📖 Heartwood (full story)

The first of the Marcellus Stories

This story is set in the Marcellus shale fracking region of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Originally the home of the Lenni-Lenape, the Munsee Lenape and the Susquehannock, whose descendants live there still. In this collection, I explore how we, trapped and complicit in destructive systems we hate, might find a way forward. Holding our grief, fear, and anger in the same trembling hands as wonder, humility, and awe—with love and compassion.

If you prefer to listen, the audio is at the end. I recorded it in 4 segments when I serialized this story.

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Light in Autumn by Julie Gabrielli

In a glassy office surrounded by sky, hands draw a red line on a map. A straight red line. The map’s thin brown lines curve and crowd together on steep slopes and wander alone across fields. Streams ribbon pale blue. Charcoal roads meander. But the trees? No, the hands don’t delineate individual trees. Instead, they wash bright green blobs over the map, patches whispering forest. How trees might appear in early spring to birds returning from their secret wintering places. When tiny leaves birth through winter-brittle stems and shine spring green, new cells eager to meet the sun for the first time, life renewing after cold, quiet sleep.

The straight red line arrows across fields and slopes and streams, through the green blobs of forest. Where we stand, all unaware.

Even now, Sam will sometimes lie on her back to watch us hold up the blue winter sky. As a child, she raised her mittened hands to tickle the silhouettes of our bare arms and strong fingers. Her Nana knit the mittens, blue with white snowflakes. Two rounded shapes connected by blue yarn strung through coat sleeves across her small back. On days that warmed above freezing, Sam slipped off the mittens, wiggled and stretched her delicate fingers till the blue of the sky pooled under her fingernails and ran down her arms. Until the blue seeped into her blue-veined wrists and traveled along her bones to her shoulders and on to ribs, hips, shins, toes. Until blue ran in her like the sap awakening in us all around. A blue sky under a warming sun means sugaring season is about to begin.

Sam has made fourteen trips round the sun, and still she marvels that our sap is clear, not the blue of sky. The blue of the world, the blue of belonging, the blue of home.

Today, Sam’s dark mood exceeds the simple exhaustion of sugaring. Long days and short nights, collective effort of three generations of the Collins family, their neighbors the Sullivans, plus cousins, friends and volunteers from Kiwanis and Boys & Girls of Scranton and the Baptist church youth group. My, those Baptists can sing! The birds join in on their four-part harmonies in praise of creation, in praise of trees. Alone representing the sixth generation of Collins’, Sam’s been doing her part to tap, string tubing, haul buckets, stoke fires, boil sap, bottle label, box, fill orders.

It's the final day of sugaring. Sam flops against me and drags her sweater sleeve over tearful eyes. “Everything’s so messed up, Ace. Kevin’s mad at me.”

I know from years of stories that Kevin Sullivan is her closest human friend. I also know I’m her favorite tree. She brings me treasures: empty forest snail shells, gold flicker feathers, bits of bright green moss, the bluest summer-sky yarn. She sits against my trunk and reports on everything. Her school day, her parents, her older brother, her dreams. I do my best to keep up, offering advice only when she asks.

Mother complains that I neglect my duties to the other trees by passing so many days with Sam. That’s unfair. Just recently, I sent nitrogen, carbon and phosphorous through the fungal network to ease my older sister’s struggle with Limb Dieback.

“Kevin wants me to join this group he started on Social, but I’m not allowed on there. He isn’t either, but he says this is too important. Our parents don’t have to know.”

What’s Social? I ask Sam.

“You know, like, a network, how people talk to each other. On the Internet.”

I didn’t know the walking people had networks, too. She’s always surprising me. What’s the problem with Kevin?

She shifts position. “It’s complicated.”

I know a thing or two about complexity. This year, I will grow 121,475 leaves, 68 more than last year. I can hear Mother saying, “Pride is not a maple trait.”

To Sam, I say, Tell me. It’s the surest way to get her talking.

