Singing Inside a Tree

Abstract

Singing Inside a Tree Anne Haven McDonnell (bio) Many regions are projected to experience an increase in the probability of compound events with higher global warming (high confidence). In particular, concurrent heatwaves and droughts are likely to become more frequent. —Valérie Masson-Delmotte and Panmao Zhai, “Regional trends in extreme events in the IPCC 2021 report” The Celts believed a tree’s presence could be felt more keenly at night or after a heavy rain, and that certain people were more attuned to trees and better able to perceive them. There is a special word for this recognition of sentience, mothaitheacht. It was described as a feeling in the upper chest of some kind of energy or sound passing through you. It’s possible that mothaitheacht is an ancient expression of a concept that is relatively new to science: infrasound or “silent” sound. These are sounds pitched below the range of human hearing, which travel great distances by means of long, loping waves. They are produced by large animals, such as elephants, and by volcanoes. And these waves have been measured as they emanate from large trees. —Diana Beresford-Kroeger, To Speak for the Trees It is the balance between the rational and imaginative that will ultimately solve the most serious problems that threaten us. —David Dunn There’s a tree I see in my mind when I need to find shelter. This Douglas fir tree lives on an island in the northwest, and simultaneously this tree lives inside me. It’s one of the few remaining old-growth trees on the island. I’ve sat inside the burned-out cave at its base where lightning struck. I’ve watched light glitter across strands of spider silk spanning its entrance, breathing cool air and smelling damp earth, bark, and wood. Inside the tree, I am young and old and animal and human. I am held inside the slow language of xylem, [End Page 44] phloem, cambium, sap, and centuries of survival. When I approach the tree as I walk on the duff trail around the border of the lake, I feel the tree’s voice move like water through my chest. The voice of the tree is a hush, a swell, a silent rolling wave like the slow rising of a whale. There’s another kind of silence in my chest when I walk through the beetle-killed forests of northern New Mexico and Colorado. This silence is brittle. It spreads from too much sky, cracks along barkless gray branches, unsheltered, unsheltering. I’ve watched forest after forest that I love succumb to the mountain pine beetles. Where my mom has a cabin in the high Fraser Valley in Colorado, I’ve watched whole mountainsides of lodgepole pines erupt with sap balls along the trunk as they try to expunge the beetles. And then I’ve watched as rusty red clusters of dead needles spread like dull fire, until all the needles are rust. It’s almost the color of fall. It’s almost beautiful. Eventually the needles drop and leave skeletons of gray. What is called silence is usually the absence of human sounds. Inside the cave in my tree on the island, surrounded by Douglas fir, western red cedar, and hemlock forests, I hear the upward spiral of a russet-backed thrush, a loon calling from nearby on the lake, and the high tinkling glassy sounds of a Pacific wren. The thick layers of moss and duff and bark cushion each voice, as my body is held inside the body of the tree. Inside what used to be a living forest in the Rocky Mountains, inside what is now a tangle of fallen and standing dead lodgepole pine, I hear the far-off hammering of a woodpecker. Other than the woodpecker, all I hear is wind. I hear the way dead branches creak and carve the wind. What are the sounds of drought and climate unravelling in a forest? If you insert a homemade microphone inside the phloem and cambium of a drought-stressed piñon tree, as artist, composer, and acoustic ecologist David Dunn did, you’ll hear a symphony of sounds. I called David...