Philip Connors on The Tree

To read John Fowles’s The Tree while in the midst of writing one’s own book about the natural world is to confront the likelihood of failure. Not failure to spin a good yarn, necessarily, but failure to articulate the essence of one’s relationship with a particular and cherished piece of wild earth. “What I gain most from nature is beyond words,” Fowles writes about a third of the way through his elegant book-length essay. “To try to capture it verbally immediately places me in the same boat as the namers and would-be owners of nature: that is, it exiles me from what I most need to learn.”

What is it that he, and by extension we, most need to learn? I think he was advocating for a kind of unlearning — not a willed ignorance of nature, per se, but a peeling away of much that our culture has drummed into us about how we ought to see nature (as a limitless resource), and whether we ought to feel nature in our bones (the central story of our culture, after all, has us falling away in permanent estrangement from the original garden). For Fowles, his father’s ruthlessly pruned fruit trees, shaped for maximum yield, represent the prevailing human view of nature: it is there to be used, and it is ours to manipulate. We seek to dominate it, he argues, partly out of fear and hostility. We cannot quite accept that is has no use for us.

Fowles, by contrast, is drawn to untamed trees, wild copses, abandoned pastures, overgrown farms. They represent in the tangible world the place where the human mind journeys in sleep — “the green chaos,” he calls it, “the deep forest and refuge of the unconscious.” To step into wild and pathless woods is to enter a kind of dream, the way uncertain, the tree shapes sinuous and erotic, time itself (human time, clock time) a suddenly meaningless abstraction. Indeed, to spend time among untamed woods is to feel oneself dissolve just a bit at the edges. Later, in the regained wholeness of our relentless selfhood, we may find we have been subtly reshaped in ways we can’t quite define.

Fowles died in 2005, but I like to think he’d have been delighted by the continuing existence of my summer job as a fire lookout in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest, where I’m surrounded by 3.3 million acres of trees. Though I’ve written a book about the job and the landscape, I wholeheartedly concur with Fowles when he says that what he gains from nature is beyond words. Words are an unceasing part of my daily life. I am, like Fowles, a writer, constantly wrestling with language. But on summer evenings, when I step off my lookout tower and wander in the woods for what remains of the daylight, the words blessedly disperse like a flock of startled birds. I am, for a moment, a being stripped of his tongue: no one near to listen and nothing at all to say. After a thousand evenings of such wanders over a decade as a lookout, I am no closer than I ever was to finding the words for how it feels to be alone in a gently quaking grove of aspen at dusk, or for the precise character of the mingled joy and peace I derive from sitting beneath an ancient Douglas fir. That many of my favorite trees will outlive me causes me no anguish. I wish them well; they have been like friends to me. What we have between us is a kind of secret it would seem a trespass to elucidate.

Fowles argues that books and photographs of nature serve only to stand in the way of a true feeling for it. His book might thus appear to us a paradox, an example of the thing about which he is rightly suspicious — except it is the furthest thing from a prescription. In its humility and gentleness, its beautiful metaphor-making, it is a form of invitation — an invitation to a celebration at which you find yourself your own host.

Philip Connors
Silver City, New Mexico
October 2010

Philip Connors is the author of Fire Season: Field Notes from a Wilderness Lookout (Ecco; April 2011). Visit Phil’s mountaintop perch and learn more about the book here:

Connors has worked as a baker, a bartender, a house painter, a delivery man, and an editor at the Wall Street Journal. His writing has appeared in Harper’s, the Paris Review, n+1, Salon, the Nation, the Chicago Tribune, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the London Review of Books, the Dublin Review, Dave Eggers’ Best Nonrequired Reading anthology and the bestselling State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. He is the editor of The New West Reader: Essays on an Ever-Evolving Frontier. Originally from Minnesota, he lives in New Mexico with his wife and their dog.