Sam’s connection with me was opened with gentle care by her Nana Bettina. When Bettina and I met long ago, we had both circled the sun seven times. I was taller, but she weighed more for another cycle or two. I was someone she could relate to, a sapling among elders. Bettina was a sensitive child. She visited me every day. In winter woods quiet with grays, browns and tans, she tied my tender branches with enlivening scraps of blue yarn in shades of iris, midsummer lake, ice melt, storm clouds, evening. She sang to me.

At the time Bettina had befriended me, I was too young to participate in the sugaring. I dreamed of the day when Bettina would, with reverence and care, turn her hand drill to pilot that first, slightly-upward, finger’s length hole through my bark beyond my cambium to press in a tin spile and hang from it a tin bucket with a tin hat to collect my sweet sap. By then, I would have more sap than I needed to grow my leaves and flowers, plenty to share, eager to share. I envied my older sister when she was tapped before me. Couldn’t wait to give my very own grown-up gift to the walking people.

“Envy and impatience are not maple traits,” my mother said many times. “You’re too close to the walking people. You’ve picked up their bad habits.”

Mother is unusual for a maple. My cousins, aunties, uncles, sisters and brothers are all lively with people. The Golden Retrievers of the tree world. Even my grandfather, before he was struck by lightning and went a bit dotty, had many sweet friendships with the walking people. Their capriciousness never seemed to bother him.

“You’re so obsessed with people, you neglect your tree family,” Mother says. “Mark my bark, your loyalty will come to grief.”

She’s never recovered from the walking people cutting down my father and two brothers. They weren’t diseased or anything, and they gave plenty of sap. It was for “thinning,” but nobody had asked permission or left an offering or even apologized. But that was seasons ago, and Mother still hoards her resentment along with her seeds. I’ll bet her sap tastes bitter.

“People can’t be trusted,” she says at least once a lunar cycle. “There’s no benefit to their friendship. Not anymore. The best we can do is endure them. Like a burl.”

I think she’s jealous of me. There. I said it. She sees the attentions that Bettina and Sam lavish, the gifts of blue yarn, our sweet connection. And she hates me for it.

Jealousy is not a maple trait, Mother.

She glosses over the fact that every year the walking people renew our special friendship with their spiles and their buckets. I love the nightly song, the drip drip plink plink of sap seeking eager pails. A simple thing turned precious in their hands. Hands! What a marvel. Hands can tie yarn and knit mittens. Hands can tap a spile, hang a bucket. Carry a bucket! Gather and cut fallen branches, summon fire. Fire! Hands can stir boiling sap into sweet, thick syrup, the gold that maple leaves turn when the sun rolls away to his winter rest.

Mother is not impressed. “Take, take, take. That’s all they do.”

It’s not all they do. As a child, Bettina developed a habit of plucking seeds from my branches before the wind could claim them. She collected them in sugaring buckets and carried them away. Years later, my seventh cousin thrice removed sent a mycelial message from over the south ridge that Bettina was tending a new maple forest all on her own. To think of my little offspring over there, planted by Bettina’s loving hands, warms my heartwood. As soon as little Sam could walk, she loved to collect seeds, too.

“People and trees have an understanding,” Bettina taught her granddaughter Sam. “I learned that from Great-Aunt Ida, and one day you will teach your daughter.”

The old trees tell me that at one time all the walking people felt the connection. But now it’s just Sam and Nana Bettina.

The year of Sam’s fifth sugaring season, Nana Bettina helped her to open a connection with me. The old woman placed her bony, weathered hand on my trunk and spoke to her granddaughter. “You can feel the pipeline flowing.” She gave her granddaughter a length of blue yarn from the dozens stashed in her pockets. “Tie this to Ace. To show our appreciation and give encouragement.”

Sam had to stretch her arms in a full-body hug. Her little-girl heartbeat warmed me. “Why doesn’t Mommy do this?” she asked while fumbling with the bow.

A cloud passed over Bettina’s blue eyes. “Your mother sees sugaring as a business. Sap equals money. Your dad’s more sentimental, but only about tradition.”

“CollinsMapleProductsSince1857,” Sam recited in a deep, gruff voice, waving her arms as if tossed by a big wind. They both laughed.

