The woodlanders of Dekalb Country, Georgia, circa 1970

 

In one of Thomas Hardy’s early and rather rough hewn novel, The Woodlanders, the central intrigue is driven by the fact that John South’s life lease upon his cottage ends when his life ends. South, at fifty-five, has made his career of chopping up wood – and now a fear has entered his mind that he is about to die, in a moment of karma, with the tree in front of his cottage being the executioner sent to bring him down:
 
“The tree was a tall elm, familiar to him from childhood, which stood at a distance of two-thirds its own height from the front of South’s dwelling. Whenever the wind blew, as it did now, the tree rocked, naturally enough; and the sight of its motion and sound of its sighs had gradually bred the terrifying illusion in the woodman’s mind that it would descend and kill him. Thus he would sit all day, in spite of persuasion, watching its every sway, and listening to the melancholy Gregorian melodies which the air wrung out of it. This fear it apparently was, rather than any organic disease which was eating away the health of John South.”
 
Although I am awfully fond of Hardy’s novels, The Woodlanders is a sort of sketchbook in which we find the later Hardy’s strong sense of fate tied to a melodramatic form imperfectly translated from George Sand’s country novels – in another instance of Sand’s international influence, which, it could be argued, rivaled Walter Scott’s in the European literature of the time.

I am reminded of John South’s obsession with treefall on this visit to the Atlanta suburbs where I grew up. Atlanta, as any visitor by plane could testify, is arbor-ific. Trees everywhere, fall leaves everwhere, pines and oaks and poplars mixed and every variant of fruit tree brought in by two generations of real estate developers.  I was, at one point in my youth, part of a landscape crew in Atlanta. I planted trees and got rid of kudzu and manned with my teen manhood a blower.  My Dad, on his suburban smallholding in Clarkston Georgia, was an ardent planter of trees, all imports. My friend Mark Criminger, whose news I long ago lost contact with, lived on a corner property marked by a huge oak tree that still lives in my treeclimbing dreams. The woods were not yet cleared in the acres behind the Gentry family house when I was a kid, and we’d make forays there, look for gold, tell each other stories of children who stepped on ground bee nests and were stung to death – the best stories, always, being children killed in macabre circumstances.

Now I’m on the verge of being an old man – sixty-sixy – and I think with a sort of communal jolt that the trees I see on my visits, the trees I recognize, are, many of them, my age or younger. Pines that tower over houses that were only built in the seventies were saplings or less when I was ten. Amazing! There’s a tie of sap that is as strong as the tie of blood within me. A shared time, and a sense of immense but slow woody effort both in the pine and my own boned and muscled bipedal-dom. Their injuries, their broken  branches and evidences of lightning strike, are paralleled by the neural fall from my aging neural network, which every day invents new ventures in forgetfulness.

“As the tree waved, South waved his head, making it his flugel-man with abject obedience. “Ah, when it was quite a small tree,” he said, “and I was a little boy, I thought one day of chopping it off with my hook to make a clothes-line prop with. But I put off doing it, and then I again thought that I would; but I forgot it, and didn’t. And at last it got too big, and now ’tis my enemy, and will be the death o’ me.”

South is one of the fool figures Hardy borrowed from Shakespeare: his madness is omen-laden. My trees, though, even if they prefigure my death, are not enemies – they are family.