"Boy-o!"
said Tom to Mary as they filed away the last of the new maps in the
box under Mary's desk, "That was a summer's worth of work
already!"
"Yeah.
It's pretty complete and I'm sure ready for a break, but I still
feel so buzzed. Almost like we were still in school!"
Tom
yawned and was about to nod and suggest hanging around down by the
river, when his eyes lit up instead, "Well, when you want to
slow down, the best place to go is..."
"Treebeard!"
"Right exactly on! Let's go!"
They
knew that finding Treebeard was not going to be too difficult - it
never was. The old ent was never far from the place where they had
last talked with him. Two weeks ago, they had come on him a few feet
from the stream as they were mapping its course through the forest,
through the Marye's pool and then winding
down to the river. During the winter he had moved to a more exposed
position, liking the feel of the wind and snow, but as the snow
melted and filled the stream in April and May, he had moved five feet
or so down a small hill to a spot where he could talk with the ducks
and animals that came to the water. That's where they found him and
there he would stay through June and July, content and busy with the
life of the river.
As
the summer weather stretched on, hot and still. Mary and Tom took to
spending hours every day, listening to Treebeard rumble on. When
Treebeard described - a process between story and history, philosophy
and poem - his human listeners slipped into a dozey state, so slow
and deliberate were his pronouncements.
Mary
and Tom lay under his shade, idly listening to bird arguments,
watching clouds over the nearby clearing, taking turns napping - a
Treebeard story was the essence of summer vacation. It was slow,
soothing, deep and endless. His teaching song, as he called it, had
mostly concerned something he called The Old One. Tom and Mary half
listened, half dreamed his rumbling, rambling, discourse. Condensed
to only the essential facts, by far the least interesting part of an
ent discussion, Treebeard had been describing an immensely old
being, old as plants, old as soil. It was born time out of mind of
rock, became pre-sentient as sand, aware as humus, slowly wise as a
tree. Now so old that it produced only one leaf a year, the Old One
had gathered around itself other trees, seeded to it to learn and
carry on its vast and ancient knowledge. All the trees together
formed a knot, an intertwined strength of trunks and branches and
roots that fed the Old One, and when their natural span had come to
an end, withered and died and were replaced by others.
Sometime,
perhaps it was a Thursday, Tom had an idea. It struggled up through
the layers of summer heat and drowse and spread slowly in his
conscious mind.
"Mary?"
he said.
"Mmm,"
Mary replied. She was picturing a corded mass, made of up bark and
shapes of all possible treeforms, its crown spreading over a city
block in size, and at its heart a living wood - wise, ancient,
dreaming. She smiled. "What a lovely story," she sighed.
"Something
Treebeard just said..." He lost the thought for a moment
watching a dust mote make its way deliberately across his vision
against the flow of other dust motes. Treebeard's voice continued
its peaceful ruminations.
"Yeah,"
Tom said, suddenly awake. "That's what I was going to say.
What if it isn't? A story, I mean. What if there is an Old One?"
"Oh,"
said Mary, faintly surprised by the thought. "Oh, Treebeard,
could this be a true story?"
"All
stories given, spoken, told, true as grass growing straight after the
rain beating down, passes away toward the river, hoommm,"
replied Treebeard, taking five minutes and several more metaphors to
say it.
"No,
but I mean is it a thing we can see, talk to," explained Mary
patiently. Tom was onto something. While waiting for Treebeard's
reply, she silently went over her memories of his story. It sounded
like something real, but where could such a huge tree-thing be? The
rain forest? Maybe the Siberian forests? Did they have forests or
was that just in Baba Yaga stories?
For
the next few days, Mary and then Tom tried again to get a description
from Treebeard of where this Old One was, but their attempts met with
failure. They came to believe even more strongly that it existed,
but could get nothing they could understand from the old ent.
Finally,
I think it was Sunday morning, with Tom reading the Sunday funnies he
had brought along and Mary sunk in a pout of frustration, Treebeard
said in his rumbling, heartwood voice, "Talk with him, be with
him, teacher to, being with, all creatures, fast, slow, chatterboxes
and silent rivers." This speech took about fifteen minutes,
with many more digressions and phrases and humming than I have
patience to recreate. It was followed by a burst of typical human
girl enthusiasm that made Treebeard smile indulgently at his "little
chatterbird".
"Yes!
That's what I mean? Could we? Talk with him, be with him? Go to
where he is?"
Tom
stopped reading Far Side and looked up interestedly. Treebeard
rumbled on to himself for a few minutes, then said, "Yes, go
soon, when moon is horned like a snail."
"Soon,"
said Tom, who was a great observer of sky events and always knew what
phase of the moon his part of Earth was in, "that's three weeks
off!"
"Yes,"
rumbled Treebeard. "Can you be ready so quickly, going then in
that particular moment?"
"What
must we do?" asked Mary.
"Oh,
nothing," said Treebeard in surprise. "Be."
"Yeah,
we can handle it," said Tom, grinning.
