The Peg at the Heart of Play

By Kim R. Stafford

Lay your hand on a table. A warmth rises to greet you, for wood lives when the tree dies. Physicists are learning this, and musicians have known for a long time. There was once a physicist who also played the violin. One morning, he took his fiddle to the lab, wrapped it green with felt, clamped it gently in a vise, and trained the electron microscope close on the spruce belly, just beside the f-hole, where a steel peg set humming at a high frequency. Through the microscope, once he got it honed in right, he saw the molecular surface of the wood begin to pucker and ripple outward like rings on a pond, the ripples rising gradually into waves, and the peg a blur at the heart of play.

When he drew the peg away, the ripples did not stop. In twenty-four hours, the ripples had not stopped. He saw, still, a concentric tremor on the molecular quilt of the wood. The violin, in the hard embrace of the vise, had a thing to say, a song. But then, in another twelve hours, the ripple had flattened and the wood lay inert.

Musicians know this without a microscope. A wooden instrument of ebony, maple, and spruce suffers a small death if not played daily. Cut thin, spruce revels in its responsive hum. A guitar, a violin, or a lute chills the air for the first ten minutes of fresh play. It will need to be quickened from scratch. But the fiddle played every day hangs resonant on the wall, quietly boisterous when it first is lifted down, already trembling, anxious to speak, to cry out, to sing at the bow’s first stroke. Not to rasp, but to sing. The instrument is in tune before the strings are tuned.

I like to think of standing trees thrumming quietly after the breeze has brushed their slender height. The forest does not live intermittently, and we do not. Our hopes practice a resonant blur. I learned this from an old musician who used to say: If I don’t practice for even one day, I can tell the difference when I next cradle the cello in my arms. If I fail to practice for two days, my close friends can also tell the difference. If I don’t practice three days, the whole world knows.

His words teach me about my whole life, how I feel as I write about trees. Places and stories beckon, and I comply, building a mosaic of stories. Each story is a peg that startles my life into being. I want to tell about the nun who lived as a tree in her room at the convent, rooted in place, she said, but buffeted by all the emotions one can feel, shaken like a willow in the storm.

And I remember Forest Francisco, my old friend who planted his yard with Douglas fir seedlings at the age of eighty-eight, planted them close so they would grow straight until they were old. He knelt in the dew and showed me. "See how close I put them?" he said. "They gotta be close to grow straight, straight and tall by the time they’re old." When he was young, he had dug out thirteen old-growth stumps by hand. Yet in old age he wanted them to grow again, to bury the sunlight he had wrested from the forest. I had to help him up. He staggered on my arm. We laughed about it.

I want to tell about my old teacher, at the end, how he asked to have his ashes scattered under the pines: about my friends who have named their newborn son Cedar. When pain or exhilaration shakes me, I feel a chlorophyllic buzz of life. Telling stories, shaping words daily on the page, with the first stroke my hand may swim, the pen glide. My pen is the peg that would move the hearts of those I love.

What resonates in your life? Where do you feel your own rush? Where is the tree that starts your understanding? Somewhere near you stands an oldest tree. No matter how old it is, it is oldest in that place, and it reigns quietly in the neighborhood. I think of the hemlock I used to camp beside, down in the woods near my house. It had the shaggy look of something there before any of us. I would build a small fire in the clay beside it, and wait for dusk, the time when silence included me. It was my older but indulgent cousin. The biggest tree, the oldest one, stands near you somewhere yet. I ask my friends where this monarch dwells. "Oh yes," says Dana in Oregon, "that would be the maple I played in as a child. We had a room in the low branches, and there was the saddle limb for reading. Then I was married under that tree—it is really two grown together—and at the end of the ceremony we simply stood awhile silent and let the green light fall over us."

"Yes," says Ken from Maine, "my favorite toy was a particular elm. As a child I pitied my friends when they bragged about their toys. They had fine things, but I had that tree. And my favorite game was simply to watch the coins of sunlight flicker across my hands. Did that for hours."

"Oldest?" says an old California native in the Silicon Valley. "just go down where those freeways cross in Mountain View. Down under there is a oak that’s oldest. You have to scramble off the overpass and push through the scotch broom. Got bees in it. Poison oak. Lots of litter. Old tires and thistle. Doing fine, though, last time I checked."

"Our tree," says Cecelia from Alaska, "is a little scrubby spruce not knee-high that somehow keeps alive out there on the tundra. People put up a sign beside it: 'Welcome to the Bethel National Forest.' Just that one tree. Snow covers it, then there it is again green. It's our little joke we're fond of."

West from Los Angeles, it's the oak that leans to scatter acorns. In Junction City, Kansas, it's the elm on the hilltop lightning favors. In San Antonio, Texas, it's the pepper tree spreading inside the compound at the Alamo. In the Smokies of Carolina, it's the tree my friend calls Heart Bursting Open. West from Bloomfield, Connecticut, it's the sycamore the centuries left alone, so massive the whole world suddenly shrinks to a different scale. To guard the whole earth, it is necessary to be large, or many, or old, or profoundly nourishing, or all of these. I put my ear against a maple in the storm to hear that symphonic rattle of twigs. My ear is wet and my heart jumps.

When I am in the forest in a storm, I feel the world thrum as one great violin. I am the peg that walks.

WN