Mechanical Treatments and Other Restorative Plans
My favorite trail is bare, and all I see is metaphor. When I last walked to the river through the dense, green canyon of myrtle and scrub oaks, which shaded me from an unforgiving sun, I was alone. Now, my family is with me and nearly everything green is gone. Weeks ago, the county posted a Forest Restoration Mechanical Treatment sign about digging up the underbrush to rejuvenate the sandhill pine flats. I hardly paid attention, knowing that using machines instead of controlled burns thins the understory while preserving the larger trees, but this was unexpected. The wilderness area’s openness is as startling as any clear-cut.
“I feel like it’s ruined,” the man I want to divorce says. There’s a familiar, acrid edge to his voice, and I wish that it was not bitterness but rage or grief instead. Rage can be useful, but bitterness works on me like a too-sour flavoring in candy. It taints the sweetness.
“There’s only like five or six trees left,” our daughter says. She is eight and liked to hide behind each bend or thicket so she could jump out at us or be found by my seeking. Now, there’s nothing to hide behind.
“There’s a lot more than six trees left,” I say, defending the pines, which are still intact. For this I’m grateful. They sway but hold the line like last men standing who don’t see how, in their winning, others lost. This land is theirs.
“Not much,” the man I want to divorce says, and because this moment risks another reason for him to dislike Florida—the place he refers to as “this angry little peninsula” and “this simpleminded state”—I take a deep breath to soften my voice.
“We knew they were doing this here,” I say, defending the harrowing and disking as if I approved of the act when I can’t help feeling like my place of comfort, where I’ve spent hours reading by the river, letting young fish nibble at my toes—where I fell in love with a foreign, subtropical state—has been ruined.
Florida. I used to say this state unsettled me with its dense thickets, toilet-brush-looking palm trees, ticks, and four-inch, rainbow-colored grasshoppers. To survive losing the aspen-rich mountains I’d called home for seven years, to endure this man’s job that brought us here, keeps us here, I looked for what I could love: the hammocks and tannin-stained rivers, the cypress-lined waterways like hoopskirted dancers waiting for a partner to choose them, all the birds chirping and hooting or fishing and bug catching, and all the oaks—ancient live oaks resting their heavy limbs on the ground while bromeliads and ferns grow in their crooks and up their branches like jewelry, the slimmer sand live oaks clustering together like wiggly fence lines in upland scrub, and the stubby myrtle and scrub oaks the county removed. All that’s left is sand, debris piles, pines, and a couple of turkey oaks dressed in pointed leaves.
“We knew they were doing this,” I say again, not knowing what else to say.
“It’s not the same place,” he says. Of course, he’s right. Without the green borders and leafy walls, the sandy path we wind down has little definition between trail and all that was cut. “It’s too open. It’s too much,” he says, and though it does feel they took too much, and that scraping was somehow more violent than burning, I cannot stomach his bitter campaign to hate the home we live in because of his job.
How can he not love this land? When I found out that over 190 rare and endangered plants live in a longleaf pine forest, that these last men standing are made of wood strong enough to dull a serrated edge and produce self-protective resins that gum up saw blades and safeguard against fire, all I felt was awe. Also, he writes about environmental sustainability, researches environmental justice, and these longleaf pines are on their way out. Harvested for use before they reach a hundred years, replaced by the faster-growing slash or loblolly pines, they’re even under assault from within. Their deep amber heartwood, over time, develops a fungal infection called red heart disease that softens and decays the pine’s cellulose. Yet this weakness is also a strength; by hollowing out the tree’s center, the fungus opens up a new place of refuge for animals and birds. Longleaf pine trees may fail at protecting themselves from red heart disease as they age, but they also succeed in protecting far more. The tree is at first its own home, then, as it changes and ages over time, it expands, creating a diverse community of species and becoming a home for many others.
I once considered this man my home. Now, I seek refuge inside myself. Forests change. People change. This is the metaphor I see: a divorce is like a mechanical treatment where the machinery of the courts treats my discontent by setting me free from all that I am tired of putting up with. What is it, exactly, that I’m tired of?
I turn what I judge to be nominal slights over and over in my mind as though holding a prickly pine cone: When we had chickens, we threw the eggs away because they were fertilized, which he said was like eating meat, which was wrong, but I wanted to eat those fresh eggs, which reminded me of my childhood; he pays too much for groceries, shopping for convenience over budgeting, no matter how many times I’ve asked him to not overspend; he says I’m too controlling, and I apologize, again and again, even when what I am controlling is my space: for my desk drawers to not be rifled through, or to be alone without him opening the door I hide behind because he’s not done fighting. He nags at me to watch TV with him when I’m reading, as though I’m choosing a book over him. Maybe I am. He wants one thing, I want another. Surely, we can continue wanting different things instead of uprooting ourselves from this fifteen-year relationship.
I sympathize with the pines because I once thought that giving up pieces of myself was how I would grow, how this man and I would become closer and stronger together. Now I wonder if I’ve given up too much, or if the person I need to make space for is my daughter: As a role model, do I suggest to her that marriage means giving up who you are for another’s rules and ways of being, or do I model bulldozing it all down for new growth?
My daughter. She’s clever. “Where are you going to pee now?” she asks when we pass the area where I used to pee, hidden. She’s right. There are no places for this now.
“I guess I’ll have to hold it,” I say, then tease her about her having to hold it too.
“It feels raw. That’s the word. It feels raw,” her father says.
“Last time they burned it,” I say. The burn was farther up the trail, in a sea of saw palmettos. After the undergrowth was lit for pruning, the woods were black with nutrients, and the horizontal saw palmetto stumps looked to me like gigantic alien worms digging their way under fresh soot. They reminded me of the giant worms in Dune, which made me like saw palmettos for the first time. I never told him that, but I did tell him how I loved the campfire smell.
