City of Trees

by Sophie Cunningham

  Most systems of law and governance place human beings at the centre, and view humans as separate from nature, but in recent decades environmentalists and lawyers have begun to work out a way of framing a holistic approach to law and governance: wild law. Rights for nature were first proposed by Christopher Stone in his 1972 article (later a book) ‘Should trees have standing?’ That same year the Sierra Club took the Disney corporation to court in an attempt to block their plans to build a ski resort inside the Sequoia National Park. While the courts rejected the lawsuit, the case prompted a famous dissent by Justice William O. Douglas, who accepted Stone’s argument that trees should have the legal right to sue for their own protection.3 This would give them the same legal rights as humans, and is known as personhood.

  But trees—particularly giant sequoia—can live for centuries and millennia; laws come and go. And as humans develop systems of thought to support the environment, corporations are fighting back and long-accepted environmental laws are struggling. For example: in the US the Endangered Species Act of 1973 legislated species’ rights to exist. It was that law that saved the condor and the wolf, if saved they are. It is that law that Republican lawmakers, lobbyists and the Trump administration now seek to amend or, worse, overturn.

  In his book Drawing a Tree Bruno Manari tells me to look at the roots of trees closely, before looking at the trunk, and then at the patterns of their branching. Last of all he exhorts me to look at the shape of the individual leaves and consider the way in which they do (or don’t) cluster. Diligent, I look.

  Roots. Can you trace the patterns they make under the soil? Are they buttress roots, high as a house, or is the root system deep underground, mirroring the tree’s crown? And what about the sound of them? The first thing you hear when a giant sequoia falls is a series of low booms as the roots snap, one at a time. In Dunn’s Woods, on the campus of Indiana University, I became fascinated by a crackling sound, a kind of electric hum that rose out of the earth when I walked through the trees. At first I thought it was insects in the dry leaves or squirrels digging for acorns, but soon I became convinced I could hear the seedlings as they pushed up, rustling the dry leaves that had fallen during the winter. And yes, scientists can detect these sounds, and roots do make tiny clicking noises, though at a frequency of 220 hertz, they are supposedly inaudible to humans.

  Trunks are more fun still. Shagbark hickory looks like a cross between dreadlocks and roof shingles. Shaggy, but not as shaggy as an Australian ribbon gum, which sheds in long narrow strips to reveal paler, smoother bark underneath. Giant sequoia trunks are as tall as a skyscraper and can have a girth of eight metres. A paperbark has hundreds of papery slices of bark, compressed together, fine as filo pastry, to form a papery slab you could use for shelter. Bloodwoods ooze hard red sap and smell pungent after rain. Scribbly gums are named for the tunnels of the moth larvae that live between layers of bark and career around like drunken street racers until, as the top layer of bark falls, the trunk is revealed as a scroll.

  Bark demands to be touched if you are to get its measure, and the most extraordinary bark I’ve felt is, of course, that of the giant sequoia. It’s fire resistant. It’s spongy, and up to a metre thick. Its alternating slabs and furrows are themselves the width of ‘ordinary’ trees. If you lean into it hard enough it enfolds you, so I did that when I was walking through the Giant Forest sequoia grove. I leaned against one and felt it give. Stroked it. Then, concerned I was being weird, I stopped and sat down under it for a while. That’s when I saw the marmots dash past, fatter and more hilarious than I’d been capable of imagining. That is when I heard the insistent tap-tap-tap of the woodpeckers.

  Leaves. Don’t get me started. The natural variation within a species can be great. Juvenile and mature leaves are often different. In my attempts to understand leaves and therefore taxonomy, I come across this word: systematics. Systematics is, I read, a way of understanding the evolutionary history of life on earth.

  How to tell the difference between pine, fir, spruce, cedar and cypress? That was another challenge. Research suggested that if the number of needles coming out of the same spot was two, three or five, it was a pine. If there was only one needle it was a fir or spruce. Then you need to pluck the needle: if it is soft and doesn’t roll easily, it’s a fir. If it has four distinct sides and is stiff, which makes it easy to roll, it is a spruce. And so on.

  I can’t tell you a lot about a giant sequoia’s leaves, to be honest: they sit so high in the sky it’s hard to make out the leafing patterns, let alone the shape of the individual leaves. I had to go to the internet to discover that as many as two billion leaves (evergreen, awl-shaped) arrange themselves spirally on shoots. To learn that an established leaf can live for up to twenty years, drawing water up the tree’s trunk and sending nutrients down it, while the trunk amasses wood. Giant sequoias’ leaves are responsive to, and cope well with, environmental changes but, this being California, pollution levels are increasingly challenging. The management of the Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks tweet daily air-quality advisories.

  The individual branches that support the spiralling leaves are often the size of large trees and it is these branches and their leaves that make up the crown: wild and raggedy cities some thirty metres across that sit higher above the ground than a thirty-storey building. The crown is wiry. There are tufts. You can see the remnants of crowns that have been sheared off by storms.

