Just across the road from our home in Southeast Rochester, Minnesota, there is a gateway to another world.
You would never notice it, driving by- like a magical locality in literature like Gaiman or Rowling, it is obfuscated from you unless you are aware of it. You can barely make out the ancient “State Game Refuge” sign to one side. In the seconds it takes to pass, it completely skips the eye. A couple times a year, a tractor-mower knocks back the creeping brush line from the road, but otherwise no one goes in or out, except other walkers between worlds like the Whitetail Deer that emerge to browse our neighbor’s Arborvitae at night. Like the quiet places of Tolkien, it is a reliquary of a fleeting magic- where we take our children to watch the indigo oxidization wash over a freshly picked Cyanoboletus pulverulentus and hear the exotic calls of the Pileated Woodpecker. Once you pass the veil of Buckthorn that guards the road and enter the understory of Bur Oaks and Cottonwoods (at combinations and ages that suggest this was an Oak Savanna that, once no longer grazed, began the process of ecological succession to dense forest ecology), a sense of schweigen sets in. Time seems to slow, ebbing against the Gooseberry and Wild Ginger that grow in the shade. Here, there are no glowing screens, no headlines, no shouting. The architecture of broken Boxelders that refuse to stop reaching for the sun creates archways and sculptures beneath the spreading branches of the Oaks that no playground or bouldering gym could imitate. During the growing season, the air is infused with phytochemicals that lift the mood like a strong tea. Sometimes, getting our children to leave all the stimulation of modernity and walk one hundred yards to this place can be challenging. Once the quiet sets in and they start to wander, it can be impossible to get them to leave.
My most lucid memories are anchored to plants and nature. I remember being very young and smelling the spicy leaf buds of a Cottonwood after a spring storm shed some small branches from a grove of them outside of my elementary school. I remember feeling the bark of the Ash tree with a low union at the local park that my siblings and I would climb together, fantasizing about being super heroes. My sister and I would spend hours in a Cedar bog in northern Minnesota, hiding caches of small treasured objects in the root voids in the peat and creating elaborate backstories and maps to find them. From the age of eight, I insisted on making attempts at produce gardening, intoxicated by the shades of green of emerging cotyledons and smell of active soil. This “place” I entered interacting with plants was a powerful medicine for other things in life that were challenging, and would eventually draw me to organic produce farming, and then arboriculture.
Learning about and helping people understand trees is one of the greatest joys of my life. It is not without its frustrations, though! Sometimes I feel like an envoy from this strange other world, because we are so disconnected from nature in our modern lives. Asking people to consider removing large limbs from trees as having the same magnitude of ramifications as amputation for a person can be challenging. Because of this disconnect, we seem to view the plants and soils and ecosystems in our urban spaces as models made of homogenous materials- like Legos, we can just add and subtract pieces without consequence. It’s just plastic, after all. Inviting people to consider the implications and contingencies of our actions upon these plant communities that we cohabitate with can be downright provocative. I think this is because we realize there is a responsibility that comes with the understanding that it is all connected. But that’s what this magic that I speak of really is- connection. A connection that, as much as we can be distracted from it, we are a part of.
Copyright 2023, Mitch Hoy
