Graduate Handbook

Meeting the Tree of Life

by John Tallmadge

Many scholars in literature and environment have faced challenges to their professional development. "Meeting the Tree of Life," an essay by 1997 ASLE President John Tallmadge, describes how one teacher, scholar, and nature writer "gained strength by giving up control" in the academic environment. "Meeting the Tree of Life" originally appeared in Witness 3.4 (Winter 1989), a special issue on "New Nature Writing," edited by Peter Stine and guest edited by Thomas J. Lyon. It later appeared as part of the book based on that special issue: On Nature's Terms: Contemporary Voices (College Station: Texas A&M UP, 1992), edited by Thomas J. Lyon and Peter Stine. It appears here as it appeared in On Nature's Terms. The essay is also now available as part of Tallmadge's Meeting the Tree of Life: A Teachers' Path (Salt Lake City: U of Utah Press, 1997).

A pine cone sits on my desk in southern Ohio. It is not large--less than two inches long--and it has no decorative value. I have seen other pine cones handsomely displayed, singly or arranged with flowers, nested in Christmas wreaths or heaped in baskets on end tables. Foxtail pines from the High Sierra, ponderosa pines from the Rockies, or piñion pines from the canyonlands all grow beautiful cones in the familiar beehive shape. Up close, their radiating scales have the carved elegance of Scandinavian furniture.

But this cone of mine has neither symmetry nor grace. In fact, "cone" is hardly the proper word: it looks more like an oversized cashew. Pick it up, and it feels surprisingly heavy. Drop it, and it clatters like a stone. The bumpy, irregular scales overlap like shingles, and you would be hard put to pry them apart, even with a knife. This cone has a clenched, impenetrable look, as if it had no interest in promoting the future.

Such cones belong to the jack pine, a prolific and weedy tree that grows across North America in a broad band stretching from northern Alberta to Nova Scotia between Hudson Bay and central Minnesota. The jack pine thrives in the poorest soil--rock outcrops, sandy moraine--and it tolerates extremes of heat, cold, and drought that discourage more popular trees. Loggers have little use for it, except occasionally for pulp. If you drive through a northern town, you will not see it growing in many front yards. It lives on the edge of society, a fact suggested by its common name. The cone on my desk came from a jack pine that grows on a rock overlooking the northwest arm of Horse Lake, two miles from the Canadian border, in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area of Minnesota. How I came by it is a story of unlooked-for transformation, about learning to teach and seeing the unseen.

The first time I encountered jack pines, I was not impressed. I had moved to Minnesota from Utah, following my teaching career to a small liberal arts college of excellent reputation set in the corn and soybean prairies south of Saint Paul. I had fallen in love with the West, and, after three years of roaming the Deep Creek Mountains, the High Uintas, and the Wind River Range, Minnesota hardly seemed like the promised land. The tallest thing in sight was always a grain elevator, and what passed for "wilderness" in these parts was a two-section county park where the land was too steep to plow. I had a couple of colleagues from the West, and they noticed that every ten weeks I would jump on the plane for Salt Lake, right after turning in my grades. So they invited me along on their next trip to the Boundary Waters.

I remember putting in at Basswood Lake, near the small town of Ely, and paddling north into Canada. Jack pines were growing on the shores. Here and there a statelier white or red pine would tower above them. The border lakes were intricate, rockbound, and clean as those in the mountains, but with no commanding summits, it was the tall pines that drew the eye. Along with occasional rocky bluffs, they provided the only sublimity one could find in this country. The white pines were smooth and dark, with feathery needles and haunting, irregular crowns that suggested a character both ancient and oriental. The reds were more rugged and western in appearance, with long, stiff needles and coarse, brick-red bark that broke off like pieces of jigsaw puzzle. The red pine looked like an American tree. With the white pine, it dominated the open, virgin forests of the border lakes.

