THE SINGING PINES
The pines were asleep in the noonday heat
That shimmered down the lea,
But they waked with the roar of a wave-swept shore
When the wind came in from the sea.
They sang of ships, and the bosun piped,
The hoarse watch roared a tune,
The taut sheets whined in the twanging wind,
You heard the breakers croon.
For their brothers, masts on a thousand keels,
Had sent a greeting free,
And the answering song swelled clear and strong
When the wind came in from the sea.
Last night I heard the pines sing again. A winter midnight was on
the woods, while a northeaster smote the coast, a dozen miles
away, with the million sledges of the surf. So mighty was the
story of this smiting that for long I thought the pines sang of
nothing else. In places and at times they told it with astonishing
fidelity. A forty-mile gale muttered and grumbled to itself high
in air above. Its voice was that of the gale anywhere when
unobstructed. You may hear it at sea or ashore, a hubbub of tones
indistinguishable as gust shoulders against gust and grumbles
about it. In the quiet at the bottom of the wood I could hear
this, too, especially at times when the wind lifted above the pine
tops, leaving them in hushed expectancy of the story to come, a
telling oratorical pause. For a little the voice of the gale
itself would come burbling down into the momentary stillness, then
with a gasp at the awesomeness of the tale the pines would take up
the story again. In it there was none of the dainty romance the
boughs will weave for the listener who cares to know their
language of a sunny summer afternoon, little stories of tropic
seas, of nodding sails and of flying fish that spring from the
foam beneath the forefoot and skim the purple waves. This song was
an epic of the age-long battle between the sea and the shore, a
song without words, but told so well in tone that it was easy,
seeing nothing there in the black shadow of the wood, yet to see
it all; the jagged horizon against the sullen sky, the streaks of
mottled foam sliding landward along the weltering backs of black
waves, spinning into sea drift at every wind-sheared crest, and
blowing, soft as wool, in rolling masses far inland. It was easy
to see the greatest crests rear and draw back, showing the roots
of the ledges among boulders brown with weed and sea wrack, then
swing forward with seemingly irresistible might, to be shattered
as if their crystal was that of glass and to fly skyward a hundred
feet, scintillant white star drift of comminuted sea. The crash of
such waves on such rocks, the hollow diapason of their like on
sands, and the shrill roar of a pebbly beach torn and tossed by
the waves, all sprang from nothingness into vibrant being there in
the black woods as the gale shouldered by the pine tops.
There is a point where the pines group on the pond shore and look
expectantly east, wistful of the sea. Here they caught the full
force of the gale and sang mightily, a wild, deep-toned, marching
symphony of crashing forces. Now and then a lull came, as comes in
the fiercest gales, and in the vast silence which ensued I heard
the pines across the pond singing antiphonally. Black as it was
under the trees, there was a moon behind the night. No suggestion
of it showed through the clouds, yet from the pond surface itself
came a weird twilight, filtered no doubt through a mile of flying
scud a mile above, reflected from the wind-swept surface and
showing these distant pines lifting heads of murk against the
murky sky. But their antiphonal shout was no pine-voiced song of
the sea, it was the sea itself. Again and again I listened in
successive lulls. I could not believe it the pines. I heard so
surely the rush of waves, the deep boom of beating surges, all the
mingled clangor of the on-shore gale, that I thought through some
atmospheric trick I was listening to the thing itself; the uproar
swept over the hills a dozen miles inland. Only by marching up the
pond shore until the pines across were south instead of east of me
did I prove to myself that it was they and not the sea in very
truth that I heard.
Back again in the Stygian darkness of the grove it was easy to
note how the pines protect their own. On the beach the smothering
onrush of the gale beat me down, drove me before it. Yet I had but
to walk inland a dozen yards to find a calm. The outermost trees
shunted the gale and half the time it did not touch even the tops
of those a hundred feet in. Walking out into the midnight storm, I
had wondered how it fared with the small folk of the forest. So
fierce was the onslaught of the wind that it seemed as if the
birds might be blown from their roosts, the squirrels shaken from
their nests. Under the shelter of the trees themselves I knew they
were as safe as I from any harm from the wind. There was not
enough of it below the tree-tops to ruffle a feather.