Bettina moved to my nearby cousin, placed a hand, leaned her head against their bark. “This one isn’t ready yet.”

“You can hear them?” Sam pressed her ear to the tree.

“Not quite. Trees don’t need sound. They feel and smell each other. They take care of each other, just like we do.”

Sam seemed amused by the idea of a tree smelling without a nose. Feeling without hands.

“Trees are not like us, dear. They’re wonderfully strange and different.”

“Then how do you know?”

“I’ve been in these woods my whole life, dear.”

“So have I.”

Bettina tugged the child’s hand inside her jacket and held it over her heart. “Feel that?”

“Do the trees have a heartbeat?” Sam’s blue eyes were wide with wonder.

The old woman smiled. “In a way. Try it.” She guided Sam’s small hand to my cool, rough bark, then covered it with her own. “Now breathe.”

Sam fidgeted. She gazed up at my bare, not-yet-budding branches. Then she listened to a nuthatch bleat. Then she watched a tiny ant labor upwards along a valley of bark past their two thumbs. Over here, little girl. Focus. Tree, not ant. She was hopeless that time, but she picked it up by midsummer that same year.

Sam turned out to be a Listener. Everyone is different, so the old trees say. Bettina Feels with her fingers, her skin. Great-Aunt Ida before her was also a Listener. I don’t understand how the bodies of the walking people work, but they do have imaginations. And hearts, like us. Their hearts speak to them through touch and listening. I’m told that hearts also speak through song and movement and color. It’s sad so many of them don’t know what their heart is capable of, what it’s for. Most people hurry past me dim, closed, absent-hearted. I worry about them.

Mother says worrying is not a maple trait. She has a point. The walking people do enough worrying for all of us. They are full of dark emotions.

“And it’s not just about Kevin’s group on Social,” Sam says on that final day of sugaring. “Yesterday my parents had a big fight with his parents and now my mom says I’ll be grounded for life if I ever speak to him again but he doesn’t believe me and now I have no one to talk to—"

Slow down. You know you can always talk to me. When that doesn’t help, I say, What happened with Kevin’s family?

“It’s insane, Ace. We’ve been so busy, I literally had no time to tell you.” Sam turns to sit cross-legged facing me. “They’re fighting about some stupid pipeline.”

A pipeline? Now, this I understand. Pipelines are open chains of cells stacked in sapwood. It’s how all trees feed and grow new stems and leaves, flowers and seeds. Sam and her family tap into our pipelines every year. But pipelines are genius.

 Sam swats my trunk. “Not that kind of pipeline, Ace, geez. Don’t be dense.”

But I am dense, and proud of it. Pride is not—I know, Mother, I know. I know.

“It’s a gas pipeline,” Sam says. “All this super-loud drilling that’s ruining our roads and water? And making people and animals sick? My parents have been arguing about it every night for over a year.”

So that’s the pipeline that old walnut was going on about last week! He said it’s a fat steel tube carrying sap from the dinosaur time. He’s always been a bit nuts, so I tuned him out. Explode rock deep in the underworld to siphon sap from down there to up here? Why would anyone do such a horrible thing? That stuff’s poison.

“Turns out the Sullivans gave their land to this company, Patriot Pipeline, like, they just said, sure, come on through with your stupid pipeline, whatever, and now they’re pressuring my parents to run it through our woods.”

Run it through? Sounds bad.

“Yeah, the pipeline guys’ll have to cut down a bunch of trees. Our trees. It’s sick and wrong and horrible.” She hauls back and throws a stone with surprising viciousness.

Um . . .. which trees?

She shrugs. “I have no idea. They don’t tell me anything.” She stands, her body restless for motion. “So Kevin started this group on Social called, get this, Hell no, Patriot Pipeline. I told him he shouldn’t swear on the Internet, geez. But he’s got like, over a hundred members already. People from all over: Scranton, Allentown, even up to Binghamton. Their comments are all, like, ‘This is illegal. This is a taking. They can’t do this.’ The people all say they’ll help us fight it.”

That sounds promising. Do the trees know? I mean, besides me?

“I doubt it. Who tells trees anything?”

