By Ethan Tapper
The sky is bright and blue, streaked with clouds as thin as carded wool. I weave between stumps, bent like an elder, planting acorn after acorn. The patch cut is as still as the waters of a new beaver pond. The forest hangs limbo, a brief pause in its perpetual arc of change.
I stand and squint into the sun. To the west, the sky roils darkly. Clouds gather over hitawbagw — the Lake Between — shading the ageless cedars twisting from its limestone bluffs. As I watch, the clouds move east, crossing the paved streets of the city. Behind them, a wall of rain sweeps the earth like a wedding train.
The light turns dim and ominous, the leaves of the trees fluttering anxiously, the sounds of the forest suddenly raucous in the still air. I lean on my acorn-planting stick as dark clouds cross the sun, turning the patch cut into something bleak and brutal and ugly. For a moment, I wonder: What evil person would do this to a forest? What callousness must fill their twisted heart?
When I first walked this mountain I saw a forest of ghosts and shadows, a forest that was half of itself, a forest that was the memory of something beautiful, lost long ago. I do not know if I can save this forest – all I know is that it is beyond inaction, that it will not save itself. The light changes, and I remember that this patch cut is an act of love, a switchback on the winding path toward a better world.
As empty as it often feels, there is something beautiful about a life lived in the aftermath. Here, in the junkyard of the Anthropocene, we hold the fate of the world — all its ecosystems, all its peoples — in our hands. We can allow this biosphere, our home, to sink further into dysfunction and disarray, or we can make the radical and bittersweet decisions necessary to choose a different path. Inside of this catalyzing moment, we have the opportunity to reimagine our relationship to ecosystems and our relationship to each other: to redefine what we are and what is precious to us.
As empty as they often feel, there is something beautiful about a landscape of forests that are just a fraction of their true potential. The forests of our lives are still only at the beginning of their journeys; they may yet become diverse and complex, rich with legacies, ancient again. With our help, these forests may rediscover a capacity for life beyond imagining, an abundance that this world has not known for generations.
I pick up another acorn, another product of thousands of years of adaptation and change, another precious thing chained to the legacies of the past and hurtling toward an uncertain future. Perhaps it is doomed. Perhaps it contains endless possibilities.
Humidity cloaks the land, drawing tiny, round beads of sweat from my skin. For a moment the mountain is cast in golden light, its smells sharp and strong. As my fingers touch another acorn, a raindrop strikes the back of my hand, rolling between the small bones of my fingers. Suddenly, droplets are stippling the soil like falling stars, throwing up little clouds of dust. I have nowhere to be and so I kneel, watching the water run around the stumps and the upturned leaves, drawing spiderwebs on the earth.
Someday, I will walk these trails with my children and teach them to reimagine forests as communities of complexity and depth and expansiveness: communities that are fated to change, to celebrate both the miracle of life and the miracle of death. Someday, I will kneel beside these stumps, a young forest blooming around me, and teach my children the imperfect truth of what it means to love a forest.
Someday, I will teach my children that this world is not ours to hold but that we hold it anyway, that each of us is a steward for one brief and precious moment in time. Someday, I will teach my children that, despite everything, we are destined to thrive — to live in a world that is beautiful.
One day, when this patch cut has become a diverse young forest, I will walk through it and remember this autumn day, when my hands were young. I will remember that each tall, perfect oak was once an acorn between my fingertips, that this forest is a child of responsibility — something that we could only have embodied together. No one but me will ever truly know the pieces of myself that I have left on this mountain, the labor of love that being the steward of this land has been. I will know, and that is enough.
We owe too much to the future to be imprisoned by the past. As the storm passes over me, I am grateful to be anything at all, grateful to be alive at a time when there is so much worth saving. I want to live in the world that will arise from this moment, the world built by people who are brave and humble and resilient, who make countless bittersweet compromises, who live their lives with the dream of a better world burning in their chests. I want to live in a world that will be created by people planting acorns in the rain.
Sometimes this life feels like autumn: the exhausted end of a boundless summer. Today I choose to live in a world in which spring is just breaking, impossible and inevitable — a world that is just awakening, just beginning to discover what it truly is. I look toward the broken ridge of the mountain and feel a powerful nostalgia, not for the past but for the future. High above the storm, the light is swelling, calling everything upward, toward a world that is just beginning.
The above excerpt was reprinted with permission from “How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World” by Ethan Tapper, copyright 2024 Broadleaf Books. Tapper is a forester and author from Vermont. Follow him on Instagram and YouTube (@HowToLoveAForest), and Facebook. Learn more about Tapper, his work, and his writing at ethantapper.com.
This article was originally published in the fall 2024 issue of The Maine Organic Farmer & Gardener. Browse the archives for free content on organic agriculture and sustainable living practices. Subscribe to the publication by becoming a member!
