Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America
—Southern Pines, NC

Tell me what it’s like to live without
curiosity, without awe. To sail
on clear water, rolling your eyes
at the kelp reefs swaying
beneath you, ignoring the flicker
of mermaid scales in the mist,
looking at the world and feeling
only boredom. To stand
on the precipice of some wild valley,
the eagles circling, a herd of caribou
booming below, and to yawn
with indifference. To discover
something primordial and holy.
To have the smell of the earth
welcome you to everywhere.
To take it all in and then,
to reach for your knife.


by Matthew Olzmann

If your first reaction to this poem resembles mine, you’d be thinking about vandalism, or ignorance, or a vile belief system that sets man above nature. Enraged about the continued thoughtlessness and indifference of people uselessly harming trees, or anything else out there in nature.

Some second thoughts, though. What do we know about tree carvings? Turns out that there are reports of arborglyphs (or dendroglyphs or sylvaglyphs, however you want to call them) since ancient times. Both Callimachus and Virgil wrote about lovers commemorating the presumed longevity of their feelings by carving the bark of trees with their initials. Shakespeare followed centuries later.

People around the world, not just couples, have carved patterns for communication, expressions of cultural significance, scientific pointers (astronomy) or spiritual appeals into trees. Some were maps or way markers, some related to burial customs. Here in the US, the Chumash tribe used tree carving to relate astronomical movement of the planets. Shepherds in the Southwest, many of them of European origin, carved into aspen trees, including drawings and poems. We have more than 20,000 documented tree carvings across California, Nevada, and Oregon, dating from the early 1900s. Who knows, of course, how many are left after the fires.

Does carving hurt a tree? Potentially (and often) yes, if it is too deep.

Does it make sense to “engrave” important local, or scientific information into trees presumed to be around for a long time to help tribal movement and information sharing before technological means of communication? I’d say yes to that, too.

And was promptly reminded of another way of communication that conveyed not necessarily pragmatic instruction, but instead psychological resilience: the Kilroy Was Here meme found throughout the battlefields of WW II, left by the Allies to indicate presence, power, the might to invade deep behind enemy lines. It boosted morale during times fraught with killing and dying. Of course, it also used every available surface, from beach sands to fences, to bombs or lavatory walls that literally confounded the likes of humorless Hitler and Stalin, respectively. But I digress.

What is the psychological motivation, though, for individuals to leave their marks on trees, marks that have no informational value, e.g. plain initials?

For lovers, it might be a spell-like, wishful thinking that nothing will part them in the future. Alas, sealing your love that way might indeed seal the fate of that tree.

And maybe, for individuals like the poem’s villain, it has to do with our shared fear of mortality. Maybe we can ward off that sense of discontinuity, triggered by a landscape that signals eternal presence, historic continuity, a landscape in which we are but a temporary speck?

So we assert ourselves, leaving a legacy, however destructive, that will remind others and ourselves that we existed (well, someone with those initials, at least.) A cheaper, if equally perverse, version of gilded triumph arches in Washington, D.C. ….

I tend to believe that views of majestic, or even just beautiful natural landscapes often conjure thoughts of past and future, and thus instill a sense of temporality. How many millennia did it take to carve a gorge into mountains of basalt? How many centuries to grow trees of this size? Will these meadows survive the droughts ahead of them, with snowcaps no longer sufficient in providing runoffs? Will these streams run dry during our life time?

It is a short jump to mull our own life span, or the possibilities of being remembered, the next best thing if we can’t be around ourselves. Most people hope that they can influence that remembrance through their achievements, or their sharing of their story, their generosity, or through their children’s recollection.

Here is what I remember: my father showing me the tree he marked with his initials as a 10-year old in a forest that later lived through WW II, bombs and all. I was in awe when I saw it at approximately the same age. And so he lives in my memory. (As he would have without that tree-endangering carving….) Was it a villainous act?

And some people will live on in collective memory through their destructiveness, their cruelty, their indifference. Like it or not. Anything that makes them feel big, rather than enduring a sense of insignificance. Having a future beyond the grave. That includes, of course, arsonists. Those who commit arson by starting fires, and those who omit to engage in environmental protection, leaving us with ever increasing risks from climate change, burning the planet. Much more “efficient” than carving and destroying just a single tree.

Trees serve well as symbols of a future. They are strong, long-lasting, easily imagined to survive, and thus carry a message from (eventually) the past. That assumption is now, of course, likely to be burnt to crisp, alongside its subject. The ever growing fires are making sure of that.

General ideas about the future and our place in it are changing as well. Here is a gift article from the NYT that I strongly recommend for your perusal. Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and a Financial Times contributing editor.

“We are living in a world very different from the world of the Cold War. Probably our very idea of governance will change. Some of the changes we witness are really radical. Imagine for a moment that some of our most fundamental assumptions have been challenged. We disagree on many things, but we have tended to believe that the future will be better than today and that individuals are mortals but nations are immortals, and we continue living through our children, our sacrifices for the nation, our books.
Now some individuals — particularly in Silicon Valley, but also including people like Putin — are starting to genuinely hope that they will not die, some nations are starting to genuinely believe that they will die, and many young people for different reasons have decided not to have children. This political world cannot be understood or explained in the language of the 20th century. This is why neither awakening the utopian energies nor simply defending institutions will be enough to deal with the current crisis.

This is where this sense of vertigo comes from. In politics vertigo is when you see the abyss, but you are not sure: Is this the past or the future?”

What we see from here is, literally, smoke and ashes.

Music today is a fascinating concept album picturing Alexander von Humboldt’s trek to explore nature and cultures on a continent different from his own. Last Lost Words.