(Simon & Schuster, 372 pages)
“A tree is not just a thing made up of bark and leaves and sap and wood. At its core, a tree is not even really a noun. It is more like a verb.”
With that musing, journalist Robert Moor puts readers on notice that In Trees aspires to be a combination of qualities he ascribes to trees: “something inventive, exacting and long-lasting. Something wise.” He largely succeeds. In Trees entwines a decade of hands-on research — to include climbing trees, sleeping in them and protesting in them — with lyrical philosophy. The result is an exploration of everything even remotely related to trees.
If, Moor writes, “we could watch the full life cycle of an oak play out in a few seconds, it would look as violent as a fireworks display.” He delves into the three simultaneous processes that result in a mature tree — branching, pruning and gnarling — and proposes that all of life follows much the same pattern. “In one sense, they are nothing more than very big plants,” he writes, but they take hold of the human imagination in a way that other plants don’t, almost god-like in the way that they outlive human beings and provide for us.”
Moor has been interested in trees and their significance ever since he spent time at a monastery in India and visited the site of the Bodhi tree, where the Buddha is believed to have achieved enlightenment. (Moor describes the tree as “a huge ficus with low crooked pale arms propped up by metal crutches, like some kind of decrepit extraterrestrial.”)
But mild interest turned to fascination when he, like Thoreau, went to the woods to live, moving from a New York City apartment to a cabin in British Columbia. For a while it was enough to sit under trees and think about them, but one day Moor felt the urge to climb one, something he hadn’t done since he was a kid.
The urge, however, was thwarted by fear, and so he sought out an instructor, a British man who sees tree climbing as a lost human skill. Under the guidance of this man (who never wears shoes, except when rock climbing, and sees the destruction of a tree as similar to the harpooning of a whale), he comes to see tree climbing as a form of “rewilding” — rewiring the brain in healthy ways.
Later he travels to the World Bonsai Convention near Tokyo, where he considers the question “What is a tree?” in the company of people who snip and trim them into myriad shapes, and later he attempts to nurture a bonsai himself with fairly disastrous results. (After he failed to water it for a while, he writes, “it had taken on a raw-spined, mangey look, like a former show poodle gone feral.”) There was, it seems, no limit to his travel budget. He goes to Papua, in Indonesia, where a tribe called the Korowai lives in treehouses deep in a jungle and mysteriously open themselves up to anthropologists and writers gaping at their way of life; getting there requires more than four hours of walking. With his husband, he goes to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, searching for the “very stem of the human family tree,” in the form of Lucy, the 3.2-million-year-old fossilized remains, weirdly named after a Beatles song. Then on to Tanzania, searching for wild apes, another component in the human family tree. This is a serious amount of branching out from the core topic.
Nowhere, however, does he stray so far from the Joyce Kilmer vision of trees, however, as when, mid-book, he departs on a story we don’t see coming: how, on a genealogical project with his father, they are confronted with the knowledge that they are descended from a southern physician who owned enslaved people and had children with at least one of them. This leads Moor to track down a cousin he had never known about, a woman who has Black heritage and is a family physician in California. They get to know each other and ultimately take a road trip to Alabama together to visit various civil rights monuments and even try to track down the grave of the enslaved woman who was the genesis of their shared history.
The story fits within the theme of the book in two ways: Moor’s exploration of family trees, and, in a more sinister way, the horrific lynchings of the Jim Crow era in which “Southerners deliberately refashioned trees into murder weapons — murder weapons that lived on for hundreds of years, often in places like the town square — to remind the town’s Black residents to remain subservient.”
It is a dark and poignant chapter that is a startling departure from the rest of the book, although Moor does do a fair bit of preaching about what’s been called the “Great Uprooting” — the abandonment of close-to-the-land lifestyles caused by industrialization and other forces. It was, he says, a change in both the soil and the soul.
Moor, who for the most part nicely blends humor and serious reflection, previously won praise for a similar book, On Trails, which won the National Outdoor Book Award in 2017. In Trees seems a sequel of sorts, fortuitously timed for your celebration of Arbor Day, April 24. You are celebrating Arbor Day, aren’t you? It would surely please Moor, who confesses that he hopes to “arborize humanity” with this book. This is his core advice: “Learn to branch out like a tree, to let go like a tree, to weather hardship like a tree, to rise above like a tree, to set down roots like a tree.” And maybe go climb a tree, as well, spider monkey. B+
Featured Photo: In Trees by Robert Moor