Piñon and sandstone

Some are tougher... or at least more stubborn... than the rest

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree…

So wrote [Alfred] Joyce Kilmer in his poem, Trees.

The trees Kilmer wrote about were lovely, but I dare say when he published his famous poem in 1913 he probably wasn’t thinking about trees like in the high country of the Southwest. He lived on the East Coast, a place where forests are thick with the lush deciduous growth that makes it easy to see loveliness.

Joyce Kilmer might have had to look very hard at a piñon pine to see god’s hand in its creation.

I have wonder what his poem would have looked like if he had grown up here in the Southwest. He might have used words like tough, determined, hardy, maybe even stubborn. Or how about valiant? Living in a land of dust and cactus, rattlesnakes and coyotes, he likely would have admired the gnarled branches, the sparse studding of clumps of tough needles, and the crusty bark oozing resin. He surely would have come to know the beauty of a tree that survived by shoving its roots through the slimmest cracks in rock where nothing else would grow.

What would Kilmer words have been when describing a tree that might be only a few feet tall after a hundred years of growth versus trees that grew a hundred feet tall in a few years?

We’ll never know, of course. But here’s the thing:

New Mexico’s piñon pines are a different kind of lovely. They’re a kind of miracle tree. They’re tougher than tough, surviving in an arid climate with poor soil and temperature extremes of 50° and more in one day. And yet no matter how terrible the conditions, as long as they are clinging to life they somehow manage to produce cones in which the nestled seeds - pine nuts - are so rich in nutrition that they have been used as a survival food for something like six thousand years, and likely longer.

They keep whole ecologies alive but now most of them are dying.

It’s never been easy surviving here in New Mexico, but now the land is subject to the even greater extremes of climate change. While the eastern parts of the state have been dealing with flooding, here on the western side we’re years into a severe drought and the accompanying infestation of bark beetles. Square miles of tough trees are dying week by week.

But there are the tougher than tough ones. Piñons like this one, growing in the least likely of places. Somehow still alive in spite of it all.

Here’s my poem:

I think that I shall never see
Such damn stubborn beauty as of a piñon pine tree.