The jack pines were far less interesting. We found them crowding the rocky bluffs as we slowed toward portages, scrawny trees seldom a foot in diameter, with shaggy bark that curled and broke like weathered shingles. Threadbare twigs dangled from the branches, a cluster of small, coarse needles at each end. We noticed the odd cones that clung to the twigs like lumps of dough. Some were green, some tan, and some bleached to a driftwood gray. It was no fun camping under jack pines, for the sharp needles pierced our tent floors and our clothes. We found ourselves looking for campsites in white or red pine groves, where the ground was soft underfoot and we could look out at evening waters framed by massive pillars and brushstroke foliage, serene as the view from a Japanese temple door.

That was the lake country--beautiful, surely, but not the mountains that I had learned to love. As we drove back home through flat, cut-over forest and small, dead-end towns, I wondered what I was going to do in Minnesota. Ever since college I had dreamed of living an integrated life. In my graduate work and early teaching, I had managed to combine the two things I loved best, literature and wilderness. My students and I had read the great nature writers and then sought out the places that had inspired them, following Thoreau to the summit of Mount Katahdin and Abbey into the maze of the canyonlands. In those days I saw the experience of great literature and the experience of great places as all of a piece. I had chosen to teach for the same reasons that everyone does: something in the material had reached in to change my life. In the giddy, confusing years of the 1960s, I had been drawn to literature because I loved words and hungered for wisdom. The visionary poets of the twentieth century had inspired me with their prophetic certainty. They spoke the truths needed to change our life, to thread our way through the mazes of sex and politics, the clashing horrors of Vietnam, the cloying idolatry of drugs, cults, and patriotism. Reading them was like cupping your hands in a snowmelt stream.

Then, too, I had shared an Edenic view of university life. In those days, so many of us believed that the campus embodied a nobler set of values than the culture at large. It seemed like a perfect community, dedicated to truth, wisdom, and personal fulfillment. Knowledge and insight counted for more than wealth. Passion and creativity were valued above status and power. Politics was ennobled by virtuous ideals. Best of all, there was a place for everyone. It was up to the campus, then, to set an example for society as a whole. To participate in the academic life was an act of public service.

Unfortunately, our government did not share this view. After one year in graduate school, I was moved out smartly for basic training. After that I was posted to language school in Monterey, California, to train as a Russian interrogator in case we should go to war. Ironically, it was there that I discovered nature writers. A weekend pass was good for a lot in California, and the Pacific coast was more inviting than any bar or strip joint in Monterey. Two days on the beach or the trail gave me enough "tonic of wildness" to offset the numbing effects of a week of drill. I remember lying awake in the midnight barracks, feeling the images of those weekend trips return: a necklace of blue surf boiling around a rock, the flint-black silhouettes of cormorants skimming the waves, mint-blue anemones in tide pools, dark, hieroglyphic cypresses spun from the rock. It was the portentous quality of these images that first drew me toward the works of the nature writers. I discovered the bitter elegies of Robinson Jeffers, who had lived on the Big Sur. At first, I read only about places I had seen. But soon his poems drew me out toward other places--Point Lobos, the Sur Rivers, and the Ventana Mountains--and I would arrive feeling the landscape already beginning to glow from within, as if the poetry had given me a sixth sense unknown to the tourists or casual hikers I often met.

That spring in California, I discovered that writing was not just a means of expression: it was a way of seeing the unseen. Poetry could make visible the hidden web of ecological, historical, and spiritual relations that give each place its distinctive presence. A conversation began in my mind between the poetry and the land, and before long I had found other writers and begun traveling farther and wider, into the redwood forests of Gary Snyder and up to John Muir's Yosemite. By summer's end I knew why Jeffers had written of Big Sur crying out for tragedy like all beautiful places, and why Muir had named the Sierra the Range of Light.

Back in graduate school, I was surprised to find that no one had heard of the nature writers, so I made them the focus of my research and teaching. In those days, I saw teaching as an improvisational performing art. My goal was to capture my students' imagination through a combination of wit, empathy, awesome knowledge, and sheer entertainment. I was not a naturalist: I saw wilderness as a scene for heroic action. In my classes I concentrated on the literature of adventure--writers like Muir, Clarence King, and John McPhee--with an admixture of natural history and vision quests, as represented by Abbey, Thoreau, and Annie Dillard. I could not imagine taking students anywhere but into the mountains. In literature and in landscape, I was devoted to the sublime.

