Rocks and Trees

It can be a stark contrast, moving from the modern world back into a natural world that still exists in the forest.

Meal preparation in civilization used to entail staring at a microwave oven while fidgeting impatiently as the seconds tick away and the packaged food within was harshly nuked. The lack of a microwave, indeed the very lack of electricity, now mandates thoughtful cooking over the stove. Staples and ingredients replace packaged or pre-processed convenience food due to the lack of expansive refrigerator space that the plugged-in world doesn’t think twice about. And mealtime in the woods is a time for conversation and visit. Human companionship is not a constant out in the forest, but even when there is no other person about, the birds and squirrels and bears and coyotes will always hear what you have to say. A television will never hear what you have to say and could care less about what you think.

Post meal in civilization used to be spent relaxing and being fed thought by the television. When alone in the forest and without man-made distraction, time is readily available, and the peace and tranquility of the environment allows for just plain old thought. Time for certain observations of the natural world to take on very human elements. Or perhaps time to observe certain human elements mimic inherent traits of the natural world.

My sauna is perched upon a grand protrusion of monolithic rock. Basement rock, I have been told. Sedimentary rock so old it was formed from primordial ooze not long in geological time after a certain conglomerate ball cooled and crusted enough to become planet earth, a time when sulfur was a more common element than oxygen in her gasses and liquids.

Rocks cannot procreate, they are the byproduct of something else. They are formed as the earth spasms and heaves her massive molten bowels to the surface, creating igneous bedrock mountains in an orgy of fire and sulfur and brimstone. They are created as those mountains are weathered down and the detritus is laid down in even stratus then compressed back into sedimentary bedrock. They are formed when mighty glaciers scrape and tear across the bedrock creating boulder and cobble and gravel and sand and laying those down as till.

But it is the mighty bedrock that captures the imagination, as solid and reliable as the name implies and the foundation upon which all else is based.

A closer look at those ancient rocks that my sauna is perched upon reveals a deeper tale. How those basement rocks became exposed at the surface is itself a violent tale of a continent being tore apart by an event so cataclysmic that it resulted in the creation of the greatest of the Great Lakes as well as the fractured edge of the crust of a planet being turned skyward and thrust forth.

Over the eons those basement rocks have been heated and compressed and stressed and thrust upwards into convex synclines as well as downwards into concave anticlines, sometimes resulting in a bizarre wavey appearance. That rock that the sauna is perched upon is chemically and elementally the same rock formed eons ago. But each time a force was placed upon it, it changed. All the original elements may remain, but each application of force left the monolith warped or fractured or crumbled and it was never the same rock ever again.

10,000 years ago, as the last of the mighty glaciers of Northern Wisconsin were begrudgingly retreating, the seed of an eastern hemlock had the audacity to germinate and take root in the very shadow of that doomed ice sheet. Those roots spread and wove and laid mat into the deposited glacial till and the milky meltwater provided moisture and nourishment.

Once established and dominant, the mighty hemlock created the perfect environment below for her offspring. The lack of sunlight below starves off the lesser species and the debris that falls to the forest floor slowly decays into damp humus, creating the perfect external womb for her seeds to take root and thrive without competition. Her massive crown above creates a microclimate below that coddles and protects the young progeny from the ravages of storms and affords them the opportunity to reach for the sun at their leisure.

With a lifespan measured in centuries rather than decades, the towering hemlock endures countless limb snapping snow falls and staggering ice storms. She braces herself for a thousand violent storms, and despite being twisted and tortured by the winds, each time returns to her previous elegant form once the storm subsides, minus some needles and dead wood.

Day after day, year after year, she consumes carbon dioxide, building her mass one carbon atom at a time and blessedly releases back into the atmosphere two life giving oxygen atoms for each CO2 molecule consumed. Her natural purpose in the grand scheme of things is to reproduce and protect her progeny but each moment she lives she creates life for every breathing being on the planet.

A horrible part of life is that there are moments of tragedy that change things forever. Long before they were Grandpa and Grandma Thompson, they were simply Pa and Ma Thompson, and they had the misfortune of experiencing such a moment.

Their phone rang and a young girl answered. A rather stern and official sounding man asked the young girl all sorts of questions about her brother Charles. Where did he work? Who were his friends? Then the official sounding man asked to speak to Mr. Thompson.

In that day and age, there was no question that the man of the house was the bedrock of the family, that was the accepted norm in society and indeed Pa Thompson was. A towering giant of man, his imposing presence and larger than life personality left no other deduction but that.

“Yes?”, Pa Thompson answered, and a hairline crack began to form in the bedrock.

“There has been an accident”, the official sounding man continued, and that crack broke into a chasm in the bedrock.

“Your son Charles…” the official sounding man continued, and at that moment a portion of the bedrock was pummeled to sand, and the bedrock man set the phone down and wept.

Ma Thompson, barely five foot two on a tall day but casting a shadow longer than that of the tallest hemlock, picked up the phone and faced into the impending storm, a storm unlike any her or her family had ever experienced and one that no family should ever have to weather.

Some storms come and leave a forever changed the world in their wake. Pa Thompson slowly returned to his role as the bedrock of the family, but he was never the same bedrock. And some storms might twist and torture and induce ring shake or other damage that goes undetected until the lofty hemlock eventually meets its end then falls to the ground. If that was the case with Ma Thompson, she gave no clue. When the storm seemingly passed, she returned to her previous elegant form.