The Eye of the Storm

He liked to tell me he was a historian, although even then I knew his real job was at the waste treatment plant.

When I was a child, my uncle took me to plant a tree in the wasteland behind his property. As we walked out, he told me that two hundred years ago this had all been an old, dark forest, with a single clearing at the center, like the eye of a storm. Then the farmer that had then owned the land had had it all chopped down, to expand his sheep pasture. There was a time, in this part of the country, when sheep were the most valuable livestock you could own, my uncle had told me. Thousands of acres were cleared by farmers hoping to capitalize. We'll never really know how much they destroyed in the process.

It was late fall. The sky was gray, the air was brisk. I remember it stung my cheeks a little, like a gentle slap. Stiff yellow grass, fragile and frost-tipped, crunched under our boots.

Naturally, he went on, the market adjusted. Prices went down. The farmer that owned this land ended up going bankrupt. He sold it to another man, who sold it to another, who sold it to another. None of them got much use from it, as far as I've been able to glean. They certainly didn’t raise sheep. I think they must have just liked the scenery. Don't you?

“Yes,” I had said.

Anyway, that third man never ended up selling it. He held onto it until he died, not far from here, without a will and without heirs. Now the state owns it, I think, as a matter of technicality. Someone has to.

“Why?” I had asked. My uncle had looked at me and smiled and said nothing. The smile didn’t reach his eyes, but I could tell that he was touched by my question. I didn't know why. That was often how it was, with my uncle.

We walked to a spot in the middle of the wasteland and stopped. It looked the same as any other. Wild legumes, patches of scrub grass, arcing tracks scored in the dirt by older kids’ motorbikes. A few scraggly trees here and there, some gaunt bushes. My uncle told me this was where the clearing in the old forest had been, as best as he could figure. No clear maps of the area had survived from that time, but the spot was discussed in a number of early settler journals. My uncle had triangulated a probable location from that, or tried to. I wasn’t surprised he had gone to so much trouble. He liked to tell me he was a historian, although even then I knew his real job was at the waste treatment plant. He would give himself these old puzzles to solve as a way to pass the time, I guess. After the divorce, with no children, he must have not had much better to do.

My uncle told me to dig a hole in the dirt. Just a small one, he said. I didn’t have any tools, so I used my hands. The dirt was cold and hard and made my fingers ache a little, but I scooped out a few handfuls, and my uncle said that was enough. The indentation I had made was long and deep and tapering at the ends. It looked a little like the inside of a canoe. My uncle squatted down beside me and took a maple seed from his pocket, slightly crushed but intact. He held it up in the diffuse light, turning it between his fingers, studying it like something he had never seen before, then handed it to me.

This is important, he told me. No tree has grown in this spot for hundreds of years, at least. As far back as the records go, this place has always been a clearing. I have reasons to believe it’s always been like that, too, for as long as it’s been a place at all. I can’t tell you why. It would be too complicated, and it isn’t really important for what we’re doing today. The important thing, the thing I need you to understand, is that when you plant this seed, it could become the very first tree to ever grow here. I want you to think about that. I want you to think about what it means to do something like that. Because this is not trivial. The way a place is means something. And don’t let anyone tell you this meaning is fixed, because it isn’t. That’s not how the world works. But it does mean something, and it means something to change it, too. This meaning, even if we can’t understand it, is not arbitrary. If you’d read as much about this country as I have, you’d understand that. I’m not trying to put you down; I don’t expect you to get everything I’m saying right now. I wouldn’t have, at your age. But I want you to keep thinking about it. Just keep it in the back of your mind going forward. Let it take root, just like this seed will. Because this, he said, pointing at the seed, and then at the raw little cradle I had made for it in the earth, this means something. Remember that this means something. I listened to him. I held the seed and looked at it, trying to see meaning in it.

“How do you know the seed will take root?” I finally asked, and he just smiled, the same way as before, and told me that it would. We planted it, covered over the spot together, and walked back to his house. My father picked me up later that day.

Twenty years later, my uncle died. The cause was never officially determined. He was found in a leaf pile by the side of the road, not far from his house, “as stiff as a board,” in the local parlance. My father called to tell me about it. I’m not sure why. I hadn’t spoken to either of them in more than a decade. My father didn’t sound upset over the phone, just resigned. As if he had been expecting it for a long time.

Twenty years after my uncle died, I went back home for the first time since childhood. There was a crisis unfolding. A sinkhole had formed near my late uncle’s property. Although small at first, it had grown steadily, swallowing boulders and fenceposts, trees, power lines. They had had to close the county road. No one had yet been able to figure out how deep the caverns beneath it went, only that it wasn’t slowing down. My late uncle’s house was expected to collapse any day. The family that had bought it after his passing evacuated weeks ago.

I walked out to the place in the wasteland where my late uncle and I had planted the tree. I had to take a different route, of course. I found the spot, the center of the clearing in the forest that had been here three hundred years ago. Someone had cut the tree down. I knew it had to be my tree. There wasn’t anything else it could be. Only the stump left was left, an aborted eruption in the grass. It couldn’t have been happened more than a day ago. The wood was still raw, bright, still oozing sap. Like it was still alive. I stood and looked at it for a while, keeping my distance, hearing the wind rustle all around. There was an abrupt jag in the surface where the chainsaw must have skipped against the grain. It looked awkward and a little pathetic. I stood and I looked at it, tried to understand it. I stayed that way a long time, leaning on my polished wooden cane.