The Hemlock in the Ravine

The hemlocks were dying in the ravine behind the Cavendish property and there was nothing to be done about it except slow it down, which was what Wren had been hired to do, which was what she had been doing for three years on this property, twice a year, spring and fall, injecting the trunks with imidacloprid, a systemic insecticide that traveled in the sap and killed the woolly adelgid when they fed on the needles, except the adelgid came back every year because the adelgid was everywhere, on every hemlock in Connecticut, on every hemlock from Georgia to Maine, a tiny insect from Japan that had arrived in Virginia in the 1950s and had been moving north ever since, killing the eastern hemlock the way Dutch elm disease killed the elm and chestnut blight killed the chestnut and emerald ash borer killed the ash — completely, systematically, species by species, the forests of the eastern United States being disassembled one tree at a time by organisms from other continents that the native trees had no defense against because they had never encountered them, had never needed to evolve resistance, had stood for ten thousand years since the glaciers retreated without ever meeting the thing that would kill them.

The Cavendish property was in Warren, on a hillside above the Shepaug River, forty acres of mixed hardwood forest with a ravine cutting through the center where a seasonal stream ran in spring and dried to a trickle in August. The ravine was lined with eastern hemlock — Tsuga canadensis — trees that thrived in the shade and the cool air and the moisture of the ravine bottom, trees that created their own microclimate, their dense evergreen canopy blocking the sunlight and keeping the air cool and the soil moist and the stream shaded, which kept the water cold, which kept the brook trout alive, which was part of the reason the Cavendishes cared about the hemlocks, because Richard Cavendish was a fly fisherman and the brook trout needed cold water and the cold water needed shade and the shade came from the hemlocks and the hemlocks were dying.

Wren parked at the house and walked down the trail into the ravine. She carried the injection equipment in a backpack — the Arborjet system, a pressurized cylinder that drove the insecticide into the sapwood through a small hole drilled at the base of the tree. Each injection took five to ten minutes depending on the size of the tree and the uptake rate, and there were thirty-seven hemlocks in the ravine that she had tagged and numbered and mapped three years ago, and she would inject all thirty-seven today, and Dale would help, and it would take them the full day, and at the end of it the insecticide would be in the sapwood of every tree, traveling up through the xylem with the transpiration stream, reaching the needles in two to three weeks, and when the adelgid nymphs — the crawlers — settled on the needles and inserted their stylets into the phloem to feed on the sap, they would ingest the insecticide and die.

And next year the adelgid would be back. Because the adelgid was windborne in the crawler stage, tiny white specks drifting on the air, landing on hemlock needles, settling, feeding, reproducing asexually — no males needed, each female producing up to three hundred eggs in a cottony white mass that clung to the underside of the twig like a tiny piece of wool, which was why they were called woolly adelgid, and the cottony masses were the visible sign of the infestation, and Wren could see them now on the lower branches of the first hemlock in the ravine, white dots along the twigs, hundreds of them, each one an egg sac, each one a colony.

She set down her pack and looked up. This tree was hemlock number one on her map — the largest in the ravine, a tree perhaps eighty years old with a trunk eighteen inches in diameter and a height of sixty feet, the crown narrow and conical the way hemlocks grew, the branches drooping at the tips, the needles dark green and fine, each needle half an inch long with two white stripes on the underside, the stripes that were the stomata, the breathing pores, the openings through which the tree exchanged gases with the air. The adelgid fed near the stomata. The insecticide reached the stomata through the vascular system. The chemistry was elegant in its simplicity: the tree's own circulatory system delivering the poison to the exact place where the pest was feeding.

But the needles on the upper crown were thin. Three years ago, when Wren had started the treatment program, the crown had been full and dense, the way a healthy hemlock crown should be — so dense that standing under it was like standing in a room with a green ceiling, the light filtered to a soft glow, the air cool, the sound muffled. Now the crown was thinning. The lower branches were still full, because the treatment was most effective in the lower crown where the uptake was strongest, but the upper crown was losing needles, the branches becoming visible through the foliage, the sky showing through where it should not show. The treatment was working but it was not working well enough. The adelgid pressure was too high. The crawlers were arriving in numbers that exceeded the insecticide's ability to kill them all, and the survivors were reproducing and their offspring were surviving and the population was building and the tree was losing the war of attrition that all infested hemlocks eventually lost.