  I’m so far away from having the skills or the patience to draw a giant sequoia accurately that for a time I don’t even try. Instead I try to capture the redwood’s glow and the abruptness of its crown—a kind of bowl cut maintained by major weather events. More important is the matter of perspective. I sit in front of a trunk about five times as wide as my body, close enough to consider the variety of tones in its charcoaled interior—the tree I’ve chosen has a chamber near its base first opened out by wildfire then polished, by time, to a small wooden cathedral. The red huskiness of the bark becomes an entire page of blocked colour with a core of charcoal black. My sketch barely makes it above the root line.

  I visit the giant sequoia in June 2018, but after my return to Australia I can’t stop thinking about them and the ways in which I might convey how transporting they are. Or is this what I want to convey: giant sequoia transform the meaning of things?

  I try again, using my square notebook. Hopeless. I buy a rectangular one, but the dimensions continue to be too modest. I get closer to capturing the crown’s raggedy charm, but my attempt to convey its height by whittling it to a point fails dismally. For this is another thing about the giant sequoia. They do not look narrow up higher. Perhaps this is to do with the fact that you can’t take in the width at the base of the tree unless you look at it from a distance. Then, once you do walk away, the tree starts to look more ordinary. Jon Mooallem wrote in the New York Times about the way the human eye wants to ‘find a way to correct for the sequoias’ unacceptable gigantism’, flattening perspective ‘so that, say, four far-off sequoias appear to be right alongside six cedars in the foreground—fusing all of them into a single line of ten perfectly boring-size trees.’4

  Despite the seeming impossibility of it all, I continue my consideration. My reading about, writing about, and drawing of the tree. I move between abstract and more practical considerations. I dig out a handmade paper concertina four times as long as it is wide and I draw the sequoia in a more considered way. I do not radically narrow the trunk but simply let the base of the tree slip off the side, thereby leaving its width to the imagination. I resist the impulse to make the tree look elegant but make sure to include gashes and boules. I draw small cartoony pines in the background. I hint at other sequoias. All of this helps. Next I try to find a larger piece of paper, one that is dramatically longer than it is wide and that will take charcoal and pastel. I end up with a compromise, which is to cut a large sheet of paper into two. It isn’t quite right and it is hard enough to manage that I have to hang it from the c
lothesline to work on it. This time I capture the red glow but not much else. I get out of bed one morning, pull out a second sheet of irregular-shaped paper and start again. The colours of my first tree are too garish. I’ve failed to convey its height. The second attempt is better on those points, but the crown still isn’t working. And so it goes. It’s become clear to me that there is no getting it right. Even clearer: that isn’t the point. I have another plan. Is it possible to draw, or write, a forest?

  ____________________

  1 ‘Giants in the Face of Drought’, Thayer Walker, Atlantic, November 27, 2016.

  2 Lindenmayer et al., 2012.

  3 ‘It’s only natural: the push to give rivers, mountains and forests legal rights’, Jane Gleeson-White, Guardian, April 1, 2018.

  4 ‘In the Land of the Giants’, Jon Mooallem, New York Times, March 23, 2017.

  STAYING WITH THE TROUBLE

  THESE essays are all over the place: the United States, Australia, Europe, South America and Iceland. My twenty-teens have been a peripatetic time but there have been constants. Trees was one of them. Walking another.

  At the end of 2013, on the morning of my fiftieth birthday, I was in Paris. I woke up early and went outside; it was the day after Christmas and the light was deep indigo: an intense morning twilight that lasted for almost two hours. This half-light, morning and evening, is my favourite time. A hovering between action and inaction. Between potential and limitation. Like ocean swimming on a cloudy day: the seafloor corrugating below, looming and receding as the depth changes. Like walking through a thickly treed forest under a heavy canopy on a sunny day. When my friend Georgia Blain titled her final novel Between a Wolf and a Dog, I learned that the French had a phrase for this light: L’heure entre chien et loup.

  It was very cold when I arrived in New York a couple of months later. Some temperature I couldn’t decipher because it was measured in Fahrenheit. A wind tunnel had formed around the taxi queue at JFK and I was almost blown over. The trees were stark against the sky. But within two, maybe three weeks, in what seemed like the blink of an eye the trees that lined the city streets were in full blossom. In another blink, spring was almost over, and by the time I visited the cherry grove at Brooklyn Botanic Garden a month after I arrived, petals were raining down, carpeting the ground in shades of lavender and pink.

  A month before I moved to that city my stepdad, who I thought of as Dad, had moved back to Melbourne from Indonesia. He and I had spent decades doing that: living in other countries, rarely crossing over. On the day he moved back to Australia my brother flew in from Canberra, I drove in from Fitzroy and we met Dad and his exhausted wife at the airport and took him to a high-care dementia ward in Flemington. He was quite cheerful when we left him that first time but things unravelled over the next few visits. Soon he was begging us not to leave him there, to please take him away. Anywhere: to the south coast of New South Wales, Bali, Lygon Street. I was called into the manager’s office because the staff had questions. They found Dad stressful. I was surprised that they were surprised.

