The Stories Trees Tell

Recorded in their wood are stories we can sometimes read.

Flattening a piece of wood. I plane off smooth thin curls of wood. I check the flatness, then plane more, then check, then plane, then check. It won’t flatten. The tree tells me of the hill it grew on and the steady wind it resisted perhaps for centuries before succumbing to the saw. Bound in the fibers of the wood was this steady resistance only released by each pass of the razor sharp plane blade. Each pass the wood pressed up more to offer the plane, the trapped strain still pushing.

Western red cedar found at DIY store. Stacked still wet from the water drawn up from some distant forest floor. Planks remained as they had been cut, here was a segmented cross section of that cedar. I selected the quarter-sawn planks for their lack of cupping for dresser drawers bottoms, back, and sides (the front cherry). I cut and plane these planks and here and there in the straight bands formed by the rings are small cracks and breaks. A story of a tree blown by some tempest in the deep rainforest of the Pacific Northwest. The strain enough to sever the internal fibers as it bent and swayed. Like a pulled muscle we might think. The muffled pop of strained wood. I read some ancient part of its long life.

A tabletop of sliced wood exposing the rings of a tree from its beginning center out into the pale white sapwood. Some radiate tight and numerous from the sapling center until at some point they sprint out in greater thickness. A late spurt of growth until the tree is felled. Its shadowing neighbors fallen or felled years before, the new light reaching this tree and accelerating its growth. Others tell the opposite story, rapid early growth in a sunny clearing with wide bands of alternating early and late wood for each season. Then the gradual closing of the ring thickness. Young trees growing together running up into the open sky until they branch and crowd each other and the light diminishes and growth slows, a forest maturing.