The Beech in Kent

The call came from a land trust in Kent — the Weantinoge Heritage Land Trust, which held three thousand acres in the northwest corner of the county, the preserves scattered across the hills in parcels that ranged from ten acres to three hundred, the land protected from development by conservation easements and outright ownership, the trust buying land when it came available and holding it in perpetuity, the word perpetuity doing the work that the word forever could not do in legal documents, the word implying a duration that exceeded the lifespan of any person or institution but that the trust accepted anyway because the alternative was to let the land be sold and subdivided and built upon and paved, and the trust existed to prevent that.

The land trust's stewardship director was a woman named Elena Ruiz, forty-two, who had a master's degree in forest ecology from Yale and the practical knowledge of a person who spent four days a week in the field, walking the preserves, monitoring the trails, assessing the timber stands, managing the invasive species that colonized every opening in the forest — the Japanese barberry and the multiflora rose and the autumn olive and the garlic mustard and the Japanese stiltgrass, the catalog of invasive plants as long as the catalog of invasive insects, the eastern forest under siege from both kingdoms, the plants coming in through the soil and the insects coming in through the bark and the native species retreating, simplifying, the forest becoming less of what it had been with each decade.

Elena had called about a beech. An American beech — Fagus grandifolia — on the Macedonia Brook Preserve, a tree that was the largest beech she had seen in the county, a tree she estimated at two hundred years old, a tree that was showing the symptoms of beech leaf disease.

Beech leaf disease was new. It had been identified in Ohio in 2012 and had spread east through Pennsylvania and New York and into Connecticut by 2020, and the cause was a nematode — Litylenchus crenatae mccannii — a microscopic worm that lived in the leaf buds and fed on the developing leaves, the feeding causing the leaves to emerge with dark bands between the veins, the banding a diagnostic symptom, the leaves striped like a prison uniform, the photosynthetic tissue damaged, the leaf's ability to produce sugar reduced, the tree starving in slow increments, the nematode doing to the beech what the adelgid did to the hemlock, what the ash borer did to the ash, what the chestnut blight had done to the chestnut, the same story told again with a different organism and a different tree and the same ending.

Wren drove to Kent with Tomas. Dale was off — his wife had a medical appointment in Hartford, and Dale did not delegate his wife's medical appointments any more than he delegated the chipper, the responsibility absolute, the attendance nonnegotiable. Wren had told him to go and had meant it and Dale had gone without discussion because the discussion was unnecessary between two people who understood that some things were more important than work.

The drive was forty minutes through the hills, the April landscape in the early phase of leaf-out, the maples and birches already green, the oaks still bare, the sequence of spring controlled by species-specific temperature thresholds, each species waiting for its own signal, the maples breaking dormancy at lower temperatures than the oaks, the birches before the maples, the willows before the birches, the sequence the same every year, the order determined by genetics and latitude and the slow warming of the soil and the air.

"Have you seen beech leaf disease?" Tomas said.

"Twice. Both times in the field — trees on private land, not my clients, trees I noticed while driving to jobs. The symptoms are distinctive. The dark banding on the leaves. You can see it from thirty feet."

"Is there a treatment?"

"No. Not yet. There's research — the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station is studying it, Yale Forestry is studying it. But there's no approved treatment. No injection, no spray, no biological control. The nematode is in the buds and the buds are inside the tree and the chemicals can't reach the nematode without damaging the tree. It's the same problem we have with every invasive — by the time we identify it and study it and develop a response, the organism has spread beyond the point of containment."

"Like the adelgid."

"Like the adelgid. Like the ash borer. Like the chestnut blight. The pattern is identical. An organism arrives from another continent. It encounters a host species that has no resistance. It spreads. We identify it. We study it. We develop a response — a chemical treatment, a biological control, a resistant cultivar. But the response takes ten or twenty years to develop and deploy, and in that time the organism has killed millions of trees. The timeline of the science is slower than the timeline of the disease."