All this I pondered in the fading light, as we drove south away from the Boundary Waters. What was I going to do in Minnesota? That canoe trip had been like no other journey: it had had no center, no peak experience, no moment of vision. Yet it had made an undeniable impression, like my first trips along the Big Sur coast. There was, after all, some sublimity in the virgin woods. Perhaps I could make do with the Boundary Waters in some way or other. As we sped into farm country at last, I composed my mind to remember the tall pines. When jack pines appeared, silhouetted against the burning dusk, I put them out of my mind.

**************

Inevitably I became a naturalist, for the essence of a country like the Boundary Waters lies in its details. I took my first class to Horse Lake because it was convenient: five portages in, with two neighboring campsites shaded by red and white pines. The approach could not have appeared less promising: five miles of slow paddling down a twisted, muskeg stream lined with anorexic spruce and thickets of alder. The water was dark as molasses and frothed over rapids like so much root beer. Yet, here and there, a cluster of jack pines would appear on a rock, and we would catch the flutelike call of a white-throated sparrow. Steering close to shore, we often struck sweet gale bushes, releasing a startling fragrance of camphor. We saw mink weaving among the rocks, dark and sinuous as the stream itself. On portages, we found red knots of bunchberries shining like buttons. And then the woods would open onto a new lake with its own distinctive character--light, scent, color, and shoreline texture all accentuating the spirit of the place.

Travel here was intimate and absorbing, without drama yet subtly transforming. Each time I returned, I became more attuned to small things: the canoelike shape of a spruce needle, the coralline branching of reindeer moss, the frosty tartness of blueberries. I learned that the small herbaceous plants on the forest floor, like trillium and wild sarsaparilla, come up each year from the same root, leaving annual rings that show they are often older than the trees above them. They flourish in old soil with a thick layer of duff, but they cannot compete in disturbed areas, where raspberry, fireweed, and poison ivy take over. I learned that loons, sleek as torpedos in water, can hardly move on land. Once I chanced upon one of their shallow nests built in some reeds less than a handsbreadth from the lake. In it were two eggs the size of avocados, colored the same dull green as an army jeep. I got out of there fast, for the parents were surely close by. Loons mate for life and spend their winters along the Florida coast--not unlike some rich Minnesota farmers. I loved them for their constancy, their beauty, their heroic journeys. They come north to breed, each pair claiming a lake and defending it with their wild, ecstatic cries that shimmer long afterward in your mind, like some sound equivalent of the northern lights.

Returning to the same place again and again was a new experience for me. All my previous trips had been explorations: in fact, I had never taken a class to the same place twice. Therefore, the details had often escaped me. I had been satisfied to encounter the landscape as scenery that presented itself in the most blatant, romantic terms. But getting to know a place is a slow process, like making friends, and each time I went to the Boundary Waters I discovered a deeper layer of detail. The accumulation of chance encounters led me gradually toward an ecological view, with a new feeling for subtlety and a deeper sense of participation.

Not surprisingly, my taste in literature began to change. I drifted away from prophetic and visionary writers toward those who celebrated relationship and community. I began to prefer the understated, laconic sketches of Aldo Leopold and the calligraphic epiphanies of Snyder, both of which seemed to mirror the ways in which the land presented itself. The land does not speak, yet it hides nothing: to be there is to listen, to become involved. So too with writers like these. The sense of beauty depended on coming to see relationships between imagery, allusions, point of view, and the character of the speaker. Here was an aesthetic of nuance, not the alpine sublimity of high peaks, but the variety and intricacy of moss, the dipping sine curve of a woodpecker in flight, the artless art of symbiosis enabling lichen to feed on rock. The beauty of these texts, like that of the Boundary Waters itself, was always just coming into view. It was easy to miss, like a mink disappearing. Reading these texts and reading the land required the same poised alertness and imagination.