Dale came down the trail with the second pack of equipment. He moved through the woods with the economy of a man who had spent his working life on construction sites and in forests, placing his feet deliberately, watching the ground for the roots and rocks that could turn an ankle, his body balanced and quiet. He was not a man who talked in the woods. He was not a man who talked much anywhere. In seven years of working together, Wren and Dale had arrived at a level of communication that was mostly silence punctuated by the specific, essential words — ready, clear, cutting, on rope, lower away — the vocabulary of the work, which was the vocabulary of safety, which was the only vocabulary that mattered when one of them was sixty feet in the air with a running chainsaw.

"Start at the far end and work back?" Dale said.

"Yeah. I'll start here and work toward you."

They split up. Wren knelt at the base of hemlock number one and began the injection process. She drilled a small hole — three-eighths of an inch, angled slightly downward — through the bark and into the sapwood. The drill bit was sharp and the bark was thin and the sapwood was soft and wet and the hole was done in three seconds. She inserted the injection port — a small plastic plug with a one-way valve — and connected the pressurized cylinder. She opened the valve. The insecticide — a pale yellow liquid with a faint chemical smell — began flowing into the sapwood under pressure, the tree's own vascular system pulling it in, the transpiration stream drawing it upward.

She waited. The uptake varied by tree, by time of day, by temperature, by soil moisture. On a warm day with the soil wet from rain, the trees pulled hard, and the injection was fast. On a cool morning with dry soil, the pull was weak, and you had to wait. Today was warm — mid-April, fifty-five degrees, the soil saturated from snowmelt and two days of rain earlier in the week. The tree was pulling. She could see the liquid dropping in the cylinder, a quarter inch per minute, the tree drinking.

While she waited, she looked at the ravine. The hemlocks lined both sides of the stream, their trunks rising from the steep slopes, their roots gripping the rocky soil, their canopy meeting overhead to form a corridor of green. This was what a hemlock ravine was — a corridor, a tunnel, a world within the world, the light inside different from the light outside, the temperature different, the humidity different, the soil different. Remove the hemlocks and the ravine would become something else — a hardwood ravine, or an open gully, or a tangle of invasive shrubs and vines, the Japanese barberry and multiflora rose and Oriental bittersweet that colonized every opening in the forest, the invasive plants following the invasive insects, the whole ecosystem shifting from one state to another, from hemlock to not-hemlock, from shade to sun, from cold water to warm water, from brook trout to no brook trout.

She had explained this to Richard Cavendish three years ago, when he had called her about the adelgid. She had stood in his living room with a map of the ravine and had told him the truth: the treatment would slow the decline but would not stop it. The adelgid was everywhere. The predator beetles that had been released as biological control — Sasajiscymnus tsugae, a ladybug from Japan — were establishing slowly, too slowly to save the current generation of hemlocks. The treatment would buy time. Ten years, maybe fifteen. Eventually the hemlocks would die, and the ravine would change, and the brook trout would likely disappear from this stretch of the Shepaug.

Cavendish had listened. He was a retired investment banker, a man who understood timelines and probabilities and the difference between a hedge and a cure. He had said, "Do the treatment." He had not said, "Save the trees." He had said, "Buy time." And Wren had been doing that for three years, buying time for thirty-seven hemlocks in a ravine in Warren, Connecticut, two injections a year, a cost to Cavendish of twelve thousand dollars annually, a cost that was trivial to him and enormous in the context of what it achieved, which was a slowing of a decline that could not be stopped, a deferral of a loss that could not be prevented.

She moved to hemlock number two. Drilled, injected, waited. Moved to number three. The rhythm of the work was meditative — the kneeling, the drilling, the connecting, the waiting, the disconnecting, the moving on. Each tree took seven minutes. Thirty-seven trees at seven minutes each was four hours and nineteen minutes, divided between two people was two hours and ten minutes each, plus walking time between trees and the lunch break, which put them finishing around three o'clock if nothing went wrong.

Nothing went wrong with hemlock injections. It was the calmest work she did. No climbing, no chainsaws, no rigging, no falling wood, no power lines. Just the kneeling and the drilling and the quiet of the ravine, the stream running over rocks, the birds in the canopy — the black-throated green warbler that lived only in hemlock and would disappear from this ravine when the hemlocks died, its song a thin buzzy refrain that Wren could hear now from somewhere above her, five notes descending, the bird singing in a tree that was being kept alive by insecticide so that the bird could sing in it.