They parked at the Macedonia Brook trailhead and hiked in. The trail followed the brook upstream, the water running clear over rocks, the sound of the water constant, the brook cutting through a valley of mixed hardwoods — sugar maple, red oak, white ash, yellow birch, black cherry, and beech. The beeches were distinctive even from a distance — the bark smooth and gray, the color of elephant skin, the surface unmarked by furrows or ridges, the bark the identifying feature of the species, the smoothness unique among the northern hardwoods, the bark retaining its juvenile texture into old age, the tree never developing the rough, furrowed bark of the oaks and maples, the smooth surface a canvas that people carved initials into because the bark healed so slowly that the carvings persisted for decades, the tree carrying the marks of human contact the way it carried the marks of weather and disease.

Elena met them at the half-mile marker. She was wearing field boots and a vest with the land trust logo and she carried a clipboard and a GPS unit and the calm competence of a person who was at home in the woods in a way that most people were at home in their kitchens.

"The beech is another quarter mile upstream," Elena said. "I found it in November during the timber inventory. The leaves were still on — beeches hold their leaves into winter, as you know. The banding was visible on most of the leaves in the lower crown."

They walked. The trail narrowed and the valley deepened and the beeches became more common, the species favoring the moist, sheltered terrain of the brook valley, the understory populated with beech seedlings and saplings, the young trees growing in the shade of the canopy, the beech one of the most shade-tolerant species in the eastern forest, the seedlings capable of surviving for decades in the dim light of the forest floor, growing an inch a year, waiting for a gap, waiting for a canopy tree to fall and the light to flood in and the seedling to accelerate, to grow upward into the gap, to claim the space.

The beech was unmistakable. The trunk rose from the slope above the brook, the bark smooth and pale, the diameter enormous — Wren estimated three feet at breast height, possibly more. The trunk was straight and without branches for the first forty feet, the crown beginning high, the canopy broad, the tree one of the tallest in the stand, the crown reaching above the surrounding maples and oaks, the beech occupying the upper canopy, the dominant tree in this section of the valley.

The leaves were emerging. The buds had broken in the past week, the new leaves unfolding from the buds in the pleated, fan-like arrangement that beech leaves used — each leaf folded accordion-style in the bud, the pleats opening as the leaf expanded, the surface pale green and slightly translucent, the new beech leaves among the most beautiful of any tree's leaves, the color the pale green of new life, the texture like fine paper, the edges finely serrated.

And on the lower branches, the banding was visible. Wren raised her binoculars and focused on a cluster of new leaves on a branch thirty feet up. The dark bands were there — parallel lines between the veins of the leaf, the bands running from midrib to margin, the color a dark green or olive that contrasted with the pale green of the healthy tissue between the bands. The banding was the nematode's signature — the worms feeding on the leaf cells between the veins, the feeding damaging the chloroplasts, the damaged cells darkening, the banding a map of the nematode's feeding, the stripes showing where the worms had been and where they had not, the leaf a record of the attack written in color.

She lowered the binoculars. "The banding is in the lower crown. Can you see it in the upper crown?"

"I couldn't in November," Elena said. "But November was late — the leaves were brown by then, harder to read. I'm hoping the upper crown is clean."

"I need to get up there," Wren said. She turned to Tomas. "This is a big tree. Three feet in diameter, maybe more. The first branch is at forty feet. You can set the line from the ground with the big shot — the throw bag won't reach that high in this canopy."

Tomas looked at the tree. He looked at it the way he looked at every tree before climbing — the assessment, the reading, the conversation without words. He had been climbing for almost a year now. He had climbed fifty trees, maybe sixty. He had climbed dead trees and live trees and leaning trees and straight trees. He had not climbed a tree this large.

"I want to climb it," he said.

Wren looked at him. The statement was not a request. It was a declaration — the first time Tomas had declared rather than asked, the first time he had stated what he wanted rather than waiting for her to assign. The shift was significant. It marked a transition from apprentice to practitioner, from the person who was told what to do to the person who knew what to do and said so.

"It's an assessment climb," she said. "No cutting. No rigging. You go up, you inspect the crown, you report what you see. I'll be on the ground reading the lower crown with the binoculars. Radio at all times."

"Copy."

He geared up. The harness, the climbing rope, the big shot — the launching system that used a slingshot mechanism to propel a throw weight and line over a branch at heights that a hand throw could not reach. The big shot was essentially a giant slingshot, the elastic bands pulled to full draw, the throw weight — a twelve-ounce bag of lead shot — launched upward with enough force to clear a hundred feet.

