Monday, November 12, 2018

70. The White Pine


           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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