You could tell them. You have to tell them. I’ve never felt such urgency in my life.

“Why don’t you tell them? Through your networks or whatever.”

Even if I did, what can we do about it? This is more of a people thing. Pheromones and extra sugar aren’t exactly what’s needed here.

“Well, I can’t stop it either.”

But the people on Social. They’re ready to fight, right?

“What can a bunch of strangers from the Internet do? My parents went to court already. Twice. And both times they lost.”

And you didn’t think to mention this to me before? I don’t like how snarky that came out, but forgive me, I’m upset.

“Nobody thought it would come to this. Mom says they wouldn’t dare take our land without consent. She promised.” Sam flops back down, wraps her arms around me. “I’m sorry, Ace. I should’ve told you.” She’s crying now, which is pure alarming.

But I have to ask. And you don’t know how many trees it is? Or which trees?

She shakes her head. “No idea. There’s a map, but I haven’t seen it. Dad rants about jerks in a random office drawing their red line on a map, The ignorant-sons-a-bitches, he says. He even told the pipeline company about old Mr. Anderson, over the big hill?” She swings her arm to the west. “He’s got that quarry and he’s fine with a pipeline on his land, so they could just redraw their map.”

Ah, yes. That sounds best. Good old Mr. Anderson.

“That’s what I’m saying, Ace. The pipeline people won’t even listen. Their red line goes straight through six counties, they don’t care what’s in the way.”

Keep trying, Sam. You’ll think of something. I’m confident Sam and Kevin won’t let anything bad happen to us. It’s risky to rely on walking people other than Sam and Bettina. But what choice do we have? Surely, they can run their pipeline along open fields and roads, instead of all that effort to cut through the sugaring woods.

The following week, strangers tromp through the woods. They lug equipment, shout to each other, look through lenses, measure and pound pine stakes into the hard ground. They tie pink plastic ribbons on some stakes and orange and white ribbons on others. They tie a pink ribbon around me without even asking. They leave empty plastic water bottles behind, glinting on last year’s fallen leaves. Clearly not meant as offerings.

The day after the men leave, Sam arrives with the forbidden Kevin. Interesting. Before a word of greeting, she rips the pink ribbon off me with a savage gesture. I’ve never seen her this angry. Then she surprises me. She gives Kevin a length of blue yarn.

“Tie this here.” She rests a hand on my trunk.

He laughs a tentative, nervous rattle. “Why?”

“It’s how we show appreciation and encouragement.”

“To . . . the tree?” Self-consciousness wars with curiosity. But he complies. I’m guessing more for Sam than for me, but I don’t mind.

“Is this supposed to confuse the pipeline guys?”

“Shhh.” She leans her forehead against my trunk. I can’t make out what she’s saying, her heart is a jumble of distraction.

The resident crows call to each other. A cardinal pair shares intel. The breeze tickles my budding branches.

Kevin puffs pursed lips, looks over his shoulder. “We shouldn’t be here, what if they see us?”

“Shhh. I’m listening. You could, too, if you would just be still. The yarn helps me hear better.”

“Hear . . . the tree? That makes no sense.”

“It’s a different kind of sense.” Her heart says to me, “You asked me to help, this is help. Show him how to connect.”

It doesn’t work that way, I’m afraid.

Kevin pulls at her shoulder gently. “I have like a half-hour at most. What did you want to show me?”

Sam, it’s okay if he can’t hear or feel us. He cares, he wants to help, that’s all that matters.  I throw out a wild idea, something he could help with right now.

She jumps back, startling Kevin. “The stakes! We’re going to pull up the stakes!”

He looks around. “What? All of them?”

“Yes. Every” She yanks one up and tosses it down with a flourish. “Last.” Yank. Toss. “One.” Yank Toss.

He whoops. “All right!”

They work till the sun streaks light parallel with the ground and turns our trunks golden. Stakes lie like fallen branches until they bundle them in armfuls. They carry them to the top of the hill and throw them into old man Anderson’s quarry.

After the final load, Kevin holds his hand in the beam of sunlight to cast a hand-shadow on my trunk. “Look!”

