The arks we build by accident, or: an essay for any author who fears obsolescence

Trust in the spookiest parts of yourself; stop trying to understand them.

The following is a revised-for-you version of a piece I wrote a while ago for Chestnut magazine, which, yes, is an actual magazine.

There’s a parable in it, provided you’re a failure or fear failure or have recently faced a monumental loss or humiliation of some kind, professional or otherwise.

If you’re an author or editor who suspects that the best of you—the meaning of you—lies somewhere in the past—if you feel yourself lurching forward, frightened, into a meaningless future—this is for you.

Walk with me. You’ll see.

*

Beneath them for the first time, I react as any sane person would: eyes brimming, jaw on loamy floor, words insufficient to explain to my startled sister what’s happening. Brigadoon. The Galactica. The Ark. I cannot BELIEVE this. How?

We’re standing underneath 14 soaring, columnar, blight-free American chestnut trees: an entire Mount Olympus’ worth of the old gods, thronged by innumerable saplings.

Here’s my recurring dream made real, the one in which I enter a clearing and my puzzled grandparents stare back at me: no, Anna, we were never dead; we were here the whole time.

Here’s the impossible world, the inevitabilities of spacetime fallen away—and in exurban Brussels, Belgium of all places.

How? Here’s how.

*

In the summer of 1904, a forester at what’s now known as the Bronx Zoo notices something: American chestnuts on the property bubbling, wobbling, withering, bright orange lesions ringing their trunks. This is chestnut blight, Cryphonectria parasitica, accidentally introduced to the United States on imported Asian trees. Unlike their Asian cousins, American chestnuts haven’t evolved in tandem with this blight; they have no natural resistance to it. So down they go.

Spores spread infernal down the coast, driving Castanea dentata into functional extinction in less than half a century. American chestnuts—buttress of our mountain cathedrals, economic cradle of Appalachia, age-old friend and sacred medicine to the Indigenous—die horribly, almost to a one.

Embers flicker postapocalyptic in the ash: a survivor here and there; doomed stump sprouts in the footprint of dead giants.

Once again, the country as we know it is over.

*

In the spring of 2022, I meet my sister for a quick sightseeing trip: Paris to Copenhagen, via Brussels, in five days. Brussels is at my insistence; MonumentalTrees.com tells me the largest surviving American chestnut on Earth grows in an arboretum near there.

I am deranged about chestnuts. The topic is a new volunteer in my neurological garden, one of the strange growths remaining after the pandemic ransacked everything else.

We stand at their feet, and I cry.

*

In the spring or summer of 1798, French revolutionaries ransack the countryside outside of Brussels, destroying a nearly 200-year-old Capuchin monastery. Soldiers scatter the monks like seeds: exile, town, prison, death.

In the forest, no humans remain, godly or otherwise.

For the next 50 years, trees find their footing in the ruins. Then Leopold I, first king of the Belgians, buys the land and chops them all down. He needs the timber for fires and other instruments of conquest.

Before long, Leopold I dies, and Leopold II takes over. Fans of the novel Heart of Darkness might recall this man as one of the most cruel colonizers in history: a king who claims all Congo for himself and frog-marches its people into forced labor, killing between 1 and 15 million.

Leopold II sets Congo up for unending misery, stealing their riches to build lavish public works back home. Belgians call him “The Builder King.”

All of Leopold II’s buildings have to be built from something—to say nothing of ships to bring rubber home from the Congo and blades to cut off Congolese workers’ hands if they don’t harvest the rubber fast enough. This makes him interested in timber and the study of timber production, otherwise known as forestry.

In 1902, Leopold II approves the Capuchin ruin site for Arboretum Tervuren, the most ambitious forestry project in Belgian history.

*

Dr. Charles Bommer, 46, pitches Arboretum Tervuren to King Leopold in the language of nascent progressive management: it’s good business for us and good, clean fun for the masses. Let me build a living museum here, and our country will benefit twice: a park for the people; a timber research facility for you.

In truth, Bommer sees something far more personal in the project: the chance to make his magnum opus from bark and soil. The son of two botanists—a polymath and certified Serial Hobby Guy—he overflows with curiosity. He’s a skilled photographer, intuitive landscape designer, and deranged phytogeographer, obsessed with how time and topography shape plant life on Planet Earth. (We all have our thing.)

Bommer’s pet peeve, his hyperfixation, is why Europe is so much less diverse than Asia and the Americas when it comes to tree species. It’s due to geographic accident, he’s sure: inopportune mountains and glaciers, nothing more. He’s convinced that if given the chance, countless other species would thrive here. Why not source as many as he can from every major forest ecosystem in the world that could even theoretically thrive in Belgium, plant them all side by side, and see what happens?