Tomas loaded the big shot and aimed at a branch crotch at fifty feet, a fork where two large limbs diverged from the trunk, the crotch visible against the sky, the target small from the ground but sufficient — the throw weight needed to pass over one of the branches and drop down the other side, dragging the throw line with it. He pulled the bands to full draw and released. The weight arced upward, trailing the thin orange throw line, the weight rising smoothly, clearing the branch, dropping over the other side. Clean launch.

He pulled the climbing rope up and over the branch, set his friction hitch, tested the line with his full weight. The branch held. The wood was sound. He went up.

Wren watched him climb. The motion was fluid now — the body moving with the rope rather than against it, the hips close, the weight centered, the ascent smooth and steady, the technique integrated into the body the way walking was integrated, the movement automatic, the conscious mind freed from the mechanics of climbing and available for the awareness that mattered — the awareness of the tree, the wood, the sound, the feel, the thousand small signals that the tree gave a climber about its condition, its structure, the quality of the wood beneath the bark.

He reached the first branch and moved into the crown. His voice came through the radio, steady, the cadence of a person reporting observations without emotion, the professional voice.

"I'm at the first scaffold branch. The bark is clean — no cankers, no conks, no sign of decay. The wood sounds solid. I'm going to move up to the mid-crown."

"Copy. Check the leaves as you go. Look for the banding pattern on the new leaves."

"I see it. The lower branches — the ones at my level — the new leaves have the banding. The dark stripes between the veins. It's on about sixty percent of the leaves down here."

Wren looked through the binoculars. She could see Tomas in the crown, his orange helmet visible against the gray bark, his body moving through the branches with the practiced economy of a climber who understood the tree's architecture, moving along the branches where they were strong, avoiding the tips, staying close to the trunk where the wood was thickest.

"Moving up," Tomas said. "The mid-crown branches — the banding is lighter here. Maybe thirty percent of the leaves affected. The rest look normal."

"Keep going."

He climbed higher. Wren tracked him with the binoculars. He was at sixty feet now, in the upper crown, the branches smaller, the canopy thinner, the sky visible through the foliage.

"The upper crown is cleaner," Tomas said. "I'm seeing maybe ten percent of the leaves with banding. Some branches have no banding at all. The upper canopy looks — it looks okay. The leaves are full-sized, good color, normal shape. The banding is concentrated in the lower crown."

Wren lowered the binoculars. This was consistent with what the research suggested — the nematode populations were densest in the lower crown, where the humidity was higher and the temperature was more stable, the conditions the nematode preferred. The upper crown, more exposed to wind and sun, had lower nematode loads. The infection gradient — heavy at the bottom, lighter at the top — suggested that the tree was in an early stage of the disease, the nematode population building but not yet at the level that would cause severe defoliation and crown die-back.

"What's the overall crown density?" she said.

"Full. Maybe ninety-five percent of normal. The lower branches are thinner than I'd expect — some bare twigs, some small dead branches. But the upper crown is dense. This tree looks healthy from up here. If you didn't know to look for the banding, you'd think it was fine."

"That's the problem. It looks fine and it's not fine. The nematode is in the buds and the bud damage will increase each year and the leaf loss will increase and the crown will thin and in ten years the lower crown will be bare and the upper crown will be showing symptoms and the tree will be in decline and by then the nematode will be in every beech in this valley."

Tomas was quiet on the radio. Wren could see him in the binoculars, standing on a branch seventy feet up, looking out over the valley, the view from the upper crown of the largest beech in the Macedonia Brook Preserve — the brook below, the hills rising on both sides, the mixed forest covering the slopes, the beeches visible as patches of smooth gray bark among the rougher bark of the oaks and maples, the beeches everywhere in this valley, dozens of them, hundreds, the understory thick with beech seedlings, the species dominant in the shade, the species that was about to meet the organism that would change everything.

"Come down," Wren said.

He descended. The descent was controlled, the friction hitch managing the rope, the body lowering smoothly, the technique as practiced as the ascent. He reached the ground and unclipped and stood beside Wren and looked up at the tree.

