Histories

The story of landscape and experience is written in the very structure of our language. Our language reflects the meaningful world we've inherited; we absorb and send back this meaning (it is in us too). The white spruce (Picea glauca) pictured here is also known as the Canadian spruce or skunk spruce. It is called the former, because it's native habitat is not here in Maynard, but in the peaceful nation to our north; this name tells us where it comes from. It is called the latter because, when snapped, its needles emit a skunk (Mepitidae)-like odor. It was named by a people familiar with that stinky cousin to the Asian badger. Its name tells us that skunk and skunk spruce lived in the same habitats with curious and naming people. It surely has other revealing names in the tongues of the indigenous. The formal name, white spruce, comes from the white stripes found on the needles; the tree's actual color is a bluish green fading into dark green towards its trunk. Its new growth points gently upward. This spruce grows at the back end of my backyard. My neighbor calls it a pine tree (Pinus strobus) but, while it is part of the Pine family (Pinacaea - resinous, whorled, straight-trunked, needle-bearing trees of the temperate north and high mountain south), it is not a pine tree. She doesn't want to learn its real identity because she wants to cut it down. "It's having a mast year," I told her. "Conifers don't reproduce every year, but when they do, they produce an enormous number of cones." "Great," she muttered. "More for me to clean up." I think its cones are not growing well with the drought. They seem smaller to me than they should be at this point in the season. A longer, hotter, dryer summer goes against the native tendencies of this species; this individual is adapted to flourish elsewhere. But even without cones this year, the tree itself is quite healthy and robust. Pushing ever skyward, it added a full ten inches to its height this season already, and next season's buds are forming steadily.

Out on the parched grassland of Crawford, a mother waits for her audience with the prince. I'm sure the right is cackling with contempt at her actions, walking lock-step with the party of spin, but she made the greatest sacrifice...and for nothing. Her complaint is not that her son died in warfare in Iraq, but that her President lied. She says that W told her last year - he promised her to her face as she looked him in the eye at a meeting in the White House - that he would not use the war and the visits with grieving parents for political purposes. Then, of course, he did. She wants to ask him why he lied to her, hold him to his own self-proclaimed standards. But he won't see her. Instead, he stands awkwardly in front of the gazing media, looking, I'll have to say, a little worried, a tad defensive, and says, this mother wants him to pull all the troops out of Iraq and that he cannot do that. In front of the world media, 24-hour cameras, enough information to last us into the next millenium, and he lies about this mother and her reason for camping out in a ditch at the farthest end of the security boundaries put up by Secret Service. At last, he can no longer smooth over his mean-spirited drive for power. Just watch, the rest of his corrupted party will jump ship from his agenda faster than you can say mid-term elections, and the other so-called party, sensing blood, will move in for the kill. They look worried in Crawford. It began as a mast term for this president, but political drought and hot weather seem to have stunted his cones as well.