Root

Jill MCcabe Johnson

Root systems fascinate me, how provenance and history reveal themselves in gnarled and twisting radices. Hiking the woods of Bowen Island, in Canada’s Southern Gulf Islands, I marvel at how the roots stretch and extend over stumps and nurse logs, rocks and ridges, twisting and looping, often wound across each other in a snarled tangle—a cross between elegant opportunism and desperate strangle in their clamor for light, water, nitrogen, and nutrition. The roots of Western red cedar pitched high on a giant boulder, for example, plummet more than 30 feet down the rock’s face to gain foothold in the soil. And a spindly Giant leaf maple, maybe a teenager by human terms, perches atop a twenty-foot high cedar snag. The maple’s roots encompass the nurse tree, digging into it for food, until eventually they reach the forest floor. Rotting stumps of old growth cedar and Douglas fir bear witness to the logging done by settlers. One can only guess at their original girth, but the deteriorating remains of several stand so wide, it would take three of us to reach hand in hand around the circumference of their trunks. Caramel tones of tree sap scent the air. A stately, pileated woodpecker nicks rectangular crannies into rotting trunks in search of bugs, and forms habitat for more bugs and birds and tiny mammals. A pair of mating ravens warns each other of my approach. One holds something indistinguishable in its beak, and I scan the trees for signs of a nest. Late winter. Early spring. Time of birth and renewal. Rain a salve and lullaby I need after my brother Mark’s sudden death.

When the sun leans into a cloud break to the west, it rakes across the thickened cumulus, skitters over water, and breaks into millions of refractions from millions of raindrops left dangling at the ends of branches, tips of needles, and pale green Mahonia flowers, covering moss, and dotting ferns. Dazzling, luminous, the brilliant greens, the itinerant light. Breath holding. Let the light shimmer, raindrop to raindrop, let it glance past, sparkle on skin and in eyes. Do the animals take this exquisiteness for granted? Or are they as mesmerized as I am? A golden eagle circles overhead. Does he simply seek prey, or is he, too, reeling from so much inexplicable beauty?

Like the time hiking with my then husband, brother Mark, and his wife Cathy at Drunken Charlie, a two-pole fishing lake near Duvall, Washington. Barely big enough to make a U-turn in a rowboat, the lake is accessed from old logging roads. The upward trail climbs to a rock outcropping that overlooks the lake. After a picnic, kicked back in the afternoon sun, I made fun of Mark’s tan lines—dark arms, pasty shoulders. But I did it in front of his new wife, embarrassed him with my clumsy, juvenile way of expressing affection, the way we’d always teased each other as kids. He stared across the lake. I stared at him confused, knowing I should apologize, but not knowing how, and not knowing how the moment would haunt me, a storm of regrets, years later on another trail.

Remnants of the spring rainfall drip from branches, trickle down trunks, into rivulets and runnels. Tiny streams form along the fissures of bark in the older firs and maples. The water fans down alder trunks, moistening lichens. It pools over bracket fungi, seeps into mosses, follows root structures into their points of penetration, steeping, soaking, then guided by downward pull, sifts through the earth, carving out ditches and streams to ponds, lakes, rivers, and the ocean. I marvel at the wisdom of water, how it serves as electrical conduit between particles, the agent of change that facilitates the breakdown of matter, the taking up of nutrients, the growth of new life. I marvel at water’s elegant system of navigation, driven by the ease of gravity, and a kind of attraction, water molecule to water molecule. It seems something to be hallowed, almost sacred, as though spring rains watering and sculpting the forest are an ancient ritual, and I, mere mortal, have witnessed the secret rite—or so I’m tempted to tell myself, wanting to fashion a spiritual experience out of millions of years of cause and effect.

