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| Growing an Ecosystem, Steve Brown 2025 |
The direction of a big act will warp history, but probably all acts do the same in their degree, down to a stone stepped over in a path or a breath caught at sight of a pretty girl or a fingernail nicked in the garden soil.
-- John Steinbeck, East of Eden,1952
Each of them in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things--plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and the expanding universe, all bound by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.
--John Steinbeck, Sea of Cortez, 1941
Heavy, blue-gray clouds drag along the juniper-blobbed ridge outside my front window. Dark oaks stand sturdy in the blond field of dry grasses up front. Bright green young elms dot the space in between. This is all part of my daily world. The clouds, the ridge, the juniper would be here if I never existed, and yet they are mine at this moment, because I'm here, now, focused on them.
The oaks--I planted them with my brother back in 1995. There are twenty-five of them. He wanted to create a ribbon of forest that would connect the trailer, where we lived, with the natural forest in the canyon. It was his idea, his vision. We planted bare-root saplings. Then we both picked up and moved on to different lives. It's very doubtful the trees would still be here if there was not something in my stepdad that would not let them die. He had a faucet installed in the middle of the field even though it is about a block away from his house. And in our absence, year after year, on hot summer days, he came down and dragged the hose around to water them while Lloyd was off in Dallas living a different life and Marci and I were in Arizona. He hated doing that. It was hot and time-consuming. He cursed us for planting the trees and then leaving them. Yet, there was something in him that would not let them die. They were trees. It was his land. We were his family. He had a commitment to our efforts and this place, Dry Creek.
My house sits where it does because of those oak trees, and the vision of my brother, and the determination of my father. It could be situated along the edge of the canyon with a full mature forest out the back door. I sometimes wish it was. The yard would be all there, already established, a full functioning forest that needs no care. But I'd grown attached to the single-wide trailer that was the summer home of Marci, me, and our children for eleven years. I was attached to a little shed we turned into The Blue Door Bar where we hung out each night, made milkshakes, and watched movies. I was attached to the old lean-to barn that was, and still is, slowly tipping over. I was attached to watching those stupid little oaks slowly grow. And although I knew the better sight for the house would be along the canyon edge and the forest in below, I could not let go of all those years we'd spent in the trailer for reasons I did not and still do not know.
So, the oak trees are still here, and the oak trees still grow.
Between them now are elms. In the spring, until recently, we have been able to run irrigation down through the trees April through early July. The wet soil has given a place for elm seeds to settle and grow.
The ridge and the juniper were here, and would be here, whether or not we ever existed. The oaks are here because we planted them. The elm trees are here because of the oaks we planted, as are a few Russian olive and a volunteer apricot tree. Now that there is a bit of ecosystem established, as long as there are at least a few years with adequate water, more will follow. There will be a forest where there were once only dry grasses. There will be soil where there once, and still is, very little. There is already so much more shade than there once was, and as the shade grows, so will more variety of plants, and with more variety of plants, there will be more insects, birds, mice and squirrels. More sounds. More smells. More life.
All because my brother and I planted twenty-five seedling oaks trees and my dad took care of them for twelve years in our absence.
Now that the house sits here, I have extended the yard outback. I planted a peach tree and a few others. Because I water flowerbeds, and because I let most anything that wants to grow stay and live, I have far more volunteer trees than planted ones--elm, ash, oak, apricot, peach, boxelder, Russian olive, and sumac--and so the forest grows.
It is time now to put down this writing, go out and water a forest that is growing me as much as I am growing it.
We are one.
