Vitality
A LLISON L ANSVERK I have taken the pulse of a tree. A Cascade Mountains’ lodgepole pine. My taxonomy-driven mind immediately cataloged it, noting the flaking bark and paired, twisting needles. It was a pine just like the hundreds still standing around it; but I was drawn to this one because of the audible lub-dub. I gently pressed my two fingers between scaly folds to feel the steady beat which had guided me through the forest moments before. I had been hiking through the woods near Holden Village up in the Cascade Mountains when I first heard the noise. There was no destination for my hike; it was only to escape the summer heat on the veiled paths that wound away from the village. The pine-carpeted trail dampened my footsteps and the canopy above shattered afternoon sunlight and laid it in shards on the forest floor. Nature’s hush, full of chirping insects and slicing bird calls, hugged the very curvature of the trees. Human-made noises—the clamber of voices and whirr of bus engines—faded as I melded into the woods. My ears were primed for squirrel chatter and creaking tree joints, and so when a loud human heartbeat resounded in the forest ahead, my own chest quickly hammered a response. My heart tap danced a painful rhythm across my ribs as adrenaline coursed through my veins. Maybe Poe’s tell-tale heart was hidden under forest instead of floorboards, my uneasy heart said. But not being one to leave mysteries unsolved, I warily wound on the trail farther and farther away from the village, letting my ears lead me through the trees. Finally, light and sound intensified as I reached the edge of the forest, which was abruptly interrupted by the flow of Railroad Creek. And there it was. The source of the heartbeat. Nothing more than a fallen tree lying with its great arms splayed into the river’s current; the water pounding through the hollowedout interior was what caused the beat. The surprise that I felt at that moment still stays with me. It sounded just like a heartbeat, and there was something magically weird and intriguing about that. The tree is dead, my analytical, scientific mind stepped up to assert. What you are witnessing is merely the ordinary cycle of decomposition, a process which occurs shortly after death. Rampant water tore at the bark and needles; they fragmented into ever smaller splinters to be carried away by the ceaseless current. I watched one needle pirouette midair before swooshing down into the frothy current in a spark of extinguished color. From the path, the bark shimmered under the heat’s haze and the water’s ripples. What should have been folds of skin, had this been the humanoid I was expecting, were actually crevices, there to leave a greater surface area for microbial and detrivore to attack. This tree was being consumed from the inside out and from the outside in, the yin and yang of decomposition. In Lady and the Tramp style, these detrivores were 10