Dear readers,
Hello from Maryland. When I chose today as the debut of this story, I hadn’t quite considered that the week would begin with a total solar eclipse. I’m still aglow with wonder from Monday, and now dopey with new-moon energy. Anything can happen.
Today’s story will arrive in three additional parts over the next ten days, with the finale on Earth Day. The full story is about 6,500 words, so this is an experiment. I tend to prefer shorter reads on Substack, and would appreciate your feedback on how this first one goes. Later, I’ll share the research that went into it—for those who enjoy a peek behind-the-scenes.
My plan is to send out five stories over the next five months, assuming the revisions can keep pace. The stories are set in the Marcellus shale fracking region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Originally the home of the Lenni-Lenape, the Munsee Lenape and the Susquehannock, whose descendants live there still.1 I’m interested in how we, trapped and complicit in destructive systems we hate, might find a way forward. Holding wonder, humility, and awe in the same trembling hands as our grief, fear, and anger—with love and compassion.
Wish me luck. Subscribe, and they’ll come straight to your inbox.
Women: if you live in the U.S. Mid-Atlantic region and have a longing to wander sacred land listening for the wisdom of the wild inhabitants of forest, mountain, and river, consider joining us for a special upcoming retreat May 31 - June 2. More information here. Feel free to ask me about it.
Part 1: The Red Line
In a glassy office surrounded by sky, hands draw a red line on a map. A straight red line. The map’s thin brown lines curve and crowd together on steep slopes and wander alone across fields. Streams ribbon pale blue. Charcoal roads meander. But the trees? No, the hands don’t delineate individual trees. Instead, they wash bright green blobs over the map, patches whispering forest. How trees might appear in early spring to birds returning from their secret wintering places. When tiny leaves birth through winter-brittle stems and shine spring green, new cells eager to meet the sun for the first time, life renewing after cold, quiet sleep.
The straight red line arrows across fields and slopes and streams, through the green blobs of forest. Where we stand, all unaware.
Even now, Sam will sometimes lie on her back to watch us hold up the blue winter sky. As a child, she raised her mittened hands to tickle the silhouettes of our bare arms and strong fingers. Her Nana knit the mittens, blue with white snowflakes. Two rounded shapes connected by blue yarn strung through coat sleeves across her small back. On days that warmed above freezing, Sam slipped off the mittens, wiggled and stretched her delicate fingers till the blue of the sky pooled under her fingernails and ran down her arms. Until the blue seeped into her blue-veined wrists and traveled along her bones to her shoulders and on to ribs, hips, shins, toes. Until blue ran in her like the sap awakening in us all around. A blue sky under a warming sun means sugaring season is about to begin.
Sam has made fourteen trips round the sun, and still she marvels that our sap is clear, not the blue of sky. The blue of the world, the blue of belonging, the blue of home.
Today, Sam’s dark mood exceeds the simple exhaustion of sugaring. Long days and short nights, collective effort of three generations of the Collins family, their neighbors the Sullivans, plus cousins, friends and volunteers from Kiwanis and Boys & Girls of Scranton and the Baptist church youth group. My, those Baptists can sing! The birds join in on their four-part harmonies in praise of creation, in praise of trees. Alone representing the sixth generation of Collins’, Sam’s been doing her part to tap, string tubing, haul buckets, stoke fires, boil sap, bottle label, box, fill orders.
It's the final day of sugaring. Sam flops against me and drags her sweater sleeve over tearful eyes. “Everything’s so messed up, Ace. Kevin’s mad at me.”
I know from years of stories that Kevin Sullivan is her closest human friend. I also know I’m her favorite tree. She brings me treasures: empty forest snail shells, gold flicker feathers, bits of bright green moss, the bluest summer-sky yarn. She sits against my trunk and reports on everything. Her school day, her parents, her older brother, her dreams. I do my best to keep up, offering advice only when she asks.
Mother complains that I neglect my duties to the other trees by passing so many days with Sam. That’s unfair. Just recently, I sent nitrogen, carbon and phosphorous through the fungal network to ease my older sister’s struggle with Limb Dieback.
“Kevin wants me to join this group he started on Social, but I’m not allowed on there. He isn’t either, but he says this is too important. Our parents don’t have to know.”
What’s Social? I ask Sam.
“You know, like, a network, how people talk to each other. On the Internet.”
I didn’t know the walking people had networks, too. She’s always surprising me. What’s the problem with Kevin?
She shifts position. “It’s complicated.”
I know a thing or two about complexity. This year, I will grow 121,475 leaves, 68 more than last year. I can hear Mother saying, “Pride is not a maple trait.”
To Sam, I say, Tell me. It’s the surest way to get her talking.
Sam’s connection with me was opened with gentle care by her Nana Bettina. When Bettina and I met long ago, we had both circled the sun seven times. I was taller, but she weighed more for another cycle or two. I was someone she could relate to, a sapling among elders. Bettina was a sensitive child. She visited me every day. In winter woods quiet with grays, browns and tans, she tied my tender branches with enlivening scraps of blue yarn in shades of iris, midsummer lake, ice melt, storm clouds, evening. She sang to me.
At the time Bettina had befriended me, I was too young to participate in the sugaring. I dreamed of the day when Bettina would, with reverence and care, turn her hand drill to pilot that first, slightly-upward, finger’s length hole through my bark beyond my cambium to press in a tin spile and hang from it a tin bucket with a tin hat to collect my sweet sap. By then, I would have more sap than I needed to grow my leaves and flowers, plenty to share, eager to share. I envied my older sister when she was tapped before me. Couldn’t wait to give my very own grown-up gift to the walking people.
