The Hemlock Requiem

Richard Cavendish died in August. The obituary in the Litchfield County Times said he was seventy-four and had been a managing director at Morgan Stanley and had retired to Warren in 2005 and had been an avid fly fisherman and a supporter of Trout Unlimited and the Nature Conservancy and the Shepaug River Association. The obituary said he was survived by his wife, Catherine, and two sons, Richard Jr. and Thomas, and four grandchildren. The obituary did not mention the hemlocks.

Catherine Cavendish called Wren in September. Her voice was measured, the voice of a woman managing grief the way she managed everything — with discipline, with sequence, with the understanding that the tasks of the living did not pause for the dying and that the hemlocks in the ravine needed their fall injection regardless of whether Richard was alive to care about the brook trout.

"I want to continue the treatment," Catherine said. "Richard would have wanted it continued."

Wren drove to Warren on the first of October. She parked at the house and walked down the trail into the ravine with Dale, the injection equipment in the packs, the same equipment, the same trail, the same walk she had been making for six years, twice a year, spring and fall, the rhythm of the treatment as regular as the seasons it followed.

The ravine was different.

She could see it from the upper trail before she descended — the canopy over the ravine was thinner than it had been in the spring. The hemlocks, which in the first years of treatment had maintained a dense, dark canopy that blocked the sky and kept the ravine in perpetual shade, were now letting light through in places where light had not reached in decades. The gaps were not dramatic — not the open holes of dead trees but the diffuse thinning of stressed trees, the needle density declining, the branches visible through the foliage where they should have been hidden, the sky showing through the canopy in small bright patches that moved as the wind moved the branches.

She descended into the ravine. The first hemlock — number one on her map, the largest, the tree she always started with — stood at the base of the trail, its trunk eighteen inches in diameter, its crown sixty feet above the stream. She looked up. The crown was still green, still conical, still recognizable as a hemlock crown. But the density was reduced. She could see the main scaffold branches through the foliage. Five years ago, standing at the base of this tree and looking up, she would have seen a solid ceiling of green, the branches invisible, the canopy complete. Now she could see the architecture. The branches were legible through the thinned needles the way the bones of a thinning person were legible through the skin.

She knelt and began the injection. Drilled, inserted the port, connected the cylinder, opened the valve. The liquid entered the sapwood. The tree drank. The uptake was slower than it had been in the early years — the transpiration rate reduced because the needle mass was reduced, the tree pulling less water because the tree had fewer needles to transpire through, the decline visible not just in the crown but in the physiology, the tree's systems slowing, the engine running on fewer cylinders.

She moved to hemlock number two. Drilled, injected, waited. The routine was the same. The trees were not the same. Each tree she knelt beside was thinner than it had been the previous fall, the decline incremental, the change small enough to deny on any individual visit but cumulative over the six years of treatment, the trajectory unmistakable when she compared the trees to her photographs from the first year, the photographs on her phone showing dense, dark crowns and the trees before her showing thinning, transparent crowns, the decline documented in the gap between the photographs and the reality.

Dale worked the other side of the ravine. They did not talk. The sound of the drill and the silence between the drillings and the stream running over rocks and the birds — fewer birds now, Wren noticed, the black-throated green warbler absent this morning, the warbler that had been singing in the hemlocks every spring and fall since she had started the treatment, the bird that lived only in hemlock and that would disappear when the hemlocks disappeared, the bird's range contracting with the hemlock's range, the two species linked, the host and the dependent, the tree and the bird, the bird's song a measure of the tree's health, the absence of the song a measure of the tree's decline.

She stopped at hemlock number fifteen and did not kneel. She stood and looked at the tree. Hemlock fifteen was dead.

The trunk was standing, the bark still on it, the branches still attached, but the needles were gone. The crown was bare — the branches gray, the twigs brittle, the tree a skeleton, the life over. She touched the bark. It was loose — she could peel a piece off with her fingers, the bark separating from the cambium, the cambium dry, the thin layer of living tissue that separated the bark from the wood no longer thin and living but dry and dead, the cambium gone, the tree dead from the outside in, the adelgid having finally won the war on this tree, the insecticide treatments insufficient to keep the population below the threshold of lethality, the crawlers arriving each year in numbers that exceeded the chemical's capacity to kill them, the survivors reproducing, the offspring feeding, the tree losing the attrition, the energy budget in permanent deficit, the tree spending more to defend itself than it earned from the shrinking needle mass, the account empty, the tree dead.

She marked it on the map. Hemlock 15 — dead. She took a photograph. She moved to hemlock sixteen.

Hemlock sixteen was alive but barely. The crown retained perhaps thirty percent of its needle mass. The remaining needles were pale — yellowish green rather than the dark green of a healthy hemlock, the chlorosis a sign of nutrient deficiency or vascular compromise or both, the tree unable to produce enough chlorophyll to maintain the dark color, the photosynthetic machinery degraded. The adelgid was heavy on this tree — the white cottony masses visible on every twig, dense, the egg sacs overlapping, the population beyond what the treatment could control.