To lay one's ear closely and firmly against the trunk of one of
these pines was to curiously get an inkling of what was going on
far up among the branches. It is quite like listening at a
telephone receiver, the wood like the wire bringing to the ear
sound of many things going on within touch of it. Thus placed, I
was conscious that the seemingly immobile tree swayed rhythmically,
just the very slightest swaying in the world, and this I seemed to
hear. It was as if the slight readjustment of the woody fibre gave
me a faint thrumming sound, a tiny music of motion that was a
delight to the ear after the beat and bellow of the gale beyond.
Twigs rapped one upon another, making little crisp sounds. Most
surprising of all, however, was a tinkling tattoo of musical notes
as if a dryad within were tapping out woodland melodies on a
xylophone. I listened long to this. It was not exactly a
comfortable position. To hear I must press, and the tree bark was
hard and the rain ran down the trunk and into my ear. Yet the
music was exquisite, a little runic rhyme, repeated over and over
again with quaint variations but with neither beginning nor end.
It was wonderfully wild and fairylike. Who would stop for water in
his ear or a pain in the lobe of it? Midnight, the middle of the
gale, the middle of the woods; perhaps here was that very opening
into the realm of the unseen woodland folk that we all in our
inmost hearts hope for and expect some day to find.
So did he feel who pulled the boughs aside,
That we might look into the forest wide.
*****
Telling us how fair trembling Syrinx fled
Arcadian Pan, with such a fearful dread.
Poor nymph--poor Pan--how he did weep to find
Naught but a lovely sighing of the wind
Along the reedy stream; a half heard strain,
Full of sweet desolation, balmy pain.
It may have been the dryad, playing the xylophone for a dance
unseen by my gross mortal eyes, but if my water-logged ear did not
deceive me--and I hope it did--it was only the beat of the big
drops of rain on the twigs above, clarified and made resonant by
its passage through the vibrant wood to my ear. At any rate, it
was a most delightful musical entertainment of which I fancy
myself the discoverer, and I hope it was the dryad. He who reads
may believe as he will.
Beyond the pines I found the wind in the woods. Among the bare
limbs of the deciduous growth the storm wailed and clattered its
way on about my head as I felt out the path with my feet for a
half mile to a pine-crowned hilltop. Again I was in sanctuary. The
hilltop carried us up--the pines and me--into the full sweep
of the gale, yet under their spreading, beneficent arms I felt no
breath of wind. Overhead I noted its own wild voice as, very near
and right with it in chorus, the pines sang, swaying in time to
their music as I have seen a rapt singer do. Strangely enough, in
their tones up here I could hear no cry of the sea. They sang
instead the tumult of the sky, the vast loneliness of distant
spaces, something of the deep-toned threnody of the ancient
universe, mourning for worlds now dark.
Something of this the gale drew from the pines as it crowded by,
but never once did its fiercest gusts disturb the serenity of the
sanctuary beneath. A foot or two down from their topmost boughs
was shelter for the crows, snugged down on a lee limb, close to
the trunk, their feathers set to shed such rain as might strike
them, their long black beaks thrust beneath their wings, rocked in
the cradle of the deep woods, sung to sleep by their lullaby of
the primal universe. There was little need to waste sympathy on
them or on any other little folk of the forest who had for their
shelter the brooding arms of these beneficent trees stretched
above them.
Pines are the great, deep-breasted mothers of the woods, giving
food and shelter from sun and storm to all who will come to them.
Prolific mothers they are, too, and if man with his axe and his
fire would but spare them they would in a generation or two
reclothe our Massachusetts waste lands with their kind once more.
Recklessly as the generations have destroyed them, sweeping often
great tracts bare of every noble trunk, leaving the slash piled
high for the fire to complete the destruction of the axe, they
still persist, pushing the greenwood with its fluffy plumes right
to our dooryards. Let the ploughed field lie fallow for a decade
and see them come, loyal little folk preparing the way for them,
as the trolls of ancient tales worked for those they loved. Into
the brown furrows troop the goldenrod and asters, the wild
grasses and brambles making a first shelter for the seeds of
gray birch and wild cherry that magically come and plant
themselves. A thousand other forms of life, beast and bird and
insect, make the place their home; all preparing it for the
nursing of the young pines to came. However rough has been the
work of the wood cutters, however persistent the forest fires,
somewhere is a seed pine standing, ready to spear the turf a mile
away with brawn javelins out of whose wounds shall spring trees,
just as out of the Cadmus-sown dragon's teeth of old sprang armed
men. The tree may be a century-old gnarled trunk, too crooked and
knotty to be worthy the woodman's axe, or a verdant sprout of a
score of years' standing, green and lusty--the result will be
the same. When the seeding year comes the brown cones will open
and the winds will bear the germs of the new growth forth,
spinning down the gale, whichever way they list to blow. The tiny
pines that result may live for three or four years amongst the
brambles unnoticed, then suddenly they take heart and grow and we
find a lusty forest coming along. At three years they will not be
over ten inches high, but they will make ten inches in height the
next year, and after the fifth they stride forward like lusty
youths, glorifying in their increase. It is not uncommon for them
to stretch up three feet a year, more than doubling their height
in that sixth year in which they strike their stride. They do not
cease this upward striving as long as they live.
