Hello from Maryland and happy Earth Day. 🌺 Today is the finale of our story. If you’d prefer to start from the beginning, it’s here.
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These 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. 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.
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In Part 3 of our story, Sam's grief over her Nana's passing deepens her despair about the pipeline, but Ace offers surprising advice – collect and plant the tree's seeds. As sugaring season returns, a strange thing happens—the pipeline men depart. Did Ace's plan somehow ward off the threat?
Now, on with the finale.
Finale: An ending and a beginning
Sugaring season ends but the stakes and ribbons remain. When Sam comes to remove the tubing lines, she says only a quick hello. Her movements seem weighted, lacking her usual bright grace. I try to get her attention. What’s wrong? You can tell me. But she doesn’t answer. She shakes her head and continues rolling the tubing on a spool.
A few days later, a crowd of people tromp into the forest. They carry plastic pails and small rollers and speak only in grim bursts. Intent and focused, they stripe every pink-ribboned tree with alternating red and white paint lines. They roll the paint right over the ribbons. Another paints blue rectangles above the stripes.
Sam is not among them, but after a while I recognize Kevin. He removes my pink ribbon, pats my trunk and whispers to me (to me!), “Sorry, Ace. Hope it doesn’t hurt. It’s all we could think of.”
I reach out to him, try to ask why they’re painting flags on us, but he’s distracted when someone calls out, “Trees are more patriotic than pipelines!”
This starts up a call and response, “Sap lines!” “Not pipelines!” which goes on for a while. They dart amongst the beribboned trees, leaving a forest of flags in their wake. Though my cousins try to be brave, the rollers tickle and the paint is suffocating. At least Mother is outside the line of stakes and ribbons, so she is spared. Her silence is more ominous than the gathering storm clouds.
“Hell no, Patriot Pipeline!” Kevin shouts as he finishes stenciling white stars on the blue rectangle sucking all moisture from my trunk. Their gruff laughter is as cold as the wind needling freezing rain into their anxious red faces.
And here come the men in their red trucks, wearing yellow vests and bowls on their heads and orange domes over their ears and dragonfly eyes. Axes and mallets hang from their heavy tool belts. They drag sleds of equipment through the ice-crusted leaves.
Sam returns, trailing a line of plastic yellow and black tape. Her despair melts the hard ground behind her. “Ace, there’s Federal marshals with assault rifles and bullet-proof vests. We were polite to them before and now they send hired guns to threaten us? On our land?” She grips me with shaking arms and rests her raging head on my bark. It burns.
“I’m so sorry, Ace. This can’t be real. It’s like . . . I want to wake up now.”
The mycelial network vibrates with panic as the men fan out dragging their sleds among the flag-painted trees. Trees as young as three seasons, as old as three hundred, spark many hundreds of distress signals. The cacophony of alarms crosses and jams the network into incoherence. No help is offered, only cries for help. I’m numb, tapped out from sugaring like everyone else. I send no help and receive none. Disbelief fizzles to resignation.
In the distant din of revving chainsaws and shouting men, the network falls eerily quiet.
“This can’t be happening,” she wails aloud. With shaking hands, she wraps fat blue yarn around me, around her legs, around her torso, around me, around one arm—
“Hey! You there!” a man shouts. “Get away from there!”
She shrieks, wraps faster, clutches me tight.
Two black-vested men appear. They’re wearing gold sunglasses, even though it’s overcast and spitting snow. Their big guns slap their backs as they tromp toward us. One pulls on Sam, who shrieks, “Get off me!” while the other one swears and unsheathes a knife to saw away the yarn and she kicks one in the shin and he swears again and kicks her thigh and she shrieks and they get a new grip and hoist her up and drag her off screaming, “Jerks! Assholes! Murderers! Help!” her voice raw with rage and fear. It’s a horrible final view of my dear friend. What will they do to her?
