Dispatch #39
Saturday, October 19
Schaumburg, Illinois

Rain has passed. Today's a chilly day altogether, though only partly cloudy by the afternoon, and blue between the modest scuds of white. It has been freezing these nights. I sleep as much under the thick bedspread as under a blanket and a sheet. Only the nose is cold.

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I saw a great, gnarled oak set somewhat back from the side of the highway. The farmer plows and plants around it--which forebearance, when I noticed it, caused me to stop and to wonder: for this Great-Grandfather Oak is dead and has been dead, by the look of it, for several years now. Surely someone could have brought it down a while ago, could have uprooted the stump, sawed its limbs--mighty outreaching arms--into logs and the logs to firewood. It would surely have been the more economical choice, yielding more harvest in this field and less trouble working it.

But there the tree stands nonetheless. And if the farmer has made a conscious decision to let this ancestor stand after its life has returned into the soil, then the grand, standing carcass must be considered a monument to something.

To what? In what mood or memory would a farmer grant continued presence to the vegetable form even after it has been drained of its life? The good Great-grandfather oak has shed to the weather large patches of bark, revealing the smooth twists of a bleached wood beneath, as though it showed the bones of a mastodon.

But the tree's general shape remains, limbs hurling branches outward, and twigs beyond that, all forming a broad corona around its mighty stem--a marvelous hemispherical shape exploding out from the rising trunk, a precious etching against the sky, the skeleton of sunrise.

I cannot know the farmer's mind. Maybe nothing of romance or sentiment moved him to his forbearance.

Or it could be the field itself requires a tree.

Could be the tree offers roost to choirs of birds: there is service in that, and beauty in service, and a farmer might love the look--or the birds, could be, require a tree.

But even while we continue to drive past it (causing the stationary tree to seem to rotate) a thought occurs to me: the tree now lifeless is monument to nothing so much as to the tree still living. There, to an observant and a patient eye, is the shape of the life that the tree once lived, now fixed visible. There is its history, its ancient experience, preserved in that final shape. The years of drought could certainly be read in internal rings too tightly wound together, and in external crooks are the signs of thirsty summers. The direction and the strength of the winds that combed and crushed it year after year are there; and to the educated eye, hardship and triumph appear in the differences between limbs straight and limbs twisted. The tree is a storied thing, filled with ascents and declinations, a mansion with all the windows and the walls thrown upon to the world, not a shred of curtain, not a thread of clothing to cover it any more: its corpse a monument to its green and growing life, its form the manifest memory of the young tree's coursing sap, of its eternal conversation with the earth and the atmosphere.

And all this I now take to be a metaphor of our own lives. Yet before we die we are ever our own histories, both in body and behavior, and at death these histories are fixed in us.

I see that oaken display, and I think of my father, whose shape at the end shall become monument to all his long life lived from the birth of it to its conclusions. Like the tree shorn of leaves, revealing its essential shape, my father's final stance (could all the farmers of the soils of our lives choose not to obliterate it, but rather to remember it, to plow and plant around it, still to show the place he occupied in the universe)--his final stance, I say, will be monument to all the long years he lived between, how he acted and reacted, what sort of conversations he held with his many sources and his shifting atmospheres: a complex, many-storied man who hurled his learning, his emotion, and his long will out beyond himself to make this final shape, the limbs of his labor muscled and gnarled, branches of influence like a thousand fingers out-spread through all the students he taught, through his parishioners--and all of it preserved by the ending, all of it manifest at the ending. He, like the tree, shall be his own mute, most particular monument.

And so I apply the same metaphor to me, to each of us. What we do today, what sort of growth we make this month, what weaknesses we reveal, what strength against the hard winds, what sources we use to survive a thousand droughts--all these things are even now establishing the full shape of our lives when others (passing travelers, lovers, friends, adjudicators, and the Lord God himself) will gaze upon the thing which we ourselves have abandoned: the monument, the tree in a field, the "I" when you and I are no longer subject to change. And the rich green clothing will be gone, and the bark will have been shed, even down to the truth of the bone-white wood which was once the core of our selves.

I would plow and plant around a thing so valuable. I would keep clean the places where you rooted your life, once. I do so even now, for many a gracious tree, by my art. But the truest way I shall in the end reveal my own self, motion and spirit and the lifelong itinerary of my going, will finally not be by my art, but by my life.

Even in such terms have I begun to consider this tour, now that we are nearing the end of it: it has been a living thing whose life, in the end, shall have been brief, but whose life at and after its end shall be evident to scrutiny. When we loop the long loop together in Chicago, when we accomplish the coda in Valparaiso, we will have in our living hand a template of the whole life together.

Walt