Festoons of Roots

Roots were on magnificent display along a winter hike near Washington’s Snoqualmie Pass—a last, limited outing before surgery would confine me for a time, would ultimately free me to venture higher and deeper into these beloved forests.

I saw clusters of roots rising aboveground like a large sea creature surfacing. Roots swimming sinuously across bare ground, tangled till there was no distinction between one organism and the next. Ribbons of roots draping themselves down the wide stump of old trees—roots of younger trees sprouting from the cut. Mooring-rope roots reaching through air over boulders to find roothold and support an alder leaning over the river.

They looked like victory. Like determination and drive. Eerily graceful. Treacherous. Acrobatic. I couldn’t tear my attention away. River, sky, even the wind like a freight train all receded to background.

In the light of an unseasonably warm afternoon (when out of the gale), each bend in the trail, each turn of head revealed what is normally hidden, seen perhaps during a dig, in spade-cut cross-section. Or when fallen tree’s fantastic root ball displays its arrested clutch of stones. Roots are underground things, like mycelium. They do their work in the dark, in the dirt. Many-fingered, hairy.

Unnoticed, unsung, unremarkable until revealed, making us marvel at their mangle of avoidance and advantage, tracing their path over other roots, around, onward. Once that would-be blockade of mature root died, along with the tree it fed, and dissembled into soil, the arch of this younger root remains, testifying to the solidity of what has vanished.

The proximity of these trails to Seattle means they are some of the most heavily traveled in the state. Many of the woody formations that so transfixed me appear only because the soil is badly eroded by the constant tread of hiking boots.

In recent months I’ve felt lost, destination unclear, both vocationally and personally. When lost in the woods, you’re supposed to pick a place and sit there till someone finds you. What about lost on life’s journey? I don’t like sitting still.

In the midst of my whining, a wise adviser broke in and corrected me, “You’re not lost, you’re wandering,” and utterly changed my landscape.

The growing end of a root is a seeker after water and nourishment. Gravity may also guide it down, down, down, to become taproot, like a dandelion’s. Each millimeter of new growth bends to find its path around the solid forms in its way.

The ultimate path is unknown; only the seeking matters. Urge. Impetus. Quest. The wanderer does not need to figure out a destination, nor the path to get there. What they need to find—to find out—is what nourishes them and what surrounds them. Then use that knowledge to inform the next step. This mode of moving through a hillside, a life, requires being comfortable with making mistakes. Sprouting a new bud just a bit back and heading off in a different direction.

Roots are both expansive and constrained. Flexible and stout. Feeding and fed. Above and below ground. Microscopic and as big around as your thigh.

A person isn’t one thing only—we know this. Pigeonholes, which help us learn, categorize, and recognize, quickly become constraints. Locked cells that deny humanity’s splendor.

The checkout clerk is more than a checkout clerk, more than neighbor, partner, parent, friend. She becomes a force that changes how my husband and I move through our day and onward when she says as we finish placing items on the belt, paying, and loading our bags into the cart, “You two make a great team.” And just like that, we find ourselves striving to live into our team during a sorely challenging time.

Without exactly knowing how, I want to leave room for each person to do the impossible. To flow down over four feet of decaying hemlock, find the ground and penetrate it to support, physically and resourcefully, the sapling springing out of the moss-covered, beetle-feeding, fungus-impregnated wood. Or to rise as that sapling, its growth buds.

To be the maple seed that brightly helicopters down from its twig and is taken away to feed a chipmunk. Or boldly sprouts its inner truth and filigrees into the air as young maple. Or gives its whole being to benefit the life forms around it. A healthy ecology needs all this. Celebrates all this in feather, leaf, and sugar.

Resting after a root-festooned hike, I notice a little collection of stones on the edge of a bench. None looks remarkable. Not one is shiny, or heart-shaped, or any of the other attributes that draw a person to bend down, pick it up, and drop it in a pocket. Or hand it to the large hand holding the little hand that picked it up.

The vested meaning of these carefully placed stones is imperceptible to me but no less real. They remind me of the moment that inspired one of the first poems I ever published (in the much-missed Rain City Review, No. 5, Winter-Spring 1994–1995).

   Visions from Lake Superior
   Yellow obelisk
   Small dense egg
   Rusty Swiss cheese
   Many-eyed shining red desert
   Acne dark around a muddy grin
   Disparate minerals fused, enduring
   The night sky, with slivers of glint
   Sulfur sheets on a bed smelling of wet cement
   Cream cheese on a rose loaf tangled with intrusions
   Aerial view of rain’s roadways, white water on a black field
   More sandwiches, layer cakes, bright from bearing the weight of the whole world
   Blood-red clavicle, holding one tiny green surprise
   One by one I take down these dusty visions
   Polish their curves, their angles in my hot fingers
   My son bangs through the door
   Long shoelaces of dirt in his wake
   He hands me a gray stone
   I found it in my digging place—
   it’s for you