This ecological sense also began to influence my teaching. In canoe country, everyone depends on everyone else. One ankle sprained on a portage means the end of the trip, no matter whose ankle it is. To launch canoes, therefore, is to begin a study in ethics. A canoe trip is not like a logging drive: the leader is not the boss, but rather the guide who facilitates the adventure. I found that, despite my familiarity with the place and experience in dealing with emergencies, I was no more likely to spot a moose than the greenhorn (or sophomore) in the bow. Nor could I, in my role as guide, take credit for any such sightings. This may be bear and wolf country, but the animals appear by grace: they are not found by seeking. All learning comes as a gift to the prepared mind. The best memories of these trips always turned out to be things I had least expected.

I soon noticed similar processes at work in my classes back home. Try as I might, I could not control what my students learned. As a young teacher, I had prepared assiduously, arriving with sheaves of notes and a clutch of books, well-scuffed, which I would pile conspicuously on the floor. (I had seen this done in graduate school, with its culture of "esoterrorism.") After some brief opening remarks, I would try to lead the class through a series of key insights. My students, however, proved much less compliant than Socrates'. They were always running off on a tangent or seizing on wacky ideas that had no place in my lesson plan. I would nod politely, glance at my watch, and then wrench the discussion back to its formal course. This worked only about half the time. I began to sympathize with my middle-aged colleagues, who stood around the coffeepot complaining that their students were getting more sullen and ignorant by the year.

After several canoe trips, however, I began to think there might be a better way. I realized that my students were bringing to literature the same beginner's mind that all of us brought to the woods. Each kind of expertise, after aft, imposes its own limits on the imagination. So I began to experiment. I arranged the chairs in a circle, which encouraged open discussion. I came to class without books, which forced me to listen to what the students were saying, as if we were all encountering these texts for the first time. Initially it was an act, but it got results. Discussions took off. I no longer left class exhausted. Instead of bringing notes, I began to take them. Gradually, the act became a genuine style. I found myself changing from a performer and impresario to a plain member and citizen of the learning community. As a teacher, I had gained strength by giving up control.

I suppose it was natural to begin seeing my whole career in ecological terms as well. In fanciful moments, I imagined a kind of "professional succession" beginning with the wastelands of the army. First came the brushed-in heaths of graduate school, where big minds lumbered among the lush growth, browsing on new ideas. This soon gave way to deciduous thickets of temporary jobs, where we all struggled to publish, designing new courses and jostling for a place. Over time, the real work made itself known: nature writing and wilderness travel emerged like evergreen saplings under the pale, leggy birches of freshman English. This was the mixed, transitional woods of assistant professorship, tough going if you were on foot, yet evolving steadily toward the light-filled climax of tenure, where everyone would be guaranteed a place in the sun. In the white pine forests of the border lakes, the air was sweet and quiet as a church. You could sit down anywhere and feel at home. I wanted my life to be like this too. I wanted to realize the dream of a community where the order and decency of human relationships mirrored the beauty of nature itself.

Blithe as this vision was, I did not see it just as a dream of the 1960s. It had been preached, in one form or another, by all the great nature writers. Even Leopold had used the harmony and integrity of nature as a standard against which to measure both social and individual character. He had written that one of the banes of an ecological education us was to live alone in a world of wounds. People abused the land because they had not come to love it. They could not love it until they had learned to see the unseen. The role of the teacher, therefore, whether enacted in class, in print, or in the woods, was vital to healing both society and the earth. I felt very good about what I was doing. My life seemed all of a piece.