  Things got worse, of course they did, far worse. It would be disrespectful to Dad to detail the ways. But his descent, when it came, was dizzying, even by the standards of such a place. I learned phrases I’d never heard before, like ‘chemical restraint’. I argued with doctors about the point of treating his weak heart to keep him alive. Suffice to say a time came when I looked at Dad, sixty-eight years old, snarling in a wheelchair, pulling against his straps and cursing, over and over, at the top of his voice. I reached towards him and he hit me. The word ‘hit’ seems a bit harsh; he was a lot lighter than me, something I couldn’t get used to, given how heavy he’d once been. I pulled my chair out of reach of his and waited for him to feel better, but that did not happen. I will never forget this. His deep distress. His terrible rage. Somewhere in among all this I tried to remind him that I was living in another country for a while but would be back in three months to spend time with him.

  Three months. What even is that?

  He looked at me and started to cry.

  Said, ‘So that’s it?’

  Percy Grainger walked to avoid the temptation of self-flagellation. David Sedaris walked to placate his Fitbit. Virginia Woolf walked the streets of London and later the South Downs endlessly: because she loved it, because she was walking her dogs, because she needed to think clearly. For Henry Thoreau, every walk was a sort of ‘crusade’. Sarah Marquis, who walked sixteen thousand kilometres over three years, sought a return to an essential self. ‘You become what nature needs you to be: this wild thing.’1 For James Bradley it can be an evocation, a provocation, ‘any walk was also an act of remembrance, the web of connections associated with each house or street recalled as we passed it.’2 Will Self began walking after he gave up heroin, though in his novel Walking to Hollywood (2010) the protagonist walks not to escape addiction but because he fears he has Alzheimer’s. This feels familiar. My brother and I had first been introduced to the pleasures of walking by Dad; in the seventies he’d taken us on lots of hikes—most memorably to Wilsons Promontory. But these days my brother joked about starting a group called Running Away from Dementia. Sometimes, catching sight of my posture reflected as I walked around New York, I wondered if I was doing the same thing. Walking away from fate. If so, could one ever walk fast enough?

  After several months in New York, during which time I’d returned to Melbourne just the once, some friends and I chose to walk the extent of Broadway. We started at a point on the tip of Manhattan that was once a village called Marble Hill. At the end of the nineteenth century a shipping canal was tucked in behind its southern edge, rendering the tiny town an island in the Harlem River. Nine years later, with a flourish of landfill, it was attached again, this time to the northern mainland—a vestige of Manhattan annexed to the Bronx. Small facts like this delight me.

  I don’t know who built the Broadway Bridge, which links Marble Hill to its old stomping ground, but Native Americans worked on many of the bridges and skyscrapers of New York: ‘sky walkers’, they were called. Our walking was more prosaic: eight Australians, one of them male; all bookish types. We met under the bridge before heading over it, southwards to Inwood. It is green up there, and the large park that sits between the Hudson and Broadway rises steeply from the street. Among its tall trees are remnants of Manhattan’s original forests; in its swamps the original salt marshes. The bald eagle, a species that has clawed its way back from ‘endangered’ status to merely ‘threatened’, has been rereleased into the park after more than a hundred years of absence.

  I’d only been to Inwood once before, one hot Sunday afternoon. Music blared from cars and shops; we ate shaved ice standing on a street corner. This day was colder, quieter. It was fall, sunny, ten degrees. The weather here turns on a dime, was already moving, swiftly, towards a new season. By the time we reached Battery Point eight hours later, it would feel like winter. We had much ground to cover, so we moved quickly, passing the incongruous Dyckman Farmhouse museum without much more than a glance. Built in 1794, it sat small, low, out of time, surrounded by a cottage garden; looking across to a gas station and a gymnasium.

  Walking is often a solitary activity, but on this day it was gloriously social. Conversation ebbed and flowed as the eight of us moved between one another and talked. It was like a slow, elaborate dance. Judy and I discussed our feet at some length. Do they wear out with age? It was a question that had been on my mind as both the necessity and pleasure of walking New York’s streets had taken its toll. Around Washington Heights, Francesca and I talked about parents. She had lost one of hers to dementia as I was losing Dad. It’s not just Dad, I told her. Other people close to me also have dementia, or have died of it. I didn’t tell her I was having violent dreams. That my memory failed me. That I became lost for words. That I’d been to my doctor to discuss my fear—phobia might be a better word—that I was getting dementia, and the doctor said, ‘It’s probably just stress. Or menopause. Or
both.’

  Francesca and I discussed what it was like to witness such unravelling, and wondered what it was like to experience it. As if to answer our question, leaves flew around in the wind. There was a scattering, a loss of coherence.

  The sun moved up, then overhead, to the west. By the time we walked through Times Square, it had disappeared behind the skyscrapers. Deep in the canyons of the city, the wind whipped up the avenue. We moved past lumbering humans dressed as Muppets and superheroes. By now we were in single file; talking had ceased. Walt Whitman’s description of Broadway as ‘unspeakable’ suddenly felt apt.