King Leopold says yes, awarding Dr. Bommer what amounts to a 300-acre sandbox. Bommer goes on a buying frenzy, reaching out to landscapers and other seed men all over the world. He plots out on a map where all the different ecosystems will go: Andes and Atlas, Cascades and Everglades, Mediterranean mountains and—yes—Appalachian hollers. It’s absurd; it’s unnecessary; it’s beautiful—like a postmodern pastiche, a David Foster Wallace novel written in dendrological grammar.

He plants and plants and plants and plants and plants and dies.

*

Two world wars exhaust the Belgian people’s appetite for foreign invasion and human misery. The colonial project wanes, and with it, the public’s interest in gawking at exotic trees. They turn their attention back to native plants.

By the end of the 20th century, the arboretum is a neglected, weedy mess, and in the middle of that mess, growing up to 125’ tall and eleven feet around, full of birdsong and flowers, surrounded by safe and happy offspring, fourteen perfect American chestnut trees dance with the sky.

*

The thing about American chestnuts is that they’re kind of like Appalachian people: as long as nobody’s taking away their means of survival, they do best when left alone. They’re frustrating to nurture in that they don’t take well to fuss; they don’t like too much water, too much nutrition, too much anything.

All chestnuts need is time—and the odd apocalyptic fire to clear the overstory, eliminating the competition. In the rebound, they grow faster than most of their rivals.

*

I am still crying. I was expecting one big tree—one, not fourteen.

My sister—who is more of an animal than plant person—looks at me, baffled. To the uninitiated, American chestnuts look just like particularly large sturdy tulip poplars or something.

I never want to leave. She wants to leave after an hour, given that it’s sort of her birthday and we are ostensibly on this trip to celebrate her birthday. Rude. So we leave.

I think: who runs this place?

I think: can I find their email?

I think: I have to come back.

*

In 2006, Patrick Huvenne takes over regional management of several forests in Flanders, including Tervuren. Although I imagine he wouldn’t describe it this way, being a Gen X Belgian man, he finds in the arboretum a kind of real-life Secret Garden—a weed-choked world wonder enclosed unto itself, full of giant sequoias and hickories and miles on miles of Douglas firs and monkey puzzles. He’s bowled over. He becomes obsessed with restoring the place.

Huvenne and his team spend 18 years letting light into Tervuren again: clearing trails, putting up signs, thinning stands, renovating the once-dilapidated forester’s cottage. Two of his colleagues, Wilfried and Kevin, move in with their families to start caring for the place full-time.

In short, they resurrect Eden—just in time for climate change to come in and start destroying it again.

*

By the time I make it back to Tervuren in August, 2023—this time to meet Patrick, Wilfried, and Kevin in person—the deaths are already legion. Across the park, magnificent conifers are dying en masse: Douglas firs, Western hemlocks, and Sitka spruces.

Driving us around in his beat-up forester’s van, Wilfried, the newly-retired forester in charge of Tervuren’s New World plantings, points the dead stands out to me, mourning the trees like old friends. (I suspect the retirement adds to the grief; for auld lang syne, my dear, and so on.)

Conifers are dying over there for all the same reasons they are here: drought, heat, bark beetles. One plague that hasn’t reached Tervuren yet, though, is chestnut blight. An isolated case was destroyed in Brussels in 2015, but that’s the closest it’s come.

Getting out of the van, Wilfried walks with me toward Appalachia. More dead conifers creak at us as we pass. But also, among the ruins, we see a wondrous thing: chestnut seedlings. Surprise: here are some in the Central Pennsylvania planting under a massive Eastern hemlock. Double surprise: here’s another amidst Araucaria in the Andes.

Baby chestnuts are popping up all over the park. Climate change is an apocalypse greater than any forest fire, but I repeat: apocalypse was always the chestnuts’ time to shine. They might not be evolved to cope with blight, but they’re exquisitely evolved to thrive when conifers die back. Their moment is the rebound. It always has been. It always will be.

I reel. Here it is: hope in a place burnt down by human violence and built up by human love, over and over and over and over.

I know more sadness is coming for Tervuren and for us all. But I also know there’ll be more Bommers, Patricks, Wilfrieds, us.

Here is hope, which, despite everything, smolders through the ages, sustained by love, until the canopy finally opens and the surge begins at last.

*

You do see why I’m telling you all this, right? I hope?

Ruin is not the end, is my point, or at least one of my points. It’s excruciatingly painful; it’s also an overstory cleared.

A book is spacetime evaded; that’s another one. A book, like any act of love, operates outside of natural law—time, death, distance. Once formed, it coils somewhere just beyond, liable to reappear in the spacetime of history wherever and whenever, moving in any old direction from there: backward, against entropy; forward, into the hearts of people you’ll never meet; outward across the Atlantic to random Flemish arboreta.

You have no fucking clue. None of us do.

Our loves, our strange fixations, our inexplicable passions: they know something we don’t. Trust in their phytogeography.

The parts of you that yearn to explain, to justify, to understand, to conquer, to plan: these are the mortal parts, the ones that disappear in time.

The heart is what stays put.

American chestnut, 50.8059° N, 4.4930° E, 2022