She thought about the cascade. The hemlocks died and the shade disappeared and the stream warmed and the brook trout died and the warbler disappeared and the soil dried and the invasives moved in and the ravine became something unrecognizable in one generation. This was happening across the entire range of the eastern hemlock, from the southern Appalachians to southern Canada, millions of trees dying, thousands of ravines changing, a landscape feature that had existed since the last ice age disappearing in the span of fifty years. The hemlocks in the Great Smoky Mountains were already gone. The hemlocks in the Shenandoah were nearly gone. The hemlocks in Connecticut were going. The line of death was moving north, following the winters that were no longer cold enough to kill the adelgid, the winters that used to drop below negative twenty and freeze the crawlers and keep the population in check and now dropped to negative five or negative ten and the crawlers survived and the population built and the hemlocks died.

Wren did not think about climate change in the abstract. She thought about it in rings. She could read it in the cores she extracted from trees — the growing season lengthening, the rings widening, the trees leafing out earlier and dropping leaves later, the frost-free period extending week by week, decade by decade. The trees were recording the change in their wood. Every tree she cored was a climate record. Every ring was a data point. The trees were the evidence, and the trees were also the victims, and she was the person who read the evidence and then cut down the victims.

She finished hemlock number twelve and stood and stretched. Her knees ached from the kneeling. Her back was stiff. She drank water and looked up through the canopy, through the thinning needles of the hemlocks, at the sky beyond. The sky was the pale blue of April, the color that meant the air was still cold at altitude even if the ground was warm, and the clouds were high and thin and moving fast, the wind aloft stronger than the wind in the ravine, which was calm, which was always calm, because the hemlocks blocked the wind, because the ravine was a shelter, because the hemlocks made the ravine what it was.

Her phone buzzed. A text from her mother: Did you forget Saturday?

She had not forgotten Saturday. She had thought about it every day since the phone call about the box behind the furnace, the box of Glenn's things, the box that Jesse had not opened and had called Wren to open, which was either an act of generosity — letting the daughter have the father's things first — or an act of self-preservation — letting the daughter absorb the shock of whatever was inside so that Jesse did not have to.

She typed: I didn't forget. 11 am.

Jesse replied: I'll make tea.

Wren put the phone away and moved to hemlock number thirteen. She drilled, injected, waited. The liquid dropped in the cylinder. The tree drank.

She thought about her father's hands. Glenn Matsuda's hands had been large and scarred and permanently stained with bar oil and pitch, the pitch of Douglas fir, which was a different pitch from the pitch of the eastern conifers — thicker, more resinous, with a sharp sweet smell that Wren could still recall if she closed her eyes, the smell of her father's hands when he came home from the woods, the smell she had associated with safety and home and the presence of the person who was largest in her world. He had washed his hands at the kitchen sink with Lava soap, the gray gritty bar that cut through grease and pitch, and the water had run brown and then clear, and his hands had emerged pink and raw and still faintly stained, the pitch in the creases of his knuckles that no soap could reach, the tree in his skin the way the tree was in hers, the sawdust in her knuckles, the bar oil on her forearms, the smell of two-stroke exhaust in her hair.

Glenn had been half Japanese — his father, Wren's grandfather, was Takeshi Matsuda, who had been born in Portland, Oregon, in 1942, in an internment camp, though Wren had not learned this until she was in college and had looked it up, because Takeshi did not talk about it and Glenn had not talked about it and Jesse did not talk about anything that had happened before Connecticut. Takeshi had become a forester for the Bureau of Land Management after the war, which was the kind of irony that only made sense in America — a man imprisoned by his government going to work for his government, managing the forests of the Cascade Range, the same forests that had imprisoned his family's future. Glenn had followed his father into the trees but had gone to the private side, to the timber companies, to the cutting rather than the managing, and Wren did not know why and could not ask because Glenn was dead and Takeshi was dead and Jesse did not talk about it.

She finished the thirteenth hemlock and moved to the fourteenth. She could hear Dale's drill on the other side of the ravine, the high thin whine of the bit cutting through bark, and then the silence as he connected the injector and waited, and then the whine again as he moved to the next tree. They were working in parallel, the ravine between them, the stream between them, the hemlocks between them, each of them kneeling at the base of a tree and injecting it with a chemical that would keep it alive for another six months, maybe a year, and then they would come back and do it again.

The adelgid was visible on every tree. The white cottony masses on the undersides of the twigs, some of them fresh and bright, some of them old and gray, the dead colonies from last year still clinging to the twigs alongside the live colonies from this year. Wren examined a low branch on hemlock fourteen. The needles were stippled — tiny yellow dots where the adelgid had inserted their stylets and sucked the sap, each dot a feeding site, each feeding site a wound, the tree losing sap from a thousand tiny wounds, the cumulative effect a slow starvation, the tree unable to photosynthesize enough to replace what it was losing, the energy budget tipping toward deficit, the tree spending more than it earned, the reserves declining, the growth slowing, the needles thinning, the crown opening, the light coming in where light should not come in.