"What do we recommend?" he said.

"There's nothing to recommend. There's no treatment. There's no pruning protocol that slows the disease. There's nothing I can inject or spray or apply. The tree is infected and the infection will progress and the tree will decline and I cannot stop it."

She said this flatly, without emotion, the words clinical, the assessment delivered the way she delivered every assessment — the facts stated, the condition described, the prognosis given. But the flatness was itself an emotion, the flatness the sound of a person who had delivered bad news about trees for ten years and who felt each delivery and contained each feeling and carried the contained feelings the way the tree carried its rings, the feelings accumulating inside her, layered, one year's grief laid over the last, the cambium of sorrow adding a ring with each tree she could not save.

Elena stood beside them. She had heard the conversation. She was looking at the tree with the expression of a person who managed land in trust — the land held for the future, the land preserved, the trust implying a responsibility to the future that required the land to be as good or better when it was passed on as it was when it was received. Beech leaf disease violated the trust. The disease would diminish the beech component of the forest and the forest would be less than it was and the trust would pass on a diminished landscape and the diminishment was not the trust's fault but it was the trust's problem.

"Monitor," Wren said. "That's all I can tell you. Monitor the tree annually. Record the crown density, the banding severity, the defoliation. Build a record. The record will be useful to the researchers — they need data from infected trees, longitudinal data, the progression documented over years. This tree can be a study site. The data from this tree can contribute to the science that eventually produces a treatment."

"And if the treatment comes too late for this tree?"

"Then the record is still useful. The record of how the tree declined and how long it took and what the symptoms looked like at each stage — that record helps the next generation of arborists treat the next generation of beeches. The record survives the tree."

Wren heard herself say this and recognized it as the lesson Margaret Blackwell had taught her — the record survives the tree, the rings persist, the data outlasts the organism. The stump is the library. The core is the page. The record is the thing that matters after the tree is gone.

They hiked back to the trailhead. The April light was bright on the brook, the water catching the sun, the surface glittering, the brook making the sound that brooks made in spring — full, rushing, the snowmelt swelling the flow, the water moving fast over the rocks, the sound continuous, the sound the beeches had been hearing for centuries, the sound the beeches would continue to hear for as long as the beeches stood, which might be decades or might be years, the timeline uncertain, the disease new, the future unwritten.

Tomas drove on the way back. Wren sat in the passenger seat and looked at the trees along the road and counted the beeches — the smooth gray trunks visible in the understory, the beeches everywhere, the species common, the species abundant, the species that had been part of the eastern forest since the glaciers retreated and that was now facing the newest entry in the catalog of loss, the catalog that Wren carried in her mind the way a librarian carried a catalog of books, each entry a species, each species a volume of information about biology and ecology and adaptation and the ten thousand years of survival that had preceded the arrival of the organism that would end it.

Chestnut. Elm. Hemlock. Ash. Beech. The list was a litany and the litany was not complete and the next species was unknown and the next organism was on a ship or in a crate or in the soil of a potted plant from a foreign nursery, the next invasion already in transit, the next tree already doomed, the next entry in the catalog already written in a language that had not yet been translated into English.

She closed her eyes. She listened to the road and the truck and the wind through the open window and the silence of Tomas, who was learning that the silence after a bad assessment was the appropriate response, the silence not emptiness but fullness, the silence full of the things that could not be said because there were no words for the feeling of standing at the base of a two-hundred-year-old tree and knowing that the tree was dying and that you could not stop it and that your profession was the profession of people who stopped things from dying and you could not stop this thing from dying and the inability was not a failure of skill but a failure of the world to be a place where skill was sufficient.

They drove home through the hills, through the canopy that was closing, through the spring that was arriving, through the forest that was still here, still standing, still growing, the beeches among the oaks among the maples among the birches, the community of species that had been a community for ten thousand years and that was losing members one by one, the community thinning, simplifying, the complexity declining, the forest becoming less than it was, the less arriving slowly, species by species, the loss cumulative, the loss the sum of all the individual losses, and Wren was the person who counted the losses because Wren was the person who knelt at the stumps and read the rings and knew what had been there and what was gone.