I know that there are many people who have not
done as I often do: walk through the woods, the seemingly endless woods of the
Northwest or anywhere, for that matter. Since I am from Idaho one of my
favorite trees that wasn’t all that present when I was a kid but is having a
resurgence is the white pine. Many of them were killed off by blister rust in
the early part of the 20th Century but since that time foresters
have helped the state tree of Idaho and Maine along with some disease resistance.
And, yes, the white pine of Maine is a little different as an eastern white pine
with its longer outspreading branches.
But,
as I was saying, I like to walk in the woods and the white pine has a pull over
me. Most of that is because it is Idaho’s state tree, but much of it is also
the fact that its trunk was the preferred tree of the 19th Century
American ships. Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab watched over the sea from the
top of a white pine! That’s what I can see as I walk through the woods, so
oblivious to mankind—or not? The trees stand tall here with perfectly
symmetrical branches unlike any other evergreen. They seem so perfectly
symmetrical that they appear like a forest of artificial Christmas trees. I
haven’t seen one of those replanted, perfectly rowed, forests of white pine but
I imagine it frequently in some Dali universe. I like how a tree, all of its own
nature, flies in the face of my sense of forested irregularity, forests without
patterns at all. The white pine takes a main mast and fundamentally puts a
pattern right into my very being even if there are no watches dripping off its
branches. The white pine is my Idaho wilderness perfectly blending into my
humanly artistic sense of being. I absolutely love that. So there’s yet another
wonder of my country that I love.
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