Breaking Points

By Anne-Marie Oomen
Sun contributor

After the shock of entering the dense-leaved maple canopy sheared to the ground and shouldered aside like the dead dropped in their tracks, after all that what I finally see are breaking points. The storm’s catastrophe bars comprehension except in stages, but every moment our eyes are open it becomes more real: massive trunks stacked like proverbial pick up sticks — all cliché but what else do I have in the first moments of first seeing? But this is no game. Still, I am so stunned I have no fresh language to describe this — it’s all too dense, thick with damage. The heart aches and the mind can’t find the way to the words, or even the real. When do I see the breaking points? The crack and twist, wood’s open wounds, the new right angle that is all wrong for the verticality of a tree. Not until the end.

When the storm hit, we were on vacation at our remote cabin north of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. We missed that moment when the storm cells collided, when two or more levels of wind struck each other and crashed into turbulent mayhem. We learned only as we crossed into Soo’s city limits for supplies. It’s never a good sign when, as you cruise into cell range, the phone starts pinging insistently: messages accumulating fast, tallying up like stats lists. The first, from a friend in Cincinnati no less, asks “Are u 2 and your house OK?” What?

The second, from beloved stepson, Theo Early, answers, “Big storm. Your house is fine.” He has checked our house? Bless him, but his message infers that other houses are not fine. That our friends’ houses, maybe our friends, are in trouble. Another message continues, “No power, possibly for days.” We have the generator with us in Canada. It doesn’t take us long to pack and head back south to Empire.

Once assured that our dear ones are safe, the trauma becomes about place, especially the spirit of place. Our communities know, once we have made sure no one died — no one died?!? — and the homes are being assessed, and people are being fed and cared for, it is about trees. Wood is a commodity, yes, but the spirit of trees is something else again. One of my lectures in my graduate program is about sacred places. We all have them — not always the stock sites of wonder, these havens may be small alcoves of land or views, or whole tracts, even villages. Or trees. Since the ancients, trees and spirit have been linked in our minds, and it’s how they reflect our interior landscapes that matters.

For me, one sacred trail is Alligator Hill, locally iconic winter ski/hiking trail that breaks me and saves me every time because it is beautiful, cantankerous, oddly wild, only half-tamed from its momentary flirtation with becoming a golf course decades ago. Level, steep, straight, tiered, high and low, this trail ranges with close and heavy deciduous forests, meadows, sudden long-eyed views, a concentration of ecosystems, and birds. People were trapped up there the night of the storm. They survived a harrowing experience, and their reports are full of ominous descriptions. I want to know.

We pause at the trailhead and listen: just the high-hat brush of dry grass. The left path seems most undisturbed, but we walk only a short way before a mottled wall of full-grown maple rises and blocks the path. Its crush against the earth makes passage impossible, but previous explorers have solved this by circumvention. A new grass-trodden path leads around the canopy; we follow. I touch what would have been the very top leaves as I pass, hating that I can do this — touch the tops of trees. We walk on, listening to the now rising dry-leafed dirge, an elegiac pitch. A dying green, almost hay-like but more acrid scent shifts on undercurrents of air. Not the scent of fresh-cut fields, but of broken trees.

We round another curve and face the thick of it. The path slides under not one but uncountable rows, rows upon rows of muddled trunks, and to move right or left or in between or over becomes a guessing game of chance. Suddenly I realize that maybe we shouldn’t be here, and simultaneously my husband David says, “If we get hurt, they probably couldn’t get us out.”

But we don’t turn back. Like our intrepid predecessors, we circumnavigate the canopies, though sometimes the path leads us so deeply into iterations of extended trunks that it seems we have entered an unruly Escher print. How much taller they seem on the ground, the limbs reaching over the land. Words can’t match this; it becomes almost mathematical, exponential. A mysterious unspeakable quality surrounds it, but I keep trying as I scramble over full grown oaks, under huge beech, through the softer branches of white pine, and the harsh brush of wild cherry. These slap my face for my irreverence. Just try to put this to words.

Again, we emerge onto a spotlit patch on the path, circled by twisted trees, ruined walls of a green tower rising up like — again, not good metaphor because it’s so literal — a monster’s sloppy log pile. Stormy Cyclops plucked them up and threw them down, left them lay in disarray, he did.

We keep pushing, nearing the east ridge, scruffling around edges of root holes because we can at least navigate these. But then, because “truth must dazzle gradually,” we finally see those roots balls. With our whole beings. Entire root masses tipped from dry sand like huge sideways spiders. So little moisture graces their tangle that when I bend to touch the sand-drifted matts, I know that those sheer winds struck trees that desperately devined for moisture from this droughty dune. A particularly complex matt of maple roots, almost upside down on the steep terrain, reminds me that 90 percent of their root ball lives in the first 30 inches under the soil’s surface. In this drought, they had little chance against shear winds.