Sam laughs and stands arms raised, legs apart, to cast a body-shadow on my wide old uncle. Kevin pushes her away to make his own body-shadow.

Next, they try a hugging shadow. Sam makes a handstand shadow. Kevin jumps up and down, waving his arms, shouting. He shadow-boxes a sassy oak, who loves the attention. They dart from tree to tree, chasing each other’s shadows. Kevin makes animal shapes on my trunk—a rabbit, a frog, and something he says is a snake, but Sam insists is a rooster.

Their joy rings through the forest and lights up my heart. Every shadowed tree shivers with delight: sturdy poplar, wise walnut, even stately elm. They feel the sweetness of attention from the walking people.

But the water-bottle strangers return. They repeat all their previous movements like a ritual dance with new stakes and new ribbons in the same locations. They leave more plastic bottles and a Lay’s chip bag.

The day after the water-bottle strangers’ return, Sam is despondent. She yanks the pink ribbon off me and ties a length of blue yarn. “Oh, Ace, everything’s awful. Nana’s sick—”

I’ve missed her. Give her my love?

“And I’m grounded for seeing Kevin. They said we vandalized their property.” Tears of indignation roughen her voice. “My own parents said we know better, we should have more respect. What about this forest? They vandalized our land with their stupid sticks and ribbons!”

Not to mention the litter. I’m always amazed at how the walking people say the land belongs to them, when really it’s the other way around. That’s terrible, is all I say.

But there’s something on her heart, something she’s not saying. What is it? Tell me.

Sam is shaking now. “Ace, you’re . . . You’re . . .” She covers her face with her hands. “I can’t,” she wails.

The sun is shining emergence everywhere, but hostile cold throbs through me, stiffening every cell. Is it the red line on the map?

She nods. “Those stakes, like, a hundred-plus feet apart?” She sweeps her arms wide, as if she could hold the whole forest. “Everything between them is toast.”

Why is she talking about snacks at a time like this?

“Clearing, Ace. That’s where they’re clearing.”

Clearing is an awfully mild word for the violence of walking people cutting down tree people in their prime. I’ve had only twenty-five sugaring seasons. I’m good for at least fifty more. Or longer. I thought you could stop it.

She sinks to her knees facing me and leans her head against my trunk. “They don’t even need our permission, Ace. My parents went to court again, but the judge said it’s for the public good. Gas and money matter more than syrup and trees.”

Another, colder wave sweeps through me, from roots to buds. Like a hundred times worse than a freak spring freeze. I recall my father and brothers cut down with many seasons of life left in them, hauled away as so much firewood. My cells feel so rigid, if Sam pushed on me right now, I would snap and topple.

In my faith that she could help, I had neglected to join the chatter pulsing through our networks. I had ignored the oaks’ report of the destruction at the Sullivans. I was certain it wouldn’t spread this far. But now, I hum a distress call to the mycelia lacing my roots. The broadcast reaches the other trees faster than Sam’s racing pulse.

What about Kevin’s group on Social? I ask her.

She prods a tender shoot. “I’m grounded. I can’t talk to Kevin, can’t use the computer. I tried to explain it all, but Mom said my sass got me two more weeks.” She drapes her arms around me and weeps. “Oh, Ace, I won’t let them take you. I’ll tie myself to your trunk before I let them cut into you.”

That sends a shiver of hot-cold right through me. I feel the bite of the pink plastic ribbon, even though Sam removed it. Just then, the mycelia return a message: Seeds. Maple seeds spinning on an autumn wind and settling everywhere in the forest. Bettina on her knees, pressing seeds into fresh-turned earth. My offspring—saplings and maturing trees nearly ready to be tapped—standing patiently in her new maple wood.

Of course, yes. I send a return message out to all the trees to thank them for their wise counsel. Even Mother chimes in: “Worth a try at least.”

Sam, listen. You know how you and your nana collect our seeds every year?

“Nana can’t go anywhere. She’s sick.”

Yes, dear. I’m very sorry. Do tell her I’m eager to see her again. Listen. It’s a big year for seeds. Collect them, pick them, get them all, as many as you can.