But, we are made a little lower than the angels and cannot imagine paradise without overlooking some vital piece. In this particular case, it was the jack pine. Five years after moving to Minnesota, I discovered that, despite my newfound reverence for detail, I had not been paying close enough attention. That summer I was teaching my course at a field station near Ely, and one evening I heard a visiting scientist named Bud Heinselman lecture on forest fire. I was astonished by his perspective. To my untutored eye, this country had always seemed wonderfully lush and green. Yet, incredibly, its character has evolved through periodic destruction by fire. Despite the abundance of surface water in lakes, swamps, and streams, the land dries out in August, and fires are ignited by "dry lightning" from thunderstorms that move on before dropping their rain. Fires sweep along the ground, destroying the duff and leaving a mineral soil enriched with ash. It kills the tall pines, though some may survive on the edges to seed in a new generation. The versatile aspens send up clones from underground roots that survive periodic burns: what appears as a grove may in fact be a single plant of great antiquity. The aspen saplings provide abundant food for deer, moose, and beaver, all of which multiply after a fire. Since fires bring on lush growths of blueberry and raspberry, bears increase as well. The Ojibway Indians, who lived here before us, were known to set fires to increase the berry crop. The old-growth forests of tall pine may be pleasant and admirable, but they do not support much wildlife, since they offer so little food. This was not the paradise of which we have heard, where all creatures thrive in the abundance of the Lord.

Because of fire, what we humans perceive as a timeless, enduring wilderness is really no more than a wave in the stream of life. The pattern of succession, so evident in clear-cut and burnt-over areas, does not actually lead to a stable, perennial state. In the Boundary Waters, a "climax community" does not exist. What we think of as climax forest is only a forest waiting to be burned. The longer the wait, the greater the accumulation of fuel and the fiercer the holocaust when it finally comes. Core out the oldest trees in a stand, and you are likely to find thin bands of charcoal: these trees stood on the edge of an ancient burn. You can find the same sort of evidence by sampling the sediments in lakes and bogs: a paper-thin layer of ash appears like a colored leaf in a book. Using these methods, Heinselman and his team had compiled a history of fires reaching back more than three hundred years. Their findings revealed an overlapping mosaic of burns, at irregular intervals and of varying size. Generally, however, a given area can expect to burn about once a century under natural conditions.

This fire cycle is invisible to us because its period exceeds the span of a human life. But all species who live here must shape their lives to its curve. Heinselman took the jack pine as an example. The persistent cones are sealed by a heat-sensitive resin. When a fire comes through, the cone opens to release its seeds, whose internal chemistry has been activated by heat. (Foresters attempting to raise jack pines found they had to bake the seeds before they would sprout.) The seeds land on a mineral soil enriched with ash and open to the sun. They cannot get started if they land on shady duff. The species needs fire in order to reproduce. Every stand marks a place that was once burnt to the ground.

After hearing all this, the students and I had to see for ourselves. I stuck one of the stubby cones on my knife and held it over the stove. At first nothing happened. The cone blackened and started to smoke. Then suddenly began to arch like a worm. It was alive! I yanked it away, but it continued to bend. The scales opened like spreading fingers, slowing as it cooled. I tapped it on the table, and several seeds fell out. They were shiny black and smaller than the head of a pin. Each bore a long translucent wing shaped like a feather. I tossed one into the air and watched it drift away, spinning like a fan. We opened several other cones, and even the oldest and grayest held glistening seeds, each one ready to catch the wind. I believe that my affection for jack pines dates from that moment, when I first beheld their seeds. Such frail tokens upon which to set all one's hope! Yet the numberless, scraggy stands showed the species knew how to survive, and not just survive, but prevail.

* * *

That fall I stood for tenure and was denied. Four days before Christmas the dean and the president called me in and told me that my time at the college was up, I had not, in their view, demonstrated "the qualities of mind necessary to sustain a permanent teaching position." They did not wish to discuss the decision; I had the right to request a written explanation from the dean.

It was early morning, the shortest day of the year. I walked blinking into the pale light. My lungs felt as if they were stuffed with wool. The campus buildings, so comfortable and familiar, were shimmering as if seen through a heat flicker. The air tasted of dust and ash. My body felt weightless and disoriented, as if I were falling through space.

To some, this may seem like an extreme reaction. It certainly was for me. I had never expected anything like this to happen. It was a disaster far worse than being plucked out of graduate school by the draft. I had lost not just my job, but my career. Incredible as it may seem, teaching experience counts for little in academia: professors, like fashion models, grow less attractive with age. But that was not all. I had thought I was paying close attention, both to my department and to the college administration. Yet now it appeared that I had grossly misread the signs.

