I’m sitting in front of the living room window, looking out at our matched pair of small juniper trees. They are full and well-shaped wit lacy tops, a regular haven for the jays and other birds, but in the morning sunlight, it’s possible to see the yellowing of the boughs.
One more casualty of drought.
One more casualty of colonialism-driven climate catastrophe.
Now, I’m also watching the tips of those boughs bending, caught by a rising wind and pushed forward, as though the whole tree might be able to move with its branches. The skies are clear, if a bit hazy; not a cloud on any side.
And still the fires rage to the east of us, now just shy of 150,000 acres burned and still burning in this one stretch of high desert. Yesterday’s much-ballyhooed weather forecast fizzled spectacularly, sound (or, rather, sight) and fury and five whole minutes of sprinkles; tomorrow we are slated for forty-mile-an-hour winds once more (and Sunday, and next Tuesday, and next Friday as well). Where once May’s arrival was the signal for the trickster winds to begin packing to depart, now they tend to stay around even into official summer.
And the land is a tinderbox.
In other parts of this land mass, folks tend to think of wildfire as burning through deciduous trees; in my own homelands, there were two periods of such fires in the last century (some drought-sparked, others the product of Klan terror), decimating acres of old-growth forest. But it’s a land of abundant water, or at least it used to be, and abundant precipitation, too, and time was when losing a single woods didn’t seem like much of a long-term disaster.
That’s all changed now, of course, but even so, it’s nothing like losing whole forests in an alpine forest environment. There are stretches of land in our own yard, so to speak, that are blanketed solely with evergreen cover; up the slopes, there are stands of aspens, but it’s the piñon and juniper, cedar and fir, blue spruce and soldier pine that hold the land in their embrace.
And we have not had a truly heavy snow, as this place defines it, on the peaks in a few years now.
Here on our land, we have two of the giant blue spruce, plus three of the dwarf varieties, no longer so small. That’s in addition to the juniper above, otherwise known as red cedar, to the flat cedar and piñon, and to bristlecone and Ponderosa pines. Too many of our aspens are in the process of dying or already dead; the weeping willows are barely hanging on. But it is the evergreens who provide us with perhaps the truest barometer, and the most deadly forecast, and they are in trouble now.
These are the wages of a 1,200-year drought, and of the soil aridification that attends it. More to the point, these are the wages of colonialism, its invasion still ongoing, and from which it is possible to trace a direct line of cause and effect to this deadly pass.
It seems as good a time as any for a tribute to these great old evergreens that are still keeping our small world alive, and this edition of #ThrowbackThursday features an entry in one of Wings’s long-running signature series created in their honor.
Every once in a while, I will feature something in this space that has been tangentially featured here in the past. So it is with today’s work, which was part of an early #TBT post many years ago, devoted to the series itself: Wings’s evergreen tree pins. Time was that we used to offer them as so-called “Christmas tree” pins, because that was how tourists viewed them, and that was the time of year in which they sold best, but now, we treat them as the relatives in year-round residence that they are, part of what powers the very respiration of this land. This one has never been featured here on its own, but given its summery jeweled shades (and the outsized space its endangered real-life counterparts are currently occupying in our consciousness), it seemed fitting to highlight it here today.
This one dates back, if memory serves, to around 2012 or so, at the winter holiday season. Wings created a collection of four that year, all of which have long since sold, each unique. This one, thanks to the blues and greens of its jeweled ornaments, was named, simply, Spruce, and its shape certainly evokes those of our own blue spruce trees, bold and brave with boughs extending sharply outward.
Wings has been creating these tree pins for more than twenty years now; he doesn’t even remember when he first began making them. He’s been doing it so long that he can sketch out the hint of a whimsical evergreen on silver with a few sharply flowing strokes, then cut the entire piece freehand. Some resemble each other in shape, but each is unique, and all have always reminded me of the Christmastown trees in the old Rankin-Bass version of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: robed in full ornamental regalia and dancing in the winds. This one was especially sharply defined, with a pointy top and boughs, and it was adorned with “garlands” of flowering sunbursts.
If you’ve ever seen a blue spruce in the throes of new growth, you’ll know that the image is not far off the mark.
Wings has always added anywhere from two to five gemstone cabochons to each tree. Seen as holiday trees, of course they resemble ornaments, but I prefer to think of them as buds and cones. And, again, if you’ve ever seen a blue spruce in late spring, you’ll know that its color ranges from the pale jade of new spring growth to the bright malachite of year-round color to the denim lapis blues that underlie the whole and give the true its common name. He fashioned three bezels in a randomized pattern across the front of this one, and et them with exactly those stones: jade; denim lapis; and malachite. It made for a clearly identifiable name and animating spirit.
East of us, many of their number are gone now; numerous other coniferous species, too, as well as acres of deciduous trees. The earth there is bare, but it’s more than that: It has been burned, and while e refer to casually to “burn scars,” these are wounds that will remain raw for years yet.
In some spots, the land (as opposed to “the earth”; those patches of soil where once things grew) will die.
It’s impossible to live, to breathe, without oxygen, and the flames have stolen it for their own use, What is left will be soil whose chemical composition is altered — in a way not dissimilar to the alteration of the rest of the soil courtesy of drought-born (and -borne) aridification. The trees are what allows the land to breathe, and while the deciduous stands take half a year and more off, the evergreens labor year-round.
They are watchers and warriors, protectors and nurturers; they breathe for nothing less than the land itself.
And for us.
We need to save their numbers now.
~ Aji
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