I can understand how the mind will stretch past reason and observed experience to take root in religious belief. How we draw meaning and purpose from our fables of existence. How reassuring it is to believe we are not cast, desperate and alone, to fight and fend with no promise of just rewards for our pains and sacrifices. No promise of afterlife where we could be reunited with those we love. And no threat of punishment for those who would ruthlessly shove us aside in the pursuit of their own foothold and fortune. Compassion is a joyous, painful thing. Compassion drives us to care for and help others, and yet it is always rooted in a kernel of hurt. Every act of kindness born of ache. I think of this as I study the roots of a cedar, as supple as octopus limbs, embracing and drawing sustenance from the notched and sawn stump of an ancestor whose once glorious stature now rots, reduced to soft and decaying stub. Which isn’t to anthropomorphize the trees and suggest they feel sorrow and compassion, though the idea is as tempting as is the grace of godliness and our hope for ever-after. And yet, I can take solace that ever-after lives in the perpetuation of energy and matter, converting from one life-form to another. An exchange that is miraculous and hopeful enough in itself. To think we might decay and reshape into something as seemingly simple but fascinatingly complex as lichen or sword fern or possibly even Salal, Spruce, or the lacy Western hemlock.

One time, Mark told a Polish joke in my living room, and I said if he did it again, if he made fun of people for their race or ethnicity, I would ask him to leave. So he did. Told another joke that to him was harmless and to me, everything that is wrong in this world. It’s not that he believed the ugly stereotypes. He was the first person to stand up for the disadvantaged and oppressed. He called himself a feminist. He fought for equal rights and equal opportunity. But in that moment, he just wanted to push his little sister’s buttons. It was late. We’d all been drinking. I kicked him out, and his wife, Cathy, drove him home. We never mentioned the incident again, but they rarely accepted my invitations to come over, and rarely invited me into their home, too. I should have apologized, and maybe he should have, as well. But we were two stubborn children, playing out a childish trajectory that was bound to collide.

We live in a time when scientists report phenomena supporting Einstein’s theory of relativity: like when they detected the sound, billions of years old, of black holes colliding—not one, but two gravitational vacuums so powerful, so singularly focused, nothing, not even light, could avoid being drawn into them. A place where nothing emerges intact. More than a ripple in the fabric of space and time. A tumultuous crashing of inescapable storms. As though two cosmological reapers had clashed and combined, in the process doubled their deathly powers. Not very different from water molecules attracting and connecting, joining forces with others, until they made an ocean of power, except this ocean is in outer space, and threatens to suck in everything within range, making it yet bigger, and therefore increasing its range again. I imagine entire solar systems, uprooted, dragged in. And here on the trail, my internal compass can almost feel the draw of that gravitational pull.

Mark apologized to me once. We were in a bar. Someone’s birthday party. I went to the counter to get a soda—I wasn’t much of a drinker—but the bartender had gone in back. Or was on break. Behind me the sound of pool cues and balls striking. Dire Straits on speaker. Mark came up next to me, leaned against the bar and said he was sorry. Sorry for the times when we were kids, when he took advantage, did things he never should have, and it made him sick now to think what he did to me, and what it might do to me over time. He wasn’t a pedophile, he said. He’d just been a dumb kid. Curious, but it was wrong and he knew it. He knew it was wrong.

What did I say? It’s okay. I think I said it’s okay. I was fine. I am fine. Don’t worry about it, I probably told him. I’ve forgotten all about it. I never think of it at all.

We were four years apart. I had friends whose brothers had touched them inappropriately, too. It wasn’t normal. I knew that. But it wasn’t rare, either. Common, I guess. So my response wasn’t anger. Not directly. Is it possible I made fun of Mark’s tan because I wanted to retaliate against his body? His sense of attractiveness? Did I want to hurt him? I don’t think so.

When I kicked him out of my house, I was drunk on more than beer. I was drunk on self-righteousness, on my self-appointed role to eradicate prejudice in society and in the home. Did I enjoy the power? Did it feel good to turn the tables and let him experience being the one who’s not in control? It’s funny how death makes these things we suppress matter. And at the same time not matter. I never mentioned what happened, what he did, to anyone because I feared what it would do to my family, and later what it would do to Mark’s widow and son. Will they read this? Probably not. Should I remain silent, just in case? Probably not.