She injected it anyway. She knelt and drilled and connected the cylinder and opened the valve and watched the liquid drop. The uptake was very slow. She waited fifteen minutes for the tree to take the standard dose. In the first year, this tree had taken the dose in five minutes, the transpiration strong, the pull vigorous, the tree healthy enough to drink. Now the tree sipped. The system was failing. The injection was palliative — keeping the tree alive was no longer the objective, because keeping the tree alive was no longer possible. The objective was slowing the dying. The objective was buying weeks, not years. The objective was the same as it had always been — buy time — but the amount of time being bought had shrunk from years to months.

She finished the round at noon. Of the thirty-seven tagged hemlocks, thirty-one were alive, four were dead, and two were in the category she described in her notes as declining irreversibly, the trees alive in the cellular sense but no longer capable of maintaining the crown density or the growth rate or the physiological function that constituted life in any meaningful ecological sense, the trees standing but not living, the trees ghosts.

She and Dale ate lunch at the stream. The stream was different too. The water was warmer — she could feel it when she dipped her hand in, the temperature higher than the cold that had defined this stream in the first years of treatment, the water that had been forty-eight degrees in October now closer to fifty-four, the six degrees a consequence of the thinning canopy, the sunlight reaching the water through the gaps in the hemlocks, the sunlight warming the stream that the hemlocks had kept cold, the shade diminishing with the canopy, the temperature rising with the shade.

Six degrees. The difference between brook trout and no brook trout. Brook trout — Salvelinus fontinalis — required water below fifty-seven degrees. The stream had been well below that threshold when the hemlocks were healthy. Now the margin was three degrees. In summer, when the air temperature was higher and the canopy was under greater stress, the stream temperature would be higher, possibly above the threshold, the trout under thermal stress, the fish that Richard Cavendish had cared about, the fish that had been part of the reason for the treatment, the fish whose survival depended on the shade that depended on the hemlocks that depended on the treatment that depended on the twelve thousand dollars a year that Richard Cavendish had paid and that Catherine Cavendish was now paying.

She looked at the stream. The water was clear. She could see the bottom — the rocks and the gravel and the sand and the caddisfly cases clinging to the rocks, the insect larvae building their houses from bits of sand and twig, the houses portable, the larvae dragging them along the bottom, the larvae the food of the trout, the food chain intact, the trout still here, for now, the water still cold enough, for now, the shade still sufficient, for now.

For now. The phrase that defined everything in the ravine. The hemlocks were alive for now. The stream was cold for now. The trout were surviving for now. The warbler was — she listened. The warbler was not singing. The warbler was gone, or was elsewhere, or had not arrived, or had stopped coming to this ravine because the canopy was too thin, the habitat degraded, the hemlock forest no longer the hemlock forest but something transitional, something between what it had been and what it would become.

Dale finished his sandwich and said, "The fifteen is dead."

"I saw."

"And the sixteen and the twenty-two are close."

"I saw."

"How much longer?"

The question was about the treatment. How much longer would the treatment work. How much longer would the injections slow the decline. How much longer would Catherine Cavendish pay twelve thousand dollars a year for a treatment that was losing the war.

"Five years," Wren said. "Maybe less. The population is building faster than the treatment can suppress it. The winters are not cold enough to knock the adelgid back. We're supplementing what the cold used to do, and the cold isn't doing enough, and the chemistry isn't doing enough, and the combination isn't doing enough. The trajectory is clear. The canopy will continue to thin. More trees will die. The stream temperature will rise. The ravine will change."

"Will you tell Mrs. Cavendish?"

"I'll tell her the truth. I'll tell her the treatment is still providing benefit but the benefit is diminishing and the decline is accelerating and there will come a point — probably within five years — when the remaining hemlocks will be past the point where treatment makes a difference and the decision will be whether to continue spending money on trees that are dying regardless of the treatment."

Dale nodded. He finished his water. He looked at the ravine — the hemlocks standing on both sides of the stream, the canopy thinned but still green, the ravine still recognizably a hemlock ravine, the corridor still shaded, the light still filtered, the world inside the ravine still different from the world outside, the hemlock ravine still a place apart, a place with its own climate and its own ecology and its own beauty.

"It's still beautiful," Dale said.

"It is."

"Even thinning. Even dying. It's still the most beautiful place I work."

Wren looked at the ravine. Dale was right. The ravine was still beautiful. The hemlocks, even stressed, even declining, were still graceful — the trunks straight, the branches drooping at the tips in the characteristic hemlock posture, the needles fine and delicate, the bark cinnamon-brown and finely furrowed, the trees elegant in their distress, the beauty persisting through the decline the way beauty persisted in an aging face, the structure still there, the form still readable, the life still present even if diminished.