The brrrraapppp of chainsaws frazzles the air. The devastation approaches from downhill. I watch each of my relatives fall one by one. I feel the slice of the saws as if they’re biting into my own flesh. Cocooned in their ear-domes, the men must not hear the calls of panicked birds, the hacking squawk of squirrels fleeing in all directions for their lives, the howls of frightened and dying trees. Theirs is a coward’s muffled battlefield.
But they cannot avoid the smells. The toxic plume of exhaust from their weapons. The sharp burst of butchered tannins. The sweet cellulose sprays of sap. The final breaths of life releasing fifty, sixty, seventy-year-old relatives. One uncle, well near two hundred years standing. Sam’s family taps him in two, sometimes three places, that’s his generosity, and he topples with a sad crunch like all the others. Not only maples fall to this slaughter. Oaks fall. Birches fall. Hemlocks fall. Poplars fall. Friends, all.
And on the men come, a big wind, a giant’s tantrum, abandoning each individual where they fall. Accumulating like matchsticks. Numb with terror, I watch the relentless death march up that hill.
The yellow ochre of a cut tree is the color of despair. The hidden heartwood, glowing amber in winter-gray woods, sober trunk slammed into a sienna bed of leaves. The vertical overturned, claimed by gravity, finished, final.
Oil reek roar, hot blade—
The spinning chain smashes my dead bark and live bark, and plows through cambium and sapwood, scattering bits of heartwood into the air, back toward the man, bouncing off the glowing eye-domes on his grimy determined face, sticking on stiff ashy lips.
When he yanks the monster free, the wound sets off a crackling chain of pheromone transports and fungal transmissions. Their violent origin traces a fluky flutter, calling to life the midwinter morning some forty sugaring seasons past, a memory long since grown over. After striking the bark, the chain is moving at eighty-eight feet per second, a pathetically sluggish pace compared to the synaptic lightning that flashes around it. Once in the heartwood, the metal comes under the mediation of arboreal time, which gives me plenty of space to savor the sweet memory of Bettina, a young mother of two, humming with anticipation. The loving bite of her hand drill. Shiver of sap finding the hole. Tang of blood of her finger cut on the tin bucket’s edge. Plump ruby bloom. She touches her finger to my first hole, collects a sweet gift of sap, raises the finger to her mouth and closes her lips around it. Sugar-iron promise. Bettina whispers, blue eyes wet, Thank you.
I want to hear it again, strangely elated by those two final words, their pure gratitude, their beauty. But the man’s axe is now finishing the job, it won’t be denied or charmed to a halt. In the end, it will do its work and drop me to the ground, dragging a splinter-shower of memory and hope, friendship, goodwill, sweet gift and love to the forest floor. That can’t be helped. But just for now I can drip one last trickle into the tin bucket, birth a new leaf from a stem, squeeze out time enough for my dear friend to return and softly sing, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
For five years, the Collins family fought for their land. All that time, the trees lay where they fell in the hundred-fifty-foot-wide crime scene. Patriot Pipeline refused to clear them and refused Sam’s family permission to gather the wood to heat their home. Those men never even got all the permits they needed to build the pipeline.
Sam tended every new maple seedling in Nana’s woods and in pots. Her parents left her alone to nurse her grief. “She could be doing worse,” they told each other. Through Kevin’s group on Social, they crowd-funded a lawyer who filed more lawyer words with the court.
Eventually, the few remaining approvals expired and the pipeline died. Patriot settled. Sam’s parents had to promise to keep their secrets in exchange for full use of their land again. Sam recruited Kevin, the extended Collins family, friends and volunteers from Kiwanis and Boys & Girls of Scranton and the Baptist church youth group to plant new trees where we had fallen.
What did you think?
Thanks for reading. Your comments and encouragement mean so much to me. Believe it or not, Heartwood is based on a true story. If you’re curious about that, I’ll share my research and the process of writing Heartwood in this Thursday’s post.
If you enjoyed this story, please ❤️ and restack in Notes to help others find it.
I finally was able to finish this story, a week late. So beautiful, tragic, and moving. Thank you for making the time to bring this story to life for all of us.
This is a love story.