Mark’s death was an event horizon, and the decision to share our story is a kind of event horizon, too. Not that these random thresholds mean anything. The world has much bigger issues at stake. We make easy correlations to nature, the inevitability of death and transformation, while worrying about earth’s own event horizon. How many parts per million of carbon, methane, nitrous oxide, before there is no escape? Just think how we’ll waste our time finger-pointing. And how powerful the pull of religion will become, too, when death for the entire planet is inevitable and the only remaining hope is a tempting fantasia of everlasting life. But even without global catastrophe, until that moment when we cross into the black hole of our own short existence, we cannot possibly know if there is life after death, and even then, since our brain’s cognitive abilities will be dismantled, we—that is, the collection of thoughts and memories laid down in gray matter and that comprise our personalities—will probably never know. Much as I wish I could see Mark again. Put the past behind us. Start over as friends. That, too, is a fantasy.

Even so, what I need is one of those dead soul holidays celebrated around the world—Obon in Japan, Samhain to the ancient Celts, Toussaint in France, Gai Jatra in Nepal, Día de Los Muertos in Latin America, Hungry Ghost Month in China—when ancestors come back to visit family and friends. When the veil between the living and the dead becomes thin as the vapor on one’s breath on a cold day, thin as the vapors of forgiveness. Mark and I will rattle the leaves on the trees and dance the Bon Odori—a dance I learned as a child to welcome spirits of the dead. Like during Pchom Ben in Cambodia, we’ll use the time to atone for our sins. We’ll celebrate, and afterward, I’ll light a lantern for Mark, set it in a stream and let it float toward the ocean. He’ll ride the smoke as it guides him gently up to the otherworld as Japanese Buddhists and Chinese observers of the Hungry Ghost Festival believe. Beautiful practices. Beautiful metaphors to help us honor the dead and process our grief.

If I were to accept these ideas – after all, who am I to argue with practically every culture in the world – I’d feel compelled to point out that maybe our problems on earth go back to that smoke lifting the ancestors into the ether, away from our everyday lives. In nearly every action, we light the planet on fire. Driving to the store, calling a friend, streaming on Netflix, cooking dinner. Not to mention the fires that plague our forests. Maybe we’ve driven the ancestors away, riding our great roiling billows of smoke. Maybe we can no longer hear them say, “Take only what you need. Leave the rest for future generations.”

Of course, we must make every radical reduction in consumption we can muster. After that, perhaps the best people can do, one might say our highest calling, is to care for and appreciate each other and this exquisite earth we’ve inherited for whatever time that fate, nature, the gods, or the universe will allow. Reduce carbon, clean our oceans, and protect the carbon sink of our forests. After all, trees are the longest-living life forms on Earth. Their annual rings hold more history than we will see in our comparatively short lifetimes. All the more reason to protect them and their ecosystems rather than mow them down for our selfish hungers. We can’t do much once the environment—the planet—is destroyed. Trust me, I know about late apologies and actions that can’t be reversed. There is no clear line of too late that we can push up against. Too late is a country with no discernible border. We can cross into it at any time, but, in reality, probably won’t know once we’re there.

Mark is gone, yet our root systems still tangle in the same nourishing past, the same nourishing soil. Maybe our dead loved ones—or grief over our dead loved ones—are a kind of nurse log, reminding us to treat the living, whether human, other animals, plants, and even water and minerals, better than we have in the past—a past we can learn from but not change.

For now, there is a moment in the woods, after the rainfall, when the sun glitters a symphony of light through raindrops and new growth, and some of it graces my own earthly sight. An experience I so want to prolong, I might grab hold of the nearest branch, dig my toes into the soil, and, yes, take root, even if only for that moment of pure gratitude and appreciation. And maybe the next moment. And maybe the next after that.