“Envy and impatience are not maple traits,” my mother said many times. “You’re too close to the walking people. You’ve picked up their bad habits.”
Mother is unusual for a maple. My cousins, aunties, uncles, sisters and brothers are all lively with people. The Golden Retrievers of the tree world. Even my grandfather, before he was struck by lightning and went a bit dotty, had many sweet friendships with the walking people. Their capriciousness never seemed to bother him.
“You’re so obsessed with people, you neglect your tree family,” Mother says. “Mark my bark, your loyalty will come to grief.”
She’s never recovered from the walking people cutting down my father and two brothers. They weren’t diseased or anything, and they gave plenty of sap. It was for “thinning,” but nobody had asked permission or left an offering or even apologized. But that was seasons ago, and Mother still hoards her resentment along with her seeds. I’ll bet her sap tastes bitter.
“People can’t be trusted,” she says at least once a lunar cycle. “There’s no benefit to their friendship. Not anymore. The best we can do is endure them. Like a burl.”
I think she’s jealous of me. There. I said it. She sees the attentions that Bettina and Sam lavish, the gifts of blue yarn, our sweet connection. And she hates me for it.
Jealousy is not a maple trait, Mother.
She glosses over the fact that every year the walking people renew our special friendship with their spiles and their buckets. I love the nightly song, the drip drip plink plink of sap seeking eager pails. A simple thing turned precious in their hands. Hands! What a marvel. Hands can tie yarn and knit mittens. Hands can tap a spile, hang a bucket. Carry a bucket! Gather and cut fallen branches, summon fire. Fire! Hands can stir boiling sap into sweet, thick syrup, the gold that maple leaves turn when the sun rolls away to his winter rest.
Mother is not impressed. “Take, take, take. That’s all they do.”
It’s not all they do. As a child, Bettina developed a habit of plucking seeds from my branches before the wind could claim them. She collected them in sugaring buckets and carried them away. Years later, my seventh cousin thrice removed sent a mycelial message from over the south ridge that Bettina was tending a new maple forest all on her own. To think of my little offspring over there, planted by Bettina’s loving hands, warms my heartwood. As soon as little Sam could walk, she loved to collect seeds, too.
“People and trees have an understanding,” Bettina taught her granddaughter Sam. “I learned that from Great-Aunt Ida, and one day you will teach your daughter.”
The old trees tell me that at one time all the walking people felt the connection. But now it’s just Sam and Nana Bettina.
The year of Sam’s fifth sugaring season, Nana Bettina helped her to open a connection with me. The old woman placed her bony, weathered hand on my trunk and spoke to her granddaughter. “You can feel the pipeline flowing.” She gave her granddaughter a length of blue yarn from the dozens stashed in her pockets. “Tie this to Ace. To show our appreciation and give encouragement.”
Sam had to stretch her arms in a full-body hug. Her little-girl heartbeat warmed me. “Why doesn’t Mommy do this?” she asked while fumbling with the bow.
A cloud passed over Bettina’s blue eyes. “Your mother sees sugaring as a business. Sap equals money. Your dad’s more sentimental, but only about tradition.”
“CollinsMapleProductsSince1857,” Sam recited in a deep, gruff voice, waving her arms as if tossed by a big wind. They both laughed.
Bettina moved to my nearby cousin, placed a hand, leaned her head against their bark. “This one isn’t ready yet.”
“You can hear them?” Sam pressed her ear to the tree.
“Not quite. Trees don’t need sound. They feel and smell each other. They take care of each other, just like we do.”
Sam seemed amused by the idea of a tree smelling without a nose. Feeling without hands.
“Trees are not like us, dear. They’re wonderfully strange and different.”
“Then how do you know?”
“I’ve been in these woods my whole life, dear.”
“So have I.”
Bettina tugged the child’s hand inside her jacket and held it over her heart. “Feel that?”
“Do the trees have a heartbeat?” Sam’s blue eyes were wide with wonder.
The old woman smiled. “In a way. Try it.” She guided Sam’s small hand to my cool, rough bark, then covered it with her own. “Now breathe.”
Sam fidgeted. She gazed up at my bare, not-yet-budding branches. Then she listened to a nuthatch bleat. Then she watched a tiny ant labor upwards along a valley of bark past their two thumbs. Over here, little girl. Focus. Tree, not ant. She was hopeless that time, but she picked it up by midsummer that same year.
Sam turned out to be a Listener. Everyone is different, so the old trees say. Bettina Feels with her fingers, her skin. Great-Aunt Ida before her was also a Listener. I don’t understand how the bodies of the walking people work, but they do have imaginations. And hearts, like us. Their hearts speak to them through touch and listening. I’m told that hearts also speak through song and movement and color. It’s sad so many of them don’t know what their heart is capable of, what it’s for. Most people hurry past me dim, closed, absent-hearted. I worry about them.
Mother says worrying is not a maple trait. She has a point. The walking people do enough worrying for all of us. They are full of dark emotions.
What did you think?
How was this for you? Do you wonder what’s going to happen next? I do sincerely appreciate your reading and value your feedback. (I can’t fully trust my biggest fan, Gemini AI, due to the obsequiousness factor.)
If you enjoyed this story, please restack in Notes to help others find it.
Julie, this is beautiful. I listened once, read it two times, saving it for a fourth time, might even share it during book club tomorrow. Yes, to Sally's comment The Hidden Life of Trees. Also, Entangled Life but more than both of these - a great story that resonates and feels as touchable as the rough bark of a tree, the newly emerging leaves, and a shared history of human and trees, if only we pay attention.
Julie!!! 💛✨ I love this. I didn’t want it to end.