April 5, 2010
 
MANN TALK: Trees and Boys
 
By Perry Mann
 
Every boy has a special spot in the woods. It’s a genetic thing: A memory in every cell of every boy of his experiences in the woods since there have been boys. It is a place where trees are a canopy under which there is a floor of cushiony decayed foliage and moss and there are all about rocks lichen covered. It is a sequestered spot any calendar would hope to display and a place life seeks in cold of winter and heat of summer. Nearby there is a spring from which a boy can have a draft of clear coolness by moving away leaves, waiting until it’s clear and drinking with cupped hands or face down. But take the trees away and the spot is nothing to boys or birds or anything.
 
I knew of a place as a boy. In fact, I knew of many such places and they were my homes in the woods. But a boy’s world is often disturbed by adults. One day men came to look at the woods at one of my favorite spots. My grandfather had agreed to sell on the stump trees for mine posts. He walked the woods and marked with a nick in the bark those that were not to be cut. Unbeknownst to him before the cutting was done, I nicked a few of my special trees and saved them, so that my woods would not have that naked look and lose thereby the aura of security it provided for me and boys like me.
 
I remember the chestnut trees and the death of them. What a loss. Nature gave man few gifts greater than the chestnut trees. They provided beauty, nuts by the buckets, fence rails that would last a century, backlogs that sparked in the fireplace, shingles for roofs and finally the easiest to split kindling of any wood.
 
I have spent fall days after the corn was cut and shocked getting in the wood to warm by in winter. I would ask my grandfather to spare a certain tree; and I never saw one fall that I didn’t feel a certain regret at its passing. If a fallen tree rode down a smaller tree and pinned it, I wasn’t comfortable until I had freed the pinned tree so that it could reach for the sun again.
 
I knew trees. I learned from my grandfather the name of every tree that grew in the tree kingdom. I knew a gum when I saw it, an oak and all its kind, a sugar maple, a hickory, poplar, sarvus, dogwood, locust, the various pines and of course the royal chestnut and many more. I knew those that would split easily and those that resisted splitting. I knew their leaves and bark.
 
In biology, I learned what in my heart I knew must be so: that trees exhale oxygen and inhale carbon dioxide and that humans inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. That is, trees produce what boys must have to breathe and live and boys produce what trees must have to breathe and live.
 
Over the years, I watched eroded land become productive again by trees. First, there came the locusts and pines to the eroded land. Then after years of growth and foliage waste from those trees, the land became fertile enough to sustain hardwoods. Then, came the oaks and maples. The evolutionary process was repeated. There is enduring hope in this process. Nature heals man-made sores.
 
There was a forest that I had driven by for years. It was on land owned by the heirs of pioneers. It had a majesty about it. The heirs sold it to sub-dividing speculators. The speculators first sold the timber and in came the bulldozers and chainsaws. Now it has the appearance of those pictures after the battle of Belleau Wood in France during WWI. I avoid looking at it when I pass. It has the effect on me of the view of a corpse.
 
I read once that lumbermen felled a white oak in Pickaway, Monroe County, which was six feet in diameter at the stump and from it came 3,000 board feet of lumber and seven cords of wood.
 
I grieved a bit over this. The thought of such a tree being cut seemed a sin. And it seems a sin that, of the thousands of such trees once here, there is scarcely one such tree that has escaped the ax and the saw. Will there come a day when a boy cannot find a spot in the woods that he knows in his genes is the place to plan and play?
 
I venture that juvenile attention disorder and delinquency as well as adult neuroticism, addictions and criminality would never have reached the proportions they have, had humankind not left the forest for concrete canyons. It’s sad and pathetic watching parents in SUVs leaving sterile suburbs and cities to travel hundreds of miles to jostle with other folk for a place in the woods for a week to rejuvenate their atrophied ties with nature and to give their children just a touch from the Mother of everything when what they need is an embrace, a close relationship, an understanding and a spiritual sustenance only she can provide. Poetry helps, but it is no substitute for spring in the woods.
 
Art is a reflection of nature. It is also a reflection of genetic memories, a reflection of life’s involvement, of those experiences natural selection favored. How many painting and photographs are there of a stream beginning in a sylvan background, purling through a cathedral of trees and terminating either in a delta of meadows or a cascade of water into a pristine pool? Countless; for these scenes are places where men and boys and women and girls through eons gathered and found support for body and soul. Writ within us all is the memory of them and the yearning for them.
 
Art is play. And the time for extended artistic play comes from the value of saved labor or the expropriated value of labor of others. Man in his pride paints a forest scene of magnetic lure and of exquisite colors and later generations reduce the real scene to wreckage in order to build a museum to house the painting, exhibiting thereby their preference for the painter’s creation over those of nature. And so it is with many of humankind’s doings. Arrogance seduces people to play God with only an infinitesimal bit of knowledge relative to the omniscience of the Creator. Ignorance breeds hubris. And man’s hubristic efforts to improve on nature have denied many boys the companionship and spiritual nurture of trees.
 
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Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a columnist for Huntington News Network. He lives in Hinton, WV.