“Okay, I guess. Then what?”

Plant them. Plant them all. Where it’s safe. Get Kevin to help you. Promise me.

“How does that help you?”

It’s hard to explain. It will, I promise.

I will never see Bettina’s physical form again, though I feel her reaching out to me from her hospital bed in the family’s living room. As the hot, humid days of summer give way to cooler nights, her heart-light dims and fades.

Sam comes to share the news. I already felt Bettina leaving, but it’s good to have someone to grieve with.

“She was sitting in her chair by the window. My mom held one hand and I held the other. She was peaceful. For hours afterwards, a yellow swallowtail visited Nana’s front garden, flitting from flower to flower. Even Mom watched.”

Remember old Matilda, my grandmother?

Sam nodded.

Matilda hadn’t given sap for two seasons. She was blown over by a storm after the sugaring, three seasons ago now. Everyone knew her root rot had been climbing into her cambium and it was only a matter of time. The suddenness was a shock, but that’s the way of things.

I miss her, but she went in her own time.

“Ace what happens after people die?”

After walking people die or tree people?

“Either. Both.”

Your people, I don’t know. Trees, we keep on. We house birds, fungus, moss, ants, termites, spiders, mice. When we tire of that, we become soil, grow new life, our voices join with new generations. Maybe it’s the same for you?

Sam is quiet. We’re both thinking of a particular blue, her grandmother’s forget-me-not eyes.

The days cool and the nights shiver, my cue to send enzymes to my leaves, all 121,475 of them that I grew this year from scratch. This dismantles my lovely green chlorophyll pigments. Won’t be needing those anymore. Time for the carotene to shine. Many’s the year Sam, and Bettina before her, collected my most spectacular red-orange leaves to press in a journal or decorate a bathroom mirror. I pull every last bit of nutrients from the leaves and, once drained, they fall. We can’t help it. It’s the way of things.

Sam enlists Kevin’s help to pluck sand-colored seed pods from my lower branches before the wind can scatter them. She even brings a stepladder to reach the higher ones. Every day, she tells me how the planting is going in Bettina’s new maple wood.

Some of your Nana’s trees will be ready to tap by the time you’re a mother.

Sam laughs at this, but there’s no happiness in it. “I’m not having kids, no way. Bring a child into this messed-up world? Not a chance. I’m not that selfish.”

I don’t understand. Reproduction is the most natural thing in the world. I didn’t know you could just . . . refuse to reproduce. How does that even work?

She laughs again, a touch of mirth peeks from behind her gloom. “You’re so odd sometimes.”

The forest is ablaze in reds, oranges, yellows, casting a wondrous gold light on everyone. The sky is a rich blue, the air crisp. And here is Sam, biting into an apple.

What’s wrong with the world, anyway? From where I stand, it’s a wonder.

“Are you serious right now? The pipeline—”

There is no pipeline, Sam.

“Are you mental? They’re gonna—”

Ah, but they aren’t here now, are they? Not today. Today is a fine, fine day.

Sam doesn’t laugh. We listen to the cardinals saying cheer cheer cheer birdie birdie. A flicker says kyeer, and a squirrel says quaa quaa quaa.

“I guess,” she says. She bites into the apple with a crunch and closes her eyes while she chews. “Man, I wish you could taste this.”

Tell me.

When sugaring season returns, the woods are busy with blue plastic tubing and pine stakes and pink ribbons and orange and white ribbons. Sam and the others have strung the tubing between us so the sap can flow continuously. Fewer buckets to haul, more efficient. The walking people do love their efficiency. I know, Mother, I know. Maples don’t judge.

Into all that bustle of sugaring, men arrive in red trucks. Sam runs to me with the news. She says they were loading chainsaws and oilcans and tools onto sleds to pull into the snow-dusted forest when her parents met them at the road “for a polite conversation.”

Sam says all this out loud in a voice ringing with happiness.

“Mom gave them a ‘Cease and Desist’ letter, like all casual, and the men read it. And the Sheriff came and they talked some more. And then! The men dragged their equipment back to the trucks. They loaded up and left. They left!”

They’re gone? For good?

