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Feature Story
The Tree, The Truck And Me
A Study in Perspective, Humility & Regeneration
by Blayney Colmore
I’m not sure it was at the exact moment that my red Ranger pickup ran into the old oak tree that I had this discomforting blik of recognition, but the crash and the blik are inseparable.
I had fallen asleep on a back road in rural Vermont—not the first time I’d done this. Running down an embankment, I bumped along for a few yards into a field and with the persuasion of the tree, in less than a foot and a second, my speed was reduced from 30 mph to zero.
When I visited the neurologist who would investigate my sleep issues, I asked him if it were possible that aging (I was 66 at the time) could cause an endocrine change that would account for a drop in the amount of adrenalin one produces in a crisis.
He said that he had no idea, which raised him a couple of notches in my estimation.
He did seem mildly interested when I told him that I had felt no panic in that instant in which I was jolted awake by the impact. I told him I saw no sign that the tree had given the event any greater gravity than I had.
The truck, on the other hand, made considerable structural compromises. The guy who towed it away told my wife he was going to donate it to the local high school for an exhibit to be placed in front of the school as a consciousness raiser the week before Prom Night.
Though I felt no panic, I, too gave way to the tree’s higher power. I discovered my mangled wrist when I tried to turn off the ignition and saw my hand dangling ridiculously off the end of my arm.
The tree, which I pass more than once most weeks, seems to have suffered only a small piece of missing bark.
And so, the blik of recognition…
The big question is about sustaining our species on this planet over the long haul. By geologic measure, we are among the most recent arrivals, and despite our undeniable impact, (or perhaps because of it), one would have to say our tenure is still an inconclusive experiment.
The lessons that the tree, the truck and me have to teach each other turn out to not only be about a wrecked truck, a venerable tree and a sleep disorder. It is about the challenge to acknowledge the mutual dependence of every atom and molecule on every other atom and molecule and to reintegrate the pieces of our world that have torn themselves loose from their moorings in a futile attempt to subdue reality for our individual gain.
Suppose we were to try to arrange the three of us who were involved in the incident into some hierarchy. What would be their relative order?
To do this might require us to shed our human parochialism and consider the matter as if, say, we happened to be on our planet from another galaxy and were trying to sort out what we were seeing.
Assuming our vision was color sensitive, the fire-truck red Ranger might jump out initially. Had we seen the three players before the incident, we would have been impressed by the efficiency with which it moved and bore its load.
The human me would seem fascinating to us. Animated, conscious, aware, and seemingly purposeful, the human me was able to unhook the seat belt, open the door, disengage from the red Ranger and flag down another passing vehicle with two other humans who tended me until an ambulance arrived. This impressive string of choices indicates a species capable of organizing its environment.
This brings into play the worrisome business of fossil fuels. The rate at which the truck spent that resource—millions of years in the making and mere seconds in the spending—would dissuade us from thinking this to be a sustainable arrangement.
If we look deeper into the scene, we would discover fossil fuels in the ambulance, the clothes the humans wore, the means by which the field had been plowed, and the glasses that popped off the human me’s face when the truck met the tree. Perhaps we would ponder the extent to which the human species bet their entire future on the planet upon a diminishing resource, polluting the very air on which its existence depends, leading us to ultimately question whether this species is designed for tenure much longer than that of the truck.
The oak tree, which had been selflessly willing to catch the truck before it careened further into the field, would appear increasingly interesting.
It had stood in this spot for 200 years. Perhaps this is not long in terms of geological or intergalactic time, but measured against the ten-year life of the truck, and the 66-year life of the human inside it, but it is an indication of durability, flexibility, and good planning.
Before humans had poured tar on the ground (there’s that fossil fuel stuff again), the tree had found a spot that provided it with sufficient ingredients to grow: water, sunlight and nutrients from the soil (which likely contains petro-chemicals, too).
The tree looked impressively impassive. In its 200 years, it had stood up under bigger impacts than that of the Ranger, which was not the first vehicle it had caught over the years. Struck by lightning, battered by hurricanes, withstanding salt runoff from winter roads, the oak quietly accepted what came, finding ways to hunker down and pull up nourishment from the earth to build new cells and grow stronger, taller, and thicker.
Most impressive of all was the sense that the oak tree gave off of its willingness to live within its means, embraced by reality.
What had looked more initially imposing about both the truck and the human me was their alluring design and ingenious operating system.