Every
morning for the next three weeks Mary would wake up, at home in bed
or in her sleeping bag somewhere in the woods, and unwrap the thought
of a trip to an unknown place to meet an unknown tree-being for a
delicious peek, then tuck it away with a sigh of anticipation. Tom
wanted to know more, and quizzed Treebeard about all manner of
things. How far was it? Did the Old One move around? Had Treebeard
seen it? How did he get there? How would they get there? He had
gotten an answer of sorts to the last question and reported it to
Mary with some puzzlement.
"He
said 'tickling'."
"Tickling?
Like this?" Mary dove for Tom's ticklish feet, which were
conveniently bare at the moment. Tom yelped and by the time Mary had
chased him around the
clearing where they had camped the night before, they were thoroughly
awake. Over bread and honey and apples, Tom described how Treebeard
had bent one of his smallest branches down and scritched lightly over
Tom's arm until the hairs stood up and he shivered suddenly.
"But
it felt neat," Tom said.
"I
don't see how that's a mode of transportation, though!" Mary
said.
"Me
neither, maybe I'll find out more today," Tom replied
indistinctly, stuffing the last of the bread into his mouth. "It's
almost the horned moon. Tomorrow night, in fact."
They
spent the rest of the day and all of the next making visits, without
leaving the woods. They dropped by the Marye's pool, where the
Marye, always eager for travel news, got quite stirred up by the
prospect of their trip and made them promise to see it first when
they got back. The mud at the bottom of the pool knew the Old One,
it said, but was so phlegmatic that it never had much to say about
anything.
Robin
Hood wasn't much interested; he and the ent weren't getting along too
well since he had made his last set of arrows from a young birch
without consulting Treebeard first. The ent had had his eye on that
particular birch; it had the possibility of speech, Treebeard had
said, but impossible to be sure until it was older. Robin sniffed,
and said, "Old trees' tale." and offered to take them on a
hunting expedition instead.
Mary
and Tom declined and went off to see Nahomet, who was as thoroughly
delighted as Robin had been stuffy. "The Old One!" he said
reverently, "what a good thing this is for you. You will know
many new things when you return. No, I have never seen this Old One,
but there are many evenings' worth of tales. It is the father of all
green things, born of minerals and water, brought to life by the sun,
but with its feet always deep in the earth. I will look forward to
your returning song - I'll have the drum ready."
Nahomet
preferred his stories told with the drumbeat keeping pace. Really
important stories were always told by moonlight and firelight, with
the flickering light and the steady light, the fluttering soft
breathbeat and the deep vibrating
heartbeat.
As
they stood at the mouth of his cave, looking out over the Marye's
pool, green and gold in the afternoon sun, Nahomet went back under
the overhanging rock to his sleeping place. Taking a pinch of dirt,
he brought it to Mary and Tom and placed a bit on each of their
palms. Curling their fingers over it, he asked
them
to take it with them. "For deep dreams," he said.
Mary
nodded and Tom said, "Sure, Nahomet. We don't know exactly how
we're travelling, but..."
"Let's
rub it in," said Mary, and they rubbed Nahomet's dirt into their
hands, and as darkness gathered, turned to see the horned moon
slipping through the spiky pines.
Following
the silver gleam along the stream, Mary and Tom came to where the
dark shadow of Treebeard loomed over the water. He had moved even
closer in the last two days; one tendril rootlet trailed in the
stream.
"Here
we are," announced Tom.
"Oh,
yes, hearing you coming, feeling breath of human ones, chatterbird
voice, Nahomet in your hand I smell."
Mary
and Tom held out their dirt smeared hands and one of Treebeard's
knotted arms reached down to them. As the tip of a twig touched each
of them, a shiver ran over their whole bodies and a shadow came over
the moon. Or was there a moon? The air felt close somehow - as
though they were surrounded by something soft, yet gritty. It was
rather like sinking into the sand at the beach as the waves come in
over your feet. Before they had a chance to feel uncomfortable, or
to think up such worries as how to breathe, the darkness around them
became even more solid, and their shivering became a humming.
"We're
in the bedrock under Treebeard's feet," thought Tom, wondering
how he knew that. Fast as a sound, they felt themselves humming
along and then suddenly the gritty softness again and then they were
there. Everything was still and at the same time intensely alive.
Neither
Mary nor Tom was ever able to put into words what they learned in the
Old One's presence, or how long they spent there with him. Later,
strange bits of knowledge would come up out of nowhere. Like the
roses. Helping Grandfather with his beloved roses the next spring,
Mary found herself with a handful of
water,
trickling it onto the bare root ball of a new rose.
"What
are you doing, my girl?" her grandfather asked.
"They
like to be waked up this way," she said. "Tickled.
They've been asleep, and this is like the spring thaw tickling their
roots."
"I
don't think I've ever seen it done that way," Grandfather said
doubtfully. "But let's try something - treat these three your
way, and these other three we'll do it as my grandfather taught me."
The
new leaves on Mary's roses uncurled two weeks before Grandfather's,
and the bushes bloomed longer - though with fewer blooms, because she
said they didn't want that nasty tasting fertilizer he applied every
spring. Grandfather was curious, but Mary couldn't say exactly how
she knew how roses felt and when she
saw Tom they giggled over the ticklish roses and remembered the Old
One.