“Yes!” She throws her arms out like branches and jumps in the air. What I would give to be able to jump like that just once. “‘Cease and Desist’ is lawyer talk for, You have no right to be here. Period. Done. You cannot trespass on our land.”

There’s that “our land” again, but if it spares us from cutting, let’s go with it.

Sam hugs me. It’s been a while since she’s done that. It feels good.

The walking people say sap is colorless, like water. What does that mean, really? Raindrops are colorless, yet a lake full of clear drops is blue. That’s how attractive blue is, how contagious. Water conspires with the sun to wear the sky like a skin.

But a lake is changeable, like a walking person’s heart. Like them, a lake’s surface reflects the surrounding world but conceals hidden depths. A basin of clear drops pretends to be sky, trees, clouds and light, but harbors darkness below.

The first person to charge sap with the warmth of wood-saved sunlight, did they expect it to turn, say, the blue of a summer sky? Were they surprised when instead it took on the color of sunlight itself? The color of pollen packed on a bee’s leg hairs? The color of the very fire beneath the black iron kettle?

Colorless doesn’t mean no color. It means waiting for color.

Sugaring season ends but the stakes and ribbons remain. When Sam comes to remove the tubing lines, she says only a quick hello. Her movements seem weighted, lacking her usual bright grace. I try to get her attention. What’s wrong? You can tell me. But she doesn’t answer. She shakes her head and continues rolling the tubing on a spool.

A few days later, a crowd of people tromp into the forest. They carry plastic pails and small rollers and speak only in grim bursts. Intent and focused, they stripe every pink-ribboned tree with alternating red and white paint lines. They roll the paint right over the ribbons. Another paints blue rectangles above the stripes.

Sam is not among them, but after a while I recognize Kevin. He removes my pink ribbon, pats my trunk and whispers to me (to me!), “Sorry, Ace. Hope it doesn’t hurt. It’s all we could think of.”

I reach out to him, try to ask why they’re painting flags on us, but he’s distracted when someone calls out, “Trees are more patriotic than pipelines!”

This starts up a call and response, “Sap lines!” “Not pipelines!” which goes on for a while. They dart amongst the beribboned trees, leaving a forest of flags in their wake. Though my cousins try to be brave, the rollers tickle and the paint is suffocating. At least Mother is outside the line of stakes and ribbons, so she is spared. Her silence is more ominous than the gathering storm clouds.

“Hell no, Patriot Pipeline!” Kevin shouts as he finishes stenciling white stars on the blue rectangle sucking all moisture from my trunk. Their gruff laughter is as cold as the wind needling freezing rain into their anxious red faces.

And here come the men in their red trucks, wearing yellow vests and bowls on their heads and orange domes over their ears and dragonfly eyes. Axes and mallets hang from their heavy tool belts. They drag sleds of equipment through the ice-crusted leaves.

Sam returns, trailing a line of plastic yellow and black tape. Her despair melts the hard ground behind her. “Ace, there’s Federal marshals with assault rifles and bullet-proof vests. We were polite to them before and now they send hired guns to threaten us? On our land?” She grips me with shaking arms and rests her raging head on my bark. It burns.

“I’m so sorry, Ace. This can’t be real. It’s like . . . I want to wake up now.”

The mycelial network vibrates with panic as the men fan out dragging their sleds among the flag-painted trees. Trees as young as three seasons, as old as three hundred, spark many hundreds of distress signals. The cacophony of alarms crosses and jams the network into incoherence. No help is offered, only cries for help. I’m numb, tapped out from sugaring like everyone else. I send no help and receive none. Disbelief fizzles to resignation.

In the distant din of revving chainsaws and shouting men, the network falls eerily quiet.

“This can’t be happening,” she wails aloud. With shaking hands, she wraps fat blue yarn around me, around her legs, around her torso, around me, around one arm—

“Hey! You there!” a man shouts. “Get away from there!”

She shrieks, wraps faster, clutches me tight.

