10x thicker there than it is on the outside. Too often, I have found myself alone in the pines with strange men crossing my path on the trails and I have thought to myself that surely I will never leave the forest, that this is how my story ends. I much prefer the density of western North Carolina forests, where it is easier to disappear. Where I can lose myself in the greenery. Or the short, fat pines of Northern forests, ones that remind me of Canada, a place that too was a home for me, once. Something about longleafs unsettles me and leaves me on edge.
For a long time I thought it must be the fact that I never intended to end back up in the south this soon, that this was a life I wanted for myself in ten years, but not now, not yet. I thought the trees reminded me of my failure somehow, that they were an ever-present indication that I would always be this, always like this, unable to survive in the city and yet unable to leave the places that so many of us seemed to want to. What was there left for me in this town, anyway? In this state? In this whole region, where I had never made solid friends or relationships or felt anything that seemed permanent, lasting? I had roots here, but they were my family’s, not mine. I did not leave anything here. I did not leave anything anywhere.
Nowadays I walk the Boyd Tract every day and look for the oldest pine, which I still have yet to find. I inhale the scent of them, which isn’t nice like firs, but dirty, warm, like hot bark and orange clay. At times, sulfuric and sharp. Beneath the rains, comforting and dense. I walk, alone, the same mile loop and wonder why I am so afraid to put down roots, because I have come to learn I want to more than anything in the world. I want to be forced to love a place, to call it home. I used to think I wanted to fall in love with another person so that I would be forced to keep myself somewhere, but I think all along what I have wanted is to just feel at home within myself. For the panic to disappear, the panic that seems to come every time I think of stability. Of home. Of staying in a place long enough to plant roots and let them seep. To, like the pines, finally be able to swing out far, in wide circles across the earth, and then come back to myself. To have a place I want to come back to. I want roots. It feels hard and strange to admit that. But I do.
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When I was researching for this essay, I came across an old poem I wrote in my first college class in New York City, an introductory poetry course. The poem was titled “Pulse” and it goes like this:
For the tree to grow into itself
it must first start at the roots and work its way up
breaking through the skin of the earth as if cellophane
or a tabletop, the legs collapsing in on themselves as branches
burst from the body and the leaves
shake themselves down to the damp grass.
Scrawny-legged, the tree sways in the wind,
not resisting its uprooting, but embracing it with open arms.
The tree has no master but itself.
I have no eyes
to see the tree with when I am leaving against it.
I feel the bark scrape my bare back, tracing
the design of its birth into my skin, red on white. Where
is the pulse, the heart that beats silent and
steady? The body is buried deep under the dirt. I lie
and search for the pulse within myself, rubbing the
silk-soft leaves between my fingers. Seeking
something. But the earth does not answer
and my heart does not break.
•
I have been told that I make everything difficult for myself. That I am not an easy person, and I probably will not have an easy life. It’s true, I think. I do not know how to exist in ease, not even if I would like to. Does anything? Sometimes the forest is so still and quiet that I can hear the pine needles drop to the ground. Other days it falls open with thunder and noise, lightning striking down in angered strokes. Ease is not permanence. Neither are roots. I am learning that. I think I have been afraid to settle because I cannot help but convince myself that settlement feels lasting, irreversible. It removes the possibility of change, of shifting. With roots there is the possibility of rot, of something being the wrong fit. And more than that, with roots, there is the greater fear of loss, of being uprooted.
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If I was a better poet, I would have liked my words to sound like Mark Strand’s poem, “The Night, the Porch”:
To stare at nothing is to learn by heart
What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself
To the wind is the ungraspable somewhere close by.
Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.
What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort
Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux
Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting
For something whose appearance would be its vanishing—
The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,
Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there
Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.
•
Next month, I will pack my life up again into brown cardboard boxes and move once more. Only an hour north this time, still within distance of something known. Each time I do this, it seems that the last month is the most difficult in the process of leaving. The last month is when I start to think of how a place has subtly shifted to feel like home, how what had before felt unfamiliar now feels more familiar than the thing that came before. How it would be so easy to stay, if I would just let myself. Faces become recognizable, known. Drives become second-nature. I imagine this road in fall, again, knowing this year I will not see it. Everything strikes out in its singular beauty. It is heartbreaking. I do not know why it becomes so difficult. Lately, I have seen the following quote from John Green’s Paper Towns floating around on TikTok, overlaying videos of crying individuals, packed cars, and soaring planes: “It is so hard to leave—until you leave. And then it is the easiest goddamned thing in the world.”
When I am gone, there will still be the trees soaring up and over the canopy of the barns, the horses, the dirt roads and rolling hills. There will still be the pines dancing in the wind, evergreen all year long. I will think of them from time to time, because wherever it is I seem to go I somehow always find myself back beneath them. In any part of the world, the pines will always seem like home. I think that perhaps I will learn to think of myself like seeds, like sprouting, leaving tiny pieces of me in each forest, each patch of dirt and grass. Eventually, all those seeds will spread out and root together and I will know then that I am home.
Your prompt this week is to find a tree where you live. It can be in a city or in the woods. Even better if it is in an unexpected place. Take a notebook and set a timer for twenty minutes. Leave the headphones at home, and just listen. Put your pen to the page and do not take it off until the twenty minutes are up. What kind of tree is it? How does it look, feel? Where are you? What emotions does it bring up for you?
Take some time to sway in the wind this week, friends. We are not all so stuck as we think.
See you Friday,
Spencer
This week you get not a song, but a whole album: Fences by Fences, their debut album from 2010. This is one of those albums that I love every single song on, and I’ve never found an album like it. I listened to it all the way through while writing this newsletter, and I recommend you do the same. My most played songs are Sadie, Boys Around Here, The Same Tattoos and Your Bones, but they’re all good.
Fences is an indie rock band from Seattle, Washington, made up of vocalist and guitarist Christopher Mansfield, guitarist Benjamin Greenspan, bassist and vocalist Lindsey Starr and drummer Elliott Garm Chaffe.
Something else I have discovered about home. It requires accountability. I don't always love having roots in the Confederacy. I understand why people leave, or never come. But I also understand the beautiful cost of staying--it falls to me to raise a contrary voice. Good luck in your move.