After the age of sixty or so the pine may be said to have passed
the heyday of its youth, no longer increasing so rapidly in height
and girth, yet the increase goes on, if more sedately. The tree
rarely reaches a height of more than 160 feet and a diameter of
more than forty inches. The largest ever measured by the Forestry
Department of the United States was forty-eight inches in diameter
at breast high and 170 feet in height, containing 738 cubic feet
of wood in its mighty trunk. It will be some time before seedlings
in the bramble patch here in Massachusetts reach that size,
however, for this tree was 460 years old. It grew among trees of
similar age in a pine forest in Michigan.
Yet New England pines have matched it, and more. Writing in 1846,
Emerson tells of trees here 250 feet in height and six feet in
diameter. One in Lancaster, New Hampshire, measured 264 feet.
Fifty years before that trees in Blandford measured when they were
felled 223 feet in length. The upper waters of the Penobscot were
long the home of mighty pine trees where it was no uncommon thing
to hew masts 70 to 90 feet in length. In 1841 one was hewed there
90 feet in length, 36 inches in diameter at the butt and 28 inches
at the top. Such trees have passed, now, almost from the memory of
living man. Could we have them here in our State they would be
worshipped as were the druidical trees of ancient European
countries and the place of their standing would be made a park
that they might be visited by all, rich or poor. It seems a pity
that our ancestors could not have thought of this. It would have
been so easy for them to let clumps of these wonderful old pines
stand, here and there. It is so impossible for us to bring one of
them back, with all our wealth and all our learning.
If we may believe the geologists the pines were the original tree
inhabitants of our land, massing it in their dark green from
mountain top to sea shore. Suddenly no one knows whence, the oaks
and other deciduous trees appeared among them and in part drove
them out of the richer soils. "The oak," says Gray, "has driven
the pine to the sands." Yet the pines grow equally well among the
rough rocks of mountain slopes where the winter gales that wreck
the hardwood trees leave them untouched. This is the more strange
as pines rarely root deeply. The roots, even of old trees seventy
to one hundred feet in height, rarely go into the earth more than
two or three feet, taper rapidly and extend not usually over
twenty feet on every side. In young trees twenty or twenty-five
feet tall the roots do not penetrate more than fifteen or eighteen
inches, yet great old trees stand alone in pasture and on hilltop,
exposed to all the fury of the fiercest gales, rarely if ever
blown down. The structure of yielding limbs that swing so that the
gusts glance on their plumes, and the needle-like leaves that let
the torrents of air slip through them, is no doubt the reason for
this. The outermost pines of the grove shoulder the gale away from
the others, yet let it slip by themselves, giving it no grip
whereby to tear them up. The resinous roots of the tree not only
suffice to hold it upright against the storm, but they last long
after the trunk has been cut away. Our forefathers in clear land
used to set the uprooted stumps of the pine up in rows for
fencing, unsightly barricades that would persist for a century
with little sign of decay. On the other hand, wood from the trunk
set in the ground soon decays.
Of the great trees centuries old that once clothed our land from
Newfoundland to the Dakotas, from northern New Brunswick to
southern Pennsylvania, few if any remain. Nor shall anyone see
their like here again for centuries. But the pines are coming back
again to New England. We know their values now as never before and
we are encouraging them to reclothe our solitudes both for their
commercial and their sentimental value. This last is great and
grows greater, nor need one necessarily go into the storm at
midnight to appreciate it. One may get some phases of it there,
though, that are not to be found elsewhere. My way home through
the storm was rough and wet, but it was not lonely. The songs of
the pines went with me, especially the tinkling xylophone dance
music of the dryad, deep within the ancient trunk.