Two black-vested men appear. They’re wearing gold sunglasses, even though it’s overcast and spitting snow. Their big guns slap their backs as they tromp toward us. One pulls on Sam, who shrieks, “Get off me!” while the other one swears and unsheathes a knife to saw away the yarn and she kicks one in the shin and he swears again and kicks her thigh and she shrieks and they get a new grip and hoist her up and drag her off screaming, “Jerks! Assholes! Murderers! Help!” her voice raw with rage and fear. It’s a horrible final view of my dear friend. What will they do to her?

The brrrraapppp of chainsaws frazzles the air. The devastation approaches from downhill. I watch each of my relatives fall one by one. I feel the slice of the saws as if they’re biting into my own flesh. Cocooned in their ear-domes, the men must not hear the calls of panicked birds, the hacking squawk of squirrels fleeing in all directions for their lives, the howls of frightened and dying trees. Theirs is a coward’s muffled battlefield.

But they cannot avoid the smells. The toxic plume of exhaust from their weapons. The sharp burst of butchered tannins. The sweet cellulose sprays of sap. The final breaths of life releasing fifty, sixty, seventy-year-old relatives. One uncle, well near two hundred years standing. Sam’s family taps him in two, sometimes three places, that’s his generosity, and he topples with a sad crunch like all the others. Not only maples fall to this slaughter. Oaks fall. Birches fall. Hemlocks fall. Poplars fall. Friends, all.

And on the men come, a big wind, a giant’s tantrum, abandoning each individual where they fall. Accumulating like matchsticks. Numb with terror, I watch the relentless death march up that hill.

The yellow ochre of a cut tree is the color of despair. The hidden heartwood, glowing amber in winter-gray woods, sober trunk slammed into a sienna bed of leaves. The vertical overturned, claimed by gravity, finished, final.

Oil reek roar, hot blade—

The spinning chain smashes my dead bark and live bark, and plows through cambium and sapwood, scattering bits of heartwood into the air, back toward the man, bouncing off the glowing eye-domes on his grimy determined face, sticking on stiff ashy lips.

When he yanks the monster free, the wound sets off a crackling chain of pheromone transports and fungal transmissions. Their violent origin traces a fluky flutter, calling to life the midwinter morning some forty sugaring seasons past, a memory long since grown over. After striking the bark, the chain is moving at eighty-eight feet per second, a pathetically sluggish pace compared to the synaptic lightning that flashes around it. Once in the heartwood, the metal comes under the mediation of arboreal time, which gives me plenty of space to savor the sweet memory of Bettina, a young mother of two, humming with anticipation. The loving bite of her hand drill. Shiver of sap finding the hole. Tang of blood of her finger cut on the tin bucket’s edge. Plump ruby bloom. She touches her finger to my first hole, collects a sweet gift of sap, raises the finger to her mouth and closes her lips around it. Sugar-iron promise. Bettina whispers, blue eyes wet, Thank you.

I want to hear it again, strangely elated by those two final words, their pure gratitude, their beauty. But the man’s axe is now finishing the job, it won’t be denied or charmed to a halt. In the end, it will do its work and drop me to the ground, dragging a splinter-shower of memory and hope, friendship, goodwill, sweet gift and love to the forest floor. That can’t be helped. But just for now I can drip one last trickle into the tin bucket, birth a new leaf from a stem, squeeze out time enough for my dear friend to return and softly sing, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

For five years, the Collins family fought for their land. All that time, the trees lay where they fell in the hundred-fifty-foot-wide crime scene. Patriot Pipeline refused to clear them and refused Sam’s family permission to gather the wood to heat their home. Those men never even got all the permits they needed to build the pipeline.

Sam tended every new maple seedling in Nana’s woods and in pots. Her parents left her alone to nurse her grief. “She could be doing worse,” they told each other. Through Kevin’s group on Social, they crowd-funded a lawyer who filed more lawyer words with the court.

Eventually, the few remaining approvals expired and the pipeline died. Patriot settled. Sam’s parents had to promise to keep their secrets in exchange for full use of their land again. Sam recruited Kevin, the extended Collins family, friends and volunteers from Kiwanis and Boys & Girls of Scranton and the Baptist church youth group to plant new trees where we had fallen.

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