A year later, the palmettos are again thick and lush. They’re beautiful, better for the fire. Most species are. Many ecosystems have evolved to withstand lightning and developed forms of self-protection against fires. Trees either retain moisture or sheath themselves in plates of bark. Pines keep wider spacing, making room for low-lying grasses that ignite before the trees. There are seed pods that won’t open unless first burned, birds that prefer nesting in recent burn sites, and flowers that only bloom three or four weeks after a burn.
For longleaf pines, it’s the wiregrass community that keeps them safe. Together, longleafs and wiregrass adapted to seasonal fires, then thrived as a result of them. The relationship encouraged the milky yellow clumps of grass to grow beneath the pines so that fire would run fast over the ground and leave the tender tips of needled trees unsinged. Bunchgrass—such as wiregrass—rarely establishes itself from seed, spreading instead through a sluggish reproduction process too slow to be seen. Eventually, wiregrass creates a dense ground cover that grows thicker after fire sweeps it bald. This community, these species, grow stronger after fire touches them. This, too, makes me wonder: Should I set fire to my marriage? Burn down what isn’t working to allow for new growth? We might be singed but better for it, or we might return to old ways.
As we weave through the newly opened-up trail, scraped back like a lobotomy, this man is still complaining about the loss, about how many acres might be involved, and finally I acquiesce to his complaints. “Why’d they take all the oaks?” I can understand everything else: the saw palmettos, wax myrtles, marlberries, asters, even the fetterbushes blooming pale-pink urns that smell like honey. But the oaks? I miss their shade and the unusual way they angled overhead. “They’ve taken so much,” I say.
“Too much,” he says.
“If it rains, we’re going to get soaked,” our daughter says.
“We would,” I say, then show her how there’s little chance of it now because the clouds are white and the sky’s a Microsoft blue, a term her father objects to. I see the quick image, the brilliant color that both a sky and computer can cast; he sees “imperialistic infiltration” and words that should never go together. But he isn’t always right.
One time, while we were standing on a steep bank at the first bend in the river, the two of us saw birds that he thought were red-cockaded woodpeckers. They flew from one bank to the other, their red caps flashing like hot embers, playing chase with one another, chirring and chipping like a pet’s squeaker toy. “Those are endangered,” he said, smiling at the rare and special moment. I believed him. He was so sure.
Later, I learned he was wrong. What we saw were the common red-bellied, which can live anywhere. Red-cockadeds need at least 200 acres of old-growth longleaf pine forests (we were in 120) and prefer to live in pines suffering from red heart disease. Each day the birds spend time maintaining the resin wells that line the walls of their home. If the sap stops flowing, they abandon the cavity they’ve made so that others—chickadees, bluebirds, screech owls, bees, reptiles, amphibians, and other woodpeckers—can move in.
Since the birds are stubbornly territorial and nonmigratory, they won’t move on when their trees are clear-cut for development or downed by intense hurricanes or fires. Where else could they go? Like the longleaf pines, red-cockadeds have less room to live, are fragmented on islands like isolated holdouts, clinging to the last 1 percent of old growth. Federally listed as endangered since the 1970s, if fragmentation continues, red-cockadeds will never recover, will slowly die out. I picture them all as newly homeless bodies standing before the smoldering remains of a house fire, streaked from creosote, having nowhere else to go. Fragmentation of anything will never mean recovery; our bodies can be fragmented, my own heart can lose pieces and go on thumping, but I will still be in danger of a short life.
“It’s just not right,” he says. “It doesn’t feel good to be here.”
I say nothing.
I’m noticing a newness as we walk, a smell, like fresh cut field grass drying into hay. It’s a smell from my childhood, of the fields I hayed in Maine, and I picture the yellow blades rippling under the high noon sun, the narrow straw creating music, dancing to itself in the wind. I don’t tell this man how I think the smell might be a good sign, how this forest will be more than fine.
Here, I will be proven right. A year from now, I’ll notice purple beautyberry for the first time, and rabbiteye blueberries which I’ll greedily eat. But in this moment, because our shade is gone, I’ve lost my bearings on the trail. I once knew every turn, every bend and plant cluster, but now I wander toward a fork in the road, disoriented. Here already?
When we get to the bridge, where wild grapes tangle over blackberry brambles, we find that it’s still too flooded to cross—we’ve left the sandhill habitat and are in the poorly drained pine flatwoods now. “Do you want to try that way?” he asks, pointing past the old saw palmetto burn site to a trail we’ve never tried before. It winds toward more pine flats, toward more saw palmettos fanning out under the hot, blue, sparsely clouded sky.
“Sure,” I say.
Aside from this pine flatwood trail, I feel I can’t follow him anymore. I know I should, for the stick-to-it commitment of things, for the love that’s circled between us for so many years, for the you knew me when, and the I knew you then and now. But I’ve seen the way organisms work on each other, change each other over time. When I think of us going on together in our relationship, I think about birds and fires, pines and oaks, creamy bunchgrasses, and mechanical treatments. Sometimes, the whole forest must be peeled back and sheared open so the ground can loosen and branch rubble can scatter, giving the soil a fresh chance to grow something new, even if it is raw.
Pamela Baker (she/her) is a prose writer living in central Florida. Her stories and essays have appeared in many journals, including Cream City Review, Reed, Story, and the Southeast Review, as well as the creative nonfiction anthology I Wasn’t Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse. She works in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Central Florida, teaching courses in composition, the essay genre, and writing about health and medicine.