Time and the Trysting Tree
It’s not there anymore. It’s gone!
Well, not technically gone: there’s still a stump with a vestige of deeply creviced bark, evidence that in its time it had been a chestnut oak clinging to the rocky outcrop here overlooking the valley.
Slightly out of breath and warmed from the climb, my wife and I set aside our jackets and knapsack to pull out our phones for a photograph. This had been a pilgrimage of sorts, a revisiting of a significant spot, but the stump is kind of shifting the scene.
Years ago, when we were much younger and the world was new and all, we spent time tramping these woods and talking about life, the universe, and everything. A process we referred to at the time as ‘getting to know each other’. Then one night the moon was full, reflecting off the snow and filling the woods with a strange otherworldly light. As we walked, we lapsed into silence, present to the world and to one another, and arrived at this spot.
There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you. What? Will you marry me? Yes!
Or perhaps ‘Sure!’, or ‘What took you so long?’ — I don’t know. I can’t actually remember. But I remember the sparkle in her eyes and the sweep of the snowy moonlit valley below.
And now this. The tree is gone. Our tree. Just a stump, and not only that — a hollow stump!
There we were, standing under this tree believing it would be there forever, and it was hollow all along? We return after 30 years to find a stump? The metaphor is terrible!
A little further along, there’s a sun warmed rock with a view. A curve of the Hudson catches the afternoon light. The breeze loosens an occasional yellow leaf to spiral downward and out of sight over the ledge. We sit in companionable silence, my wife with a book, myself with a pipe pondering the past.
I’ve been thinking recently about the way some words seem to have two closely related but subtly different meanings.
Like the word ‘know’. You could, for example, ‘know’ the times tables or the names of the US presidents from Washington to Biden.
But if you were asked ‘do you know Jim’ aren’t you being asked something different? Not just ‘do you know of Jim’, but do you know Jim. A kind of knowledge you couldn’t gain by reading about him, but only through spending time together.
Or another word: ‘believe’. If you said ‘I believe this bus stops at the library’ it seems weaker than to know the same thing. Of course, in this day and age you would just ask Google, and then you’d know.
But if you said: ‘I believe in Jim’, it seems stronger than saying ‘I know Jim’.
Why is this?
They say you can never step in the same river twice, and maybe this is true of a person as well. I mean, after 30 years of getting to know my wife, is she even the same person she was as we were standing under the tree? Can one person ever really know another?
But I would say this without hesitation: I believe in her!
The other day we were eating dinner with friends, and they told us they had met through skydiving. He was an instructor, she was a student. They don’t skydive anymore, but one day ‘when the kids are grown’ they plan to go back and do it again.
I don’t know. That seems like an even longer shot than looking for a tree in the woods. I mean, can you ever step out of the same plane twice?
Perhaps I’m romanticizing this, and probably it didn’t happen this way, but I picture their younger selves standing at the door of the plane. He shouts over the roar of the wind ‘There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you…..’
Her honey-colored hair whips around her face and there is laughter in her eyes. For a moment she stands framed in the door, the sweep of lake and fields below. Then she steps into the void.
After a brief hesitation, he follows.