The truck sheltered its powering mechanism beneath a seductive, smoothly rounded bonnet, holding the human me in an efficiently confined, comfortable space.
But its skin was made of a material (more carbon squandering) that was clearly intended for the short, and not the long run. Unlike the human wrist, which although seriously damaged, had the capacity to regenerate, the truck’s skin was good only for the duration of its intact existence. Its oddly rigid material did not possess the capacities to renew itself or even survive without that ever diminishing fossil fuel, nor would it ever be able to regenerate into anything useful for furthering the life of the planet.
It was this business of regeneration that came to be the critical focus when the intergalactic traveling researchers considered the relative places of the three actors in this drama, and what they either contributed to or subtracted from the wellbeing of the earth.
Consciousness and self-awareness—the prizes for this long, complex evolution—has given humans an apparent, if fleeting, hegemony over the planet. And that may turn out to be their evolutionary wrong turn, the flaw that shortens their tenure.
The ability to be cognizant has within it the temptation of exceptionalism, or the fatal belief that one—whether an individual, nation, species, planet, or galaxy—has reached a point from which it has freed itself from the forces that govern everything.
As we considered the aging oak tree, the human me and the truck, most telling was that the human me, with the most potential power to affect the earth’s environment, was the only one of the three that seemed to lack understanding that it was irrevocably tied to the same global system as the other two.
The tree, with its impressive capacity to withstand stress, had no pretensions of, nor desire for, a quality or length of life beyond its cellular capacity. When it finally dies, it will contribute its cells to the earth and air around it, which will, for the life of the planet, provide sustenance for countless other life forms, giving the tree more than adequate satisfaction in having fulfilled its vocation.
When its useful life has ended, even the truck—with that astonishing red that doesn’t occur in nature, and that brittle skin fabricated by manipulating cells into combinations that require as much energy to break down as to make them in the first place—will give way to the disbursing of its cells without complaint.
But the human me appears to have misunderstood its intoxicating consciousness as providing the power to step outside the process of generation and regeneration on which all life and development is built—including the life of the human me.
It’s not as if the human me—despite its conceit to the contrary—is, in fact, exempt. He will experience the same entropy of the cellular arrangement that has provided him with the heady capacity to have such an impact. But an inordinate sum of his limited energy is expended working to create new forms and beliefs that support the illusion that the self he so prizes does not have a beginning and an end, as the tree and truck do.
Considering the three of them after their unscheduled encounter, it does seem at least remotely possible that such a jolt (magnified many times across the globe, in economic, climate, and geological terms) might help the human me come to terms with his marvelous, proximate place in the scheme.
The ego consciousness is that mischievous voice that whispers into the anxious ear of humans, you are irreplaceable and if you were to die, it would be a disaster for earth. This voice can be silenced only by some shock that alters the very terms of the human’s sense of his or her place in the order of things.
My appreciation is renewed for the marvelous wager a single sperm makes among millions to match a single egg. From those two cells comes a unique, complex arrangement, all of its parts exquisitely fashioned to support life and consciousness for many decades. The natural wearing down until the body willingly surrenders itself—like the tree and the truck—requires no illusion of exceptionalism to feed the hunger that we as humans seem to have for believing our existence has lasting value.
For several days after the accident, my wife drove by the junk yard to which the truck had been towed before it was put in front of the high school. It was the first year Ford put an air bag into the Ranger—just one, on the driver’s side. The truck hit the tree mostly on the passenger side, which was pretty much crushed. The guy who towed it said he had pulled dead bodies from less damaged trucks.
The only thing I never recovered was an expensive pair of tri-focal glasses. My wife and I each went back several times and combed through the underbrush at the foot of the great oak, being careful to avoid the stand of poison ivy. We never found the glasses but insurance paid for a new pair.
At least once a week on the way to my writing group in Brattleboro, I pass the old oak tree. She shows sings of aging, ever more gnarled in her branches farthest from her nourishing trunk. The place I hit her still shows a little; the bark hasn’t fully grown back.
As I pass, I raise my mostly repaired right hand in salute, and sing out, “Afternoon, boss.”
Blayney Colmore retired after 30 years as an Episcopal parish priest. He now writes full time in Vermont during the summers, and in California during the darker months. He has published two books entitled, In the Zone: Notes on Wondering Coast to Coast, and God Knows; It’s Not About Us: An Odyssey. Check out his blog at www.blogblayney.blogspot.com