Then David observes, “We could get lost in here.” Yes, lost in more ways than one. We know this land, but the map in our minds has been dropped through a storm shredder, and we have to patch direction from thin and sheared glimpses of horizontal gray and wilting green. We lose our sense of direction and dimension. We lose the path entirely, forced to break north through a forest of fallings. Then I lift my eyes to the few still upright trunks, looking for some guidepost. Here, dying ash, sick and mocking sentinels, once lost in the mass of the whole stand, stand silhouetted by sky. They parody as they lean, yellow-barked and shy of light, while the great oaks lie compressed below. Above it all, high, two hawks ride thermals, calling to each other, over and over, the same call — the only birds we have heard all morning.

Further into this crisscross chaos, we blunder on a small stand of half-grown maples — not yet tall enough, not so many leaves to catch the wind. Understanding comes slowly: the lush canopies surrounding them took the brunt, tried to break the wind, failed and fell. But these thin-leafed saplings, the only ones remaining among the tumble and rubble — they stand. Will they survive the drought as these big trees dry? Or will they burn years from now in the fires that seem inevitable after great fellings? I want them to stand.

We had been told the top of Alligator had been stripped of trees and we were both thinking to make it that far, but as we dive into the mess again, we lose heart. Not to get too anthropomorphic, but it’s one thing to visit the dead, another to walk for long periods among the dying — that’s how this spirit place feels right now. At one point, as I climb between two once-noble oaks, claustrophobia closes in, and my heart races. That scent of parched green turns oppressive — are trees giving off final breaths of carbon dioxide? I can’t seem to inhale deeply enough. All around, the green dust that rests on leaves through a summer has dislodged, and unfiltered, floats free, tinting the air. I don’t want to be sentimental, I want this to be true description, but I feel like I am breathing the last breaths with giants. This is an expiration, and we have inadvertently become not just witnesses, but participants, breathing with it, as trees come to ending, roots and branches failing and brittling. Is this happening to all of us?

We burst onto the ridge, and there, Lake Michigan, a new view, but even that blue, and the sudden rising breeze does not comfort. I turn back to the crush of trees and because we now look down the alligator’s back, I see at last the breaking points, those not right right angles. I see them defined: tender, brutal points of severance, the splinterings and tearings of trees from themselves, their grain shattered into shards in their breaking. These breaking points, consistently in the 8- to 12-foot range, match the height of my living room’s ceiling. Here the saw blade of the shear tore through at that oddly domestic height. Some trees broke in one direction, twisted into another. The winds turned? A tornado? Another breaking point, where the storm, deviating from its expected pattern, twisted in a destructive energy that wrecked our trees.

That breaking point, the place where the snap snapped, and the roar that must have been, rises in my imagination — Storm, majestic in its own rough beauty, this time full of loss and terror for us, erased the way our trees hold sky in place. Now, as I listen to the leaves’ soft dirge, other absences: no birds, no insects. Not a sparrow or fly to be heard in this desert of wilting green. I stand in that single, unadorned note of wind, inadequate to my job, wrapping my mind around the dynamism of weather becoming ever more dynamic. David notices a forked tree without its mate; the wind took only one side, says wryly, “I guess its time had come.” He’s trying, but his pun’s about Time, trees out of time, and terribly misplaced, so a tragic irony. But there it is, one side of the forked tree still lives, and with that small hope, I am brought at last to my own breaking point, my dusty face streaked.

We do not belong in this broken place in broken time. Not right now. This hill was sacred space to me — as it still is and will be to many others in the future, but right now, its mantle of ruin is a carapace for a new process, one in which the surrounding communities are participating, are breathing. Are living. Yes, we breathe the air of dying trees, and our interior, previously unnoticed, almost unconscious treescape shifts, labors, and perhaps we breathe differently — with sadness and more keen awareness of fragility, of the immense beauty we mostly do not see because we live inside it. How that breath breaks from us, and what we do with that knowing, will evolve in the coming weeks and years as climate also evolves. I struggle to say it right. The stories too, that evolve from crisis, will be part of the liturgy and legacy, but for now, with that single tree, a finger flipped to the sky, we emerge and carry on. That.

When we finally stumble down and drive out, we encounter the roadblocks, and sun-yellow ribbons that were not run across the road when we arrived. We, and perhaps all of us in spirit, are closed inside Alligator Hill, and must raise the caution tape to slide under and come back to a world rousing to the new spaces in a broken-open sky.