This was how species died. Not all at once, not dramatically, but slowly, tree by tree, ravine by ravine, the range contracting from the south northward, the surviving trees at the northern edge of the range holding on because the winters were still cold enough to keep the adelgid in check, but the winters were getting warmer and the northern edge was moving north and eventually there would be no northern edge, there would be no range, there would be no eastern hemlock, and the word hemlock would become historical, the way chestnut was becoming historical, the way elm was becoming historical, words that described things that had once been everywhere and were now almost nowhere.

She injected hemlock fourteen and moved on.

At noon she and Dale met at the stream and ate lunch on a flat rock. Sandwiches, chips, water. The stream ran clear and cold over the rocks, the water coming from the snowmelt on the hillside above, the last of the winter's snow releasing its water in a slow trickle that gathered into the stream and ran down the ravine and joined the Shepaug and joined the Housatonic and went to the sea. Dale ate his sandwich methodically, chewing each bite fully, the way he did everything — deliberately, completely, without hurry. He was a man who had learned patience from heavy materials, from concrete that set on its own schedule, from lumber that warped if you rushed it, from foundations that cracked if you loaded them too soon. He had brought that patience to tree work, where patience meant the difference between a controlled removal and a catastrophe.

"How's your side?" Wren said.

"Nineteen done. Couple of them didn't want to take the injection. Slow uptake. Maybe the soil's still too cold on that side."

"North-facing slope. Gets less sun. The soil temperature's probably five degrees cooler."

"I gave them extra time. They took it eventually."

"Good."

They ate in silence. A pileated woodpecker called from somewhere up the ravine — the laughing call, the jungle sound that seemed too wild for Connecticut, too loud, too insistent. The woodpecker was probably hammering on one of the dead hemlocks — the ones that had died before Wren started the treatment program, the ones that stood as gray ghosts in the ravine, their bark falling off, their wood softening, the carpenter ants and beetle larvae colonizing the decaying sapwood, the woodpecker following the insects the way the insects followed the death the way the death followed the adelgid. The cascade in reverse: death creating habitat for the things that fed on death.

"You ever think about what this place will look like in twenty years?" Dale said.

Wren looked at the ravine. The hemlocks rising on both sides, the stream in the middle, the ferns on the stream bank, the moss on the rocks, the filtered green light.

"Yeah," she said.

"Not like this."

"No. Not like this."

Dale finished his sandwich and folded the plastic bag and put it in his pocket. He stood and picked up his pack. "Better finish while the trees are pulling."

They went back to work. Wren finished her side of the ravine by two-thirty. Eighteen trees injected, each one marked with a small flag — pink, the color she used for treated trees, the flags visible against the dark bark of the hemlocks, a line of pink dots running along the ravine like a trail of markers leading somewhere, though they led nowhere, they simply marked the trees she had injected, the trees she was keeping alive, the trees she would come back to in September and inject again.

She packed up her equipment and walked down the ravine to the stream crossing, stepping on the rocks Dale had placed there three years ago, flat stones set in the stream bed to make a crossing that would hold through the spring runoff. On the other side she climbed the slope to the trailhead and walked up to the house. Cavendish was on the porch, reading. He was a tall man, thin, with white hair and the kind of weathered face that came from decades of standing in streams with a fly rod, watching the water, reading the current the way Wren read a tree — the surface telling you what was happening beneath, the ripple telling you where the rock was, the smooth water telling you where the depth was, the trout holding in the seam between fast water and slow water the way a bird held in the eddy between wind and calm.

"How do they look?" Cavendish said.

"The lower crowns are holding. The treatment is maintaining them. The upper crowns on the south-facing trees are continuing to thin. The adelgid pressure is high this year — I saw heavy egg masses on most of the trees."

"Will they make it?"

This was the question. Will they make it. It was the same question Brian Alderman had asked about the elm, but the answer was different because the question was different. Alderman had been asking about one tree. Cavendish was asking about an ecosystem. One tree could be saved or not saved, removed or not removed, and the decision was binary and the outcome was final. An ecosystem was not binary. It was a gradient. It was a spectrum between fully alive and fully dead, and the hemlocks in this ravine were somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, and the treatment was keeping them there, in the middle, neither fully alive nor fully dead, sustained by an artificial intervention that mimicked the tree's own defenses but was not the tree's own defenses, the way a person on medication was alive but not the same as a person who was alive without medication.