Their
visit, or audience, had been short and long, timeless and calm, yet
electric with thoughts, feelings, energy. There were no words of
greeting, but they both felt accepted there as though they had been
expected. Or as though nothing unexpected happened to the Old One.
So
it seemed as if a moment or an eternity had passed when they felt his
presence fading. This time, though, the deep humming of bedrock gave
way after a time to a silky hurrying in the darkness. There were
others with them, uncounted others slipping along as they tumbled on,
running free, then squeezed and slowing, then breaking free to roll
on over bumps and around bends, spreading out thin, rushing on in a
burst. Rock spoke to them as they flew by, rolling off a grain of
sand, dissolving a mote of silica into the stream. In the slower
stretches when
they
spread into pools, the inquisitive voices of roots questioned them,
politely inquiring, "Do you carry food?" Or in a cool
rush, messages they had been carrying were greedily sucked up and
disappeared.
Always
they were jostled, bumped and giggled over by a billion others just
like them, water voices burbling along in cheerful companionship.
The voices were so numerous and so similar Mary couldn't tell them
apart. Even Tom's voice sounded the same, but he said things like
"Wow!" and "Look out - I don't believe we just did
that!" and "Mary? Are you still out there?" The water
voices shouted, laughed, yelled: "Here we go!" "Bumper
cars!" and "Going up!" "See ya, fellows!"
"I'm off!" There was no time to think, no need to make
decisions, it was all rush and tumble as they were drawn up by the
roots or down by gravity into hairline
cracks.
Once
they felt a slowing that became pressure; Tom would have held his
breath if he had been breathing. When they inched along to a freer
place, Mary felt a burst of colors - turquoise, chalk white,
translucent green - take the place of the black, gray, brown
darkness.
As
she gasped, Tom felt new textures in the thick adobe clay - like
silk, wetness, tiny points of iciness. A sudden sensation of space
all around him made him giddy.
Slipping,
slithering, they slid down both sides of - "a stalagtite!"
breathed Mary - broke free and fell through air. "Plop!"
"Splash!" And then they were carried on again; back in the
dark, flowing on through an underground channel, they ran and slipped
through tunnels, caves and pools, always sliding downhill.
Tom
smelled it first. "Mary, what's that smell?"
"Brown,"
said Mary cryptically.
And
suddenly they could see - the dense rockiness around them began to
feel crumbly. "Like a chocolate chip cookie!" laughed Tom
as he bumped over a small stone and worked his way upwards, propelled
along by a million or so of his
fellows
pushing up from behind.
A
flash of silver surprised him as he came briefly face to face with a
large round disk which stared back, seeming almost as surprised.
"Hey,"
Tom gasped, as he was sucked in, swept back and expelled again from a
cold fish gill into the warm spring water. Swirling around he found
Mary again and they were drawn upwards, floating up toward a lighter
space as colors revolved and bubbled around them. New voices called
and commented - rich green voices, golden sun voices, dripping like
honey into their pool. Nervous minnow voices whispered, and
squeaked, "What's that?" "Shadow, shadow, turn left,
turn left!" Under the babble a steady hum and burble came up
from the muddy bottom where snails shared their slow thoughts with
mud, lying placid on the floor of the spring pool.
With
a burst of light splinters Mary came crashing up through the surface
of a pond, scattering water droplets whose voices had become tiny -
giggles and shrieks that were becoming splashes as she listened. Tom
followed a moment later, feeling suddenly very solid as he broke
through the water mirror into air. Both kids drew great lungfuls of
sweet summer air and as it pumped through their
veins, felt as though the air itself were blowing them up.
"I
feel like a balloon!" Mary laughed.
"Pop,
an arm, look at that!" her companion replied.
"Hey,
we're back!" she sang to no one in particular, and was answered
by a chorus of bird song, wind song, and far back in the woods, a
contented, questioning "Hooomm."
As
they stretched out on the bank, simply feeling the sun on drying
skin, wordless, the Marye came cautiously to the surface and watched
them silently for a moment. "It is you, isn't it?" it
finally inquired. "Didn't expect you to drop in so soon. Or
weren't you in the pool? How did you...oh, it must have been a trip
and a half!" it concluded exhultantly.
Tom
and Mary looked at each other and just laughed.
"Oh,
yes," May said finally, "But I haven't the words for it."
"Not
yet," said Tom hastily, as the Marye began to pout. "I
think a poem is definitely in order. Something with alot of sharp
stuff in it and really fast, and …"
"Gray,
like pearls, and blue like the sky as soon as it's really dark, and
all that shivery silver..."
"And
the tree..."
"The
roots all grown around, braided like my Grandma's hair in that old
picture..."
"and
all of it alive," concluded Tom.
"Yeah,"
said Mary, and fell silent again.
Despite
the Marye's pleadings, they never were able to put that trip into
words. But it stayed with them for the rest of their lives.
