Why Loblollies on the Yadkin?

At my life’s current fulcrum, with the not-as-far-away-as-it-used-to-be future of empty nesting, retiring, and the eventual meeting with my maker in the balance, I have decided that now is the time to embrace a personal metamorphosis, rather than to remain cocooned in my established persona woven with the threads of youth, career, and family. Perhaps a bit rhetorical and contrived as a mission statement, but it will do for now. The prospects are exciting:  traveling the globe in the spirit of international volunteerism; returning to school for a degree in divinity or architecture or literature; rekindling my interest in stained glass design and guitar music and creative writing; and perhaps becoming an uber grandpa one fine day.

With all of these ‘futures’ to counterweight my past investments of time and energy, why at this moment has a bunch of trees next to a shallow, lazy, Southern river so compellingly captured my imagination?  Why not a more conventional place in the North Carolina countryside to ‘individuate’ (bending a Jungian concept into a verb): a condominium on the beach, a cabin in the mountains, a house on a lake?  Why not a more exotic locale away from my cocoon — say in the Canadian Rockies, Hawaii, or even Singapore?  Why not pull up stakes and just go? My left brain quickly intercedes, “You cannot just leave! There are concerns and obligations -- family, finances, profession! Lists, many lists.”  It goes on to remind me how capricious and foolhardy my right brain can be.  “If you had listened to me you wouldn’t have bought those 30 acres of scrub forest in Yadkin County in the first place.”

From the perspective of a forester, this land is a mess.  The native trees were logged and replanted in commercial-grade loblolly pine seedlings in 1992 and mostly neglected afterwards.  The loblollies are interlaced with scrub pines and hardwood saplings and briers.  They are overcrowded in some places and replaced with patches of upstart beeches and poplars in other places. The forest floor is littered with downed tree limbs and rotting logs, impassible in some areas. Most of the land is sloped, either bluff or hollow, except for the flood plain at the riverbank. There is a 150-foot-wide Duke Energy right-of-way, a swath of defoliated wasteland underneath 220,000-volt high-tension lines that cuts across the entire property.  Anywhere you look, there is work to do.  And not city boy’s work in a windowless climate-controlled operating room, instructing orthopedic residents in the correct use of scalpel, osteotome, and reciprocating saw. No, here it’s country boy’s work, out in open weather, straining muscles and back using rake, chainsaw, and tractor.

Yet the question persists: what is it about these scrappy, adolescent, evergreen trees; planted as a crop to be harvested and sawed into two by fours and pulped into toilet paper?  Surely they are not at all romantic compared to the precise rows of lush, deciduous apple trees carefully cultivated at my parents’ orchard. Indeed, I am a prodigal arborist who forsook a career in the family business in upstate New York to heed ambition’s distant call 800 miles away.  Didn’t I leave Hick’s Orchard for Wake Forest to be an orthopedic surgeon rather than a tree surgeon?  Wake Forest, I chuckle, the university where I have spent so much of my adult life, not a stand of trees in Wake County I have never thought to visit. I wonder if anything is left of that forest.

To be honest, my left brain is still puzzled by my new focus, this right-brain caprice, but I know deep in my bones that this is where I need to be right now.  The Irish Poet John O’Donohue would consider this riverland a ‘thin place’, referring to a Celtic tradition that certain places exist in nature where the distance between heaven and earth is so small one is able to glimpse a presence of the divine.  Is this loblolly plantation an invitation to transition from a thick-headed view of life to see a vision of that which is thin?  If so, then the thinner the better.  I’ll go with that!  So for now, the question ‘what shall I do with all these years of life I hope yet to enjoy’ has been replaced with the question ‘what shall I do with all these loblolly pines I bought on the edge of the Yadkin River?’ Let me share my journey with you.