For about two weeks I lived in shock. At night I would lie awake, heat rolling off my body in waves. My thoughts raced back and forth through my six years at the college, throwing old fears into sudden, lurid relief or magnifying the already monstrous silhouettes of my enemies. No place was safe. The air stung with betrayal. When I awoke at dawn, my sheets would be damp and clinging.

Word got out after New Year's Day when classes resumed. My students and colleagues were outraged. They urged me to appeal--what else was there to do? Gradually, my shock settled into a hard and glowing rage. I spent hours conferring with my supporters. I filed the appeal, and thereby obtained some of the documents from my review. I requested an explanation from the dean. His letter described a person I hardly recognized. So all my free time went into building a case. It was exacting, lawyerly work, comforting in a way, though I had little hope for success. The documents hinted at some reasons for the decision--suspicion of my teaching methods, my wilderness trips, and my practice of nature writing--but, since tenure reviews are confidential, I knew the real reasons would always be hidden.

Meanwhile, I forgot all about the Boundary Waters and the jack pine. Life went on, not the life I had known as a member and citizen of this idealized community, but a kind of internal, psychic exile. On the surface, everything looked the same: I taught my classes, dozed through department meetings, and ate my hamburger in the student union. But underneath, all my relationships had gone into suspense. Everything I had taken for granted was now called into question. To the college, I was both a nonperson and a cause célèbre. I belonged and did not belong. This was an anguishing condition, but it had the virtue of turning me into an observer.

Almost immediately, my enemies began to reveal themselves by their behavior. Certain members of my department greeted me with the same bland courtesy they had affected for six years, as if nothing extraordinary had happened. Others became effusive, suddenly interested in my research and my plans. One of these was a man who had come up to me after the departmental review, clasped my hand, and congratulated me on winning their endorsement for tenure: shortly thereafter, he had written a lethal report to the dean. Others, less subtle, expressed their regrets and then made a point of avoiding me. That winter was strewn with such brittle, inauthentic encounters, the scorched debris of an ideal professional life.

At the same time, however, I received all kinds of unlooked-for support. The students wrote angry editorials and launched a petition drive. My friends in the English department released the confidential letters they had submitted for my review. Other professors, some only distant acquaintances, called me to say they had protested the decision. Letters came in from faraway parts of the country. Even the janitor in my building who drove the bus for canoe trips stopped by the office every day, just to check in. One morning he told me about the time he and his wife had come home to find their farmhouse in flames. Nothing was insured; they lost all they had. But people came from all over with offers of food, clothing, a place to stay. It gave them hope, he said. And, two years later, they had jobs in town, a snug new house, and a baby girl.

Meanwhile, as I say, I had forgotten the jack pine, for my intellect was consumed with the legalities of my appeal. Yet, as the winter wore on, I became aware of a growing clarity in my emotional life. I began to realize that every relationship based on some calculus of power--anything from professional envy or ambition to campus politics to private social agendas--had begun to wither the moment I was fired. But those based on a free gift of love--straight talk, a favor, a moment of affirmation, a small forgiveness--bloomed and flourished more vigorously than before. Some, indeed, had sprung up from roots of which I was not even aware. And so, broken and poor in spirit, I began to feel spiritually enriched, as if a table were being spread for me in full view of my enemies.

The appeal process required a formal hearing that was finally scheduled for May. I have only the dimmest memories of the first weeks of my nature writers course, which had been planned in happier times. I did not really expect to win tenure from the appeal, since the hearing board could only ask the president to reconsider. But I did hope the faculty would condemn the decision and the process by which it had been reached as a violation of principles in which--supposedly--we all believed. I hoped, in short, for a moral victory.

Spring came late, and the board rejected my appeal--for lack, as the chairman said, of a "smoking gun." Thus the community declared itself. I no longer had a future here, nor anywhere in my chosen vocation.

