My husband and I awoke to a slow, powerful cracking sound. Groggily, we wondered at the mysterious force just outside our bedroom window. It was creakier than thunder and more organic than a car crash, the sound of an immense yielding to gravity.
The next morning revealed the sound’s source, half of a giant willow tree had fallen behind our house. Layers of leaves and entangled branches once full and massive splayed across the alley and the split hefty trunk appeared raw and bright against the autumn gray sky. Two weeks passed before the trunk’s other half fell, smothering half of its owner’s garage on the other side of the alley.
The half fallen willow tree.
The fully fallen willow.
Times passed and the tree’s thousands of spiky leaves and complex angled branches simply lay in a heap, a harmless obstruction at the end of a dead end alley. On a crisp November Saturday, a couple of weeks after the final fall, I saw a man with a hand saw removing minor branches and decided to ask if I could snip some of them to make charcoal.
Vine charcoal is made of willow branches baked in coals or kilns. This was a week after attending the symposium, Flow: Art and Ecology in a Changing Climate and I was inspired by its focus on making pigments and other materials connected to place and the land such as ochre and plants. Foraging this willow would be a way to make the very first drawing tool out of a tree that had been integral to my neighborhood, connected to my sense of domestic place.
The man with the saw introduced himself as Conan, a self-ascribed name. Conan went on to share that he was the owners of the house with the fallen willow’s son. He happily granted me permission to collect branches.
Foraged branches cut into charcoal sized pieces.
While a seemingly shy introvert with a long pony tail and nondescript metal framed glasses, Conan spoke profusely. He immediately shared that he came from a family of artists and that he himself was a painter. He went on to assure me that his parents had hired someone to remove the tree but because this man was a veteran and it was the weekend before Veteran’s Day, the tree’s removal was delayed. Conan hoped this timing would be fortuitous, allowing family members to salvage willow wood for carvings and possibly baskets.
Conan then discussed a painting he had been working on, a waterscape. The empty water required something to animate the rippling, uninterrupted space. He was a bit stuck, unsure what would make the picture more complete, a breaching Orca, a flock of birds soaring overhead?
A few days later a truck with a long flatbed trailer threaded backwards down the narrow alley. Three men spent an entire day dismantling the willow’s branches and splitting its bifurcated trunk into a long stack of firewood. This line of utilitarian lumber replaced the willow’s tall, vertical green texture, opening up the sky and deep marine horizon.
As I prepare willow branches to make charcoal and look out at the open sky where it once stood I think about what has been lost and gained in the aftermath of the willow’s fall.
There is more light in our house, a spatial opening between two birch trees. We look out and see currents riffling a soft yet affecting and constant motion, as well as mountains near Snoqualmie pass on the horizon. There will be fewer birds in our neighborhood as the tree was a sanctuary primarily for starlings and sparrows. The motion of rippling water replaces the fluttering of birds emerging from the tree. Their erratic yet graceful movement into and out of the willow filled the air with life and their boisterous calls infused the alley with a rambunctious vitality.
The pieces of willow branches need to be peeled and packed into a metal, lidded container.
Ideas explored during the panel, “Decolonizing Land’s Imaginary,” during the Friday evening opening of the Flow symposium, complicated my bias against sparrows and swallows. Panel participant, Professor Banu Subramanium’s perspective on the implications of using language overlaps with anti-immigration rhetoric to decribe introduced flora and fauna, words such as “alien” and “invasive” made me examine how I think about these birds.
Language has extraordinary power in shaping ideas. Words can act, as ecologist and philosopher David Abram suggests, like spells, hypnotizing through their associative power of suggestion. At the same time, embodied systems and living relationships that define a sense of place and enliven land speak their own wordless languages. Land’s imaginary requires precise words as well as wordless understandings. It's critical to acknowledge verbal language’s profound power and its limitations in shaping ideas about place and land. Regardless of their origins, starlings still pulse in synchronized murmurations across the sky. Their abundance in urban environments does not erase their striking iridescent, dappled shimmering and confident, perky characters. The willow’s fall, and its timing just before the Flow symposium has left me contemplating how words, place, ecologies, and direct encounters affect how I know and imagine starlings and by extension other beings.
Backyards and alleys can effect reckonings and unexpected encounters. I now know Conan’s name and that he faces unfinished canvases, wondering what he can do to make the picture more complete. Listening to him while salvaging willow branches, made me more aware that sometimes words, like Conan, are chosen, and sometimes they’re imposed. The willow’s fall raises questions about where, as well as how, we find the language to tell textured and expansive stories that nourish our roots as we soar above the spell of broken systems and dead end ideas. Sometimes cracking and yielding is an opening, not merely a fall.
The peeled pieces of willow branches were cooked in a grill for about an hour.
Vine charcoal!