"The treatment is buying time," Wren said. She used the same phrase she had used three years ago because it was still true and would always be true and there was no better phrase for what they were doing. "The biological controls are establishing in the region. The predator beetles are being found in the wild now — not just at release sites. If the predator population builds fast enough, it could reduce the adelgid pressure to a level the hemlocks can tolerate without treatment."

"And if it doesn't?"

"Then we keep treating, and eventually the treatment isn't enough, and the upper crowns die, and the trees decline, and we're looking at a different ravine in fifteen or twenty years."

Cavendish nodded. He looked out at the ravine, at the hemlocks visible from the porch, their dark green canopy against the brown of the still-bare hardwoods on the hillside above. "My grandfather bought this property for the hemlocks," he said. "He was a botanist at Yale. He used this ravine as a teaching site. Brought his students up here. I have photographs — black and white, 1940s — the ravine looks exactly the same as it does now. Exactly."

Wren did not say anything. The photographs from the 1940s showed a ravine that had looked the same for eighty years and had looked the same for centuries before that and would look different within a generation. The constancy was ending. The photographs would become a record of what had been, the way the rings in a stump were a record of what had been, the evidence of a life that was over.

She drove home through the late afternoon. The hills were greening, the maples budding, the willows along the rivers already leafing out, their long branches hanging like green curtains over the water. Wren drove and thought about the hemlocks and the adelgid and the cascade and the time they were buying and the time they were losing and the difference between the two, which was narrowing, which was always narrowing, which was the nature of a losing fight — the gap between what you could do and what needed to be done closing until there was no gap and there was no fight and there was only the loss.

She got home and showered and sat at the kitchen table with a beer and the map of the Cavendish ravine spread out in front of her, the thirty-seven hemlocks marked with their numbers, each number a tree she knew, each tree a patient she was treating, each patient dying. She had not trained for this. She had trained to assess and remove. She had trained to climb and cut. She had not trained to be a hospice worker for trees, to manage the slow decline of a species, to administer palliative care to an ecosystem. But this was what the work had become, in part — not just removing the dead but sustaining the dying, not just cutting but injecting, not just ending but prolonging.

Outside, the oak in the backyard stood in the last light, its crown dark against the sky, its branches massive and spreading, the architecture of two hundred years of growth visible in the pattern of the limbs. The oak was not dying. The oak was healthy. The oak would outlive her and her children and her grandchildren if she had them, which she did not plan to, which was a decision she had made at thirty and had not revisited, the decision to not continue the line, to let the name end with her, to be the last Matsuda in this branch of the family, a thought that connected to the hemlocks in a way she did not want to examine, the last of a kind, the end of a line, the range contracting to a single point.

She finished her beer. She looked at the map. She folded it and put it away.

Saturday was two days from now. The box was waiting. The furnace had been serviced. The box had been found. The things inside the box had been behind the furnace for however many years, in the dark, in the heat, waiting for no one, because things did not wait any more than trees waited, things simply persisted until they were found or until they were not found and the house was demolished and the things went to the landfill and the persistence ended and no one knew what had been in the box behind the furnace in the basement of a house in Litchfield, Connecticut.

She would go on Saturday. She would open the box.

She went to bed. In the dark, the oak creaked in the wind, a sound that was not distress but was the sound of a large structure accommodating forces, the wood flexing, the grain absorbing the load, the tree doing what trees did in wind, which was to bend, which was the opposite of what buildings did, which was to resist, and the bending was why trees survived storms that destroyed buildings, because flexibility was strength and rigidity was weakness and the trees knew this in their wood the way a person knew it in their bones if they had lived long enough and lost enough and bent enough and were still standing.

The hemlock ravine was dark. The stream was running. The adelgid were feeding. The insecticide was traveling upward through the sapwood, rising in the sap, reaching the needles, and the crawlers that fed on the treated needles would die, and the crawlers that fed on the untreated needles at the top of the crown would live, and the living crawlers would produce eggs that would hatch into crawlers that would feed and live and reproduce, and the cycle would continue, the treatment buying time, the time running out, the hemlocks standing in the dark in the ravine, their needles filtering the starlight, their roots gripping the rocky soil, their trunks carrying the insecticide upward like a prayer, like a mercy, like a temporary reprieve from a sentence that had already been passed.