A few days later, my class left for the Boundary Waters. Throughout the long drive I sat quietly on the bus, numb with the ache of impending exile. We followed winter as it retreated north. Five hours into the trip, we crossed the Laurentian Divide, beyond which all the streams flow toward Hudson Bay. Up here the woods were budding, open, and full of light. The aspen crowns were barely misted with green. As we approached our jumping-off place, I noticed jack pines clustering, dark and shaggy, among the smooth, chalky trunks of the aspen. I noticed them the next morning as we launched canoes onto the twisting muskeg stream that led to Horse Lake. We camped in our old places under the tall pines. While the students bustled about, exploring, gathering wood, savoring the excitement of adventure, I sat looking out on the water, as if fixing the place in my mind would somehow undo the decree of banishment. My throat was full of loss. I envied the students their youth, their freshness, their eagerness for the future.

Next afternoon, we dispersed to various parts of the lake for journal writing and meditation. (Most of our writers had encountered the land this way, and we wanted to simulate their experience.) Two students, who knew me from other courses, asked me to come along with them. I was grateful to be asked. No doubt they had sensed my mood.

We canoed to the northwest shore of the lake, where a high bluff plunged to the water. On top, a cluster of jack pines offered the only shade. We climbed up to them and sat down in the dry moss, lichen, and needle duff, looking out over the lake. The shores were quilted with aspens and evergreens: cedar, white spruce, and balsam fir. Here and there, a white pine spread its lone, oriental flag above them. I thought how pristine the country looked, and yet it was ripe for a conflagration. It was hard to imagine fire on such a fresh, clear day, with spring winds rippling the ice-cold water. We sat making small talk for a while. Then one of the students asked, "What are you going to do?" It was not an unusual question. I had heard it often that spring, from my aging colleagues trapped in the English department, from students seeking letters of recommendation. I usually said something flippant, like "get another job." I did not want to own my grief. But here in the woods the question caught me off guard. I experienced a hot flash of anxiety, followed by one of those extraordinary moments when time slows down and everything seems brilliantly clear, as if seen through a microscope. "What are you going to do?" It was not just a question of what to do next, but of what to do now. What are you going to do now, right now, right here? It meant this moment. It meant every moment when someone else consents to listen. What are you going to do with the gift of their attention? It meant every moment of life. What are you going to do with it? Where will you take your stand?

I looked off to the far shore where aspens danced, glittering with hope. I felt the coarse, tindery duff beside me, laced with the nodding shadows of jack pine boughs. I saw the clenched, bulbous cones overhead, ready for lightning. They knew what to expect from that guileless sky.

And so I told those students everything, everything I have just told you. And as I did so, I felt myself stretching and cracking open, and from behind the charred crust of my anger I felt winged words falling into the wind, spinning away to take root God knows where. I realized that this was true teaching at last: the act of bearing witness, to own a truth you have lived beyond all pretense. I realized, too, that the tenure review had come as a gift, for it had clarified all my relationships. It had opened my eyes to the spiritual dimension of life, the network of love that sustains us through times of despair and empowers us to transmute suffering into wisdom. This world is unseen, like harmony in music or the complex ecology of the Boundary Waters, yet it determines the character of our life. It leaves a signature in each work of our nature writers, just as the fire cycle leaves its mark in the jack pine cone. With each winged seed, the jack pine speaks with its whole being the wisdom of centuries of evolutionary time. It has learned to ride into the future on the energy of its own destruction.

Across the lake a stiff wind had arisen, scuffing the aspen groves to white and darkening the water as it approached. Soon our canoe began bumping against the shore. Other canoes were already heading back toward camp. From this height, they looked like grains of rice.

We got up and brushed the lichens and twigs from our clothes. It was time to move on. As the students ran down to grab the canoe, I stayed a moment under the jack pines. I reached up and plucked a cone, savoring its gnarled surface, the thought of its winged and hidden life. In my hand it felt strangely warm. I heard the students calling and started down. I put the pine cone in my pocket. Here it is.

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