She thought about what would replace the hemlocks. The research suggested that hemlock ravines, when the hemlocks died, were colonized first by black birch — Betula lenta — a native species that tolerated the acidic soil the hemlocks had created and that grew fast in the sudden light. The black birch would fill the canopy within twenty years. But the birch canopy would be deciduous, not evergreen, and the winter shade would be gone, and the summer canopy would be thinner than the hemlock canopy had been, and the light would reach the stream, and the temperature would rise, and the brook trout would leave or die, and the warbler would not return.

The ravine would be a different place. Not a dead place — a living place, a place of birch and fern and sunlight and warm water, a place with its own ecology and its own beauty. But a different place. A place that no one alive would remember in its former state, because the former state would be gone and the photographs and the memories would fade and the ravine would simply be what it was, the way it was, and no one would know that it had once been dark and cool and lined with hemlocks and home to brook trout and a small bird that sang five descending notes in a forest that no longer existed.

Unless someone kept the record. Unless someone wrote down what the ravine had been and when it changed and why. Unless someone documented the canopy density and the stream temperature and the species present and the species absent, the data points that would tell the story of the transition, the way the rings told the story of a tree's life, the data the evidence, the evidence the testimony, the testimony the record that survived the thing it described.

She would keep the record. She would continue the treatment for as long as Catherine Cavendish wanted it continued, and she would document the decline, and the documentation would be the record, and the record would be the ravine's last gift, the way the stump was the tree's last gift, the record of what had been, preserved after the thing itself was gone.

She packed up the equipment. She walked up the trail. At the top, she turned and looked back at the ravine. The hemlocks stood in the October light, the needles catching the low sun, the canopy thin but present, the ravine shaded but not dark, the stream visible through the thinned branches, the water catching the light and throwing it back in glints and flashes.

She stood and looked. She looked the way she looked at every tree she assessed — with attention, with the knowledge of what she was seeing, with the understanding that the looking itself was a form of care, the attention a form of tending, the observation a form of love.

She drove home. The hills were in color — the maples red, the oaks brown, the birches yellow, the landscape performing its annual spectacle, the chemistry of senescence creating the beauty of autumn, the dying of the leaves the most beautiful thing the trees did all year, the death beautiful in a way that the growth was not, the growth quiet and invisible, the death vivid and public, the colors the trees' farewell to the season, the farewell gorgeous.

She thought about Richard Cavendish. She had never met him — Catherine had been her contact, Catherine had written the checks, Catherine had been the person Wren spoke with. Richard had been a presence — the fly fisherman, the man who cared about the brook trout, the reason for the treatment. He had been a name attached to a motivation. Buy time. Buy time for the hemlocks so the trout have shade. The motivation had outlived the motivator. Catherine was continuing the treatment because Richard would have wanted it, the dead man's wish animating the living woman's spending, the commitment persisting beyond the person who had made it.

Like the trees. The trees persisted beyond the people who planted them. The Blackwell oak had persisted beyond Josiah Blackwell. The Garden Club maples had persisted beyond the women who planted them. The hemlocks in the ravine had persisted beyond whoever had let them grow there, centuries ago, the hemlocks volunteering on the slopes, the seeds falling from the canopy and germinating in the shade and growing slowly and replacing the previous generation and the generation before that, the hemlocks persisting through generations of themselves and generations of humans, the trees outliving the people, the people outliving the trees only when the trees were killed by something the people had brought.

The adelgid was something the people had brought. Not intentionally — the adelgid had arrived on imported nursery stock, on ornamental hemlocks from Japan, the insect a hitchhiker, the introduction accidental, the consequence systematic. The people had brought the thing that was killing the trees that the people wanted to save. The irony was not lost on Wren. The irony was never lost on her. The irony was the condition of her work — the people brought the pests and the diseases and the climate change that killed the trees and then the people hired Wren to save the trees from the things the people had brought. She was the cleanup crew for a disaster of human origin. She was the medic on a battlefield created by the supply chain.

She drove through the hills and the color and the October light and she thought about the ravine and the hemlocks and the trout and the warbler and the treatment and the time that was running out, the time that she had been buying for six years, the time that was getting more expensive and less effective, the time that was finite, the time that would end, and when the time ended the hemlocks would die and the ravine would change and the record would be all that remained.

The record and the stream. The stream would remain. The water would continue to flow from the hillside to the brook to the river to the sea, the hydrological cycle unchanged by the death of the trees that shaded it, the water indifferent to the hemlock or the birch, the water flowing regardless, the stream the one constant in the changing ravine, the stream the thing that had been there before the hemlocks and would be there after the hemlocks, the stream the oldest thing in the ravine, older than any tree, older than the soil, the stream cut into the bedrock by ten thousand years of flowing, the stream the record beneath the record, the geology beneath the biology, the stone beneath the wood.