by Hally Winters
“Of the many circumstances in my life for which I feel gratitude, these friendships shine with a particular brightness. They make me look eagerly to the future, to imagine all the conversations to come.”
— The Crying Book by Heather Cristle
Trees experience time differently. We drove up to see the snow. I had not driven with her in a while. When we first became friends, we would drive up the LA forest and day camp. It was our way of slowing time down, or maybe feeling it in a natural way. A way that didn’t translate it into cash or something to be used up. We were so young, and I know what it entails to say that, and it’s true that any time in the past is essentially a we were so young moment, but still.
The wonder about the LA forest is that it’s so close to Los Angeles. It’s like an upside-down universe when compared to its sister. Yuccas extend from the sides of cliffs and reach upwards to the sky like door hangers. Everything there wants to defy gravity. There’s even a spot called Gravity Hill that we would park our car into neutral on and wait till the car rolled upwards. It’s an illusion, but illusions have their place.
That winter the forest offered illusion. Winter hits this sweet spot in the forest for people who don’t know everything about ecology. We couldn’t tell what was product of the season or product of climate change. In the summer, you see it so clear. The circles don’t touch. As she was driving us around corners, I saw wolves, bears, the grim reaper swirling. All these images were just burnt stumps, the leftovers of a wildfire. The shifting shapes picked a side in the debate. The trees losing leaves looked like death at first, then she said they are deciduous. Then she said they are native: Western Sycamores.
We parked at Monte Cristo camp ground. We were low enough to have light rain but not snow. She said that’s mistletoe, on the sycamores. She ran over and tried to climb the tree. It was too high up and there were no low-hanging branches. I suggested we pull the car around and she could climb on top to pick some. I liked the idea of mistletoe. She said they’re not native. They’re a parasite, but she wasn’t sure what they took from the tree. They may have just taken photosynthesis, in which winter growth would be no problem because sycamores were deciduous. When the summer came the mistletoe would stop.
The birds were all jumping between the high canopy, loud. We watched to see if they interacted with the mistletoe. They seemed not to. We couldn’t see! They were so fast and high up there.
The campground was empty. Fallen branches were everywhere and we had just began to notice them. She said they must’ve been cut because each tree has a fallen branch. I said they weren’t because the cut wasn’t clean. It must have been the storm. We had already forgotten about the storm. The storm that brought us on our day-trip. We began to notice huge things as we lingered. Things we should have noticed a long time ago, that were so loud. The area was marked with tragedy. We also started noticing small things. The little green seeds stuck with a gluey substance on the bark of the sycamores. A winged bug underneath a loose piece of bark.
I said to a coworker after the storm I bet because of all the eucalyptus trees the ground gets all messy and difficult to clean up. He said no not at all actually. They hold onto their bark throughout the whole storm and when they sense it’s gone, it’s over, they let it all go. I thought of the competition between the wind and the sun seeing who could take a man’s coat off. The wind blew and blew but the man held on tighter. Afterwards, the sun shined and the man took the coat off himself. I wondered if it was because of who went first, the wind before the sun. If it had been the other way, the sun before the wind, the man trying to put his coat back on. If with a sudden gust wind the man would not have wrapped his coat on properly, and in the struggle to find shelter, the wind would have succeeded.
She drove the car under the mistletoe and hopped up on the hood. She picked the ones with berries and handed them to me. I put them in the trunk and she began to back the car up. She didn’t have her seatbelt on and was backing up near a ditch. You should put your seatbelt on in case the car rolls. She was half standing to see out the back. She said the car wasn’t doing any of that with her in the car.
She said when she used to drive up to her grandmother’s house in Big Bear with her mom in the car, and the roads were icy, the car would start slipping and she could control it and pull them off to the side safely. It happened multiple times. Her mom would be terrified and then look at her in awe. She did that so many times especially in her old car that worked like a space ship. She’d have to pour a little coke here and there to get the battery to work. Turn off all the lights, open doors, jimmy a nob. I remembered that car. That was the car she had when I first met her.
I decided that was the best time to talk to her. I had been looking for a time to talk to her that whole trip. I had almost given up, until she offered me an opening. We parked the car under another spot of mistletoe, so she could check that bundle out. I turned to her and said I believe you. About how you pulled the car over on the ice all those times. I believe you, and I believe you can do that with your life. I smiled and cried against my will. I don’t know how to cry with other people. I said I love you. She said I love you too and thanked me. She said friends are great, sighed and smiled. I said I liked being called a plural and we laughed the tears off.
She pulled that bundle down and said no the mistletoe does not take the photosynthesis. Its roots are in the trees sucking its nutrients. That’s kind of disgusting. They’re basically leeches. We stepped back and looked at the massive shape of the tree. Its bare branches and the balls of mistletoe hung like Christmas ornaments. It transformed into a stray dog with clumps of fur and fleas gathered around open sores. I was overcome with the desire to slowly and violently rip the mistletoe out of each tree.
We drove away as soon as another car came and I thought that was timing. We drove up further unable to play music because there was no reception, pointing out fat hawks poofy because they were cold or poofy because they were badass motherfuckers. We didn’t know. As we drove around one corner, the snow came full view and we were so close to it.
We stopped at what seemed the top of the mountain as it began to slope down. She smoked a cigarette and I wondered if it was so she wouldn’t drink. That was every cigarette. I walked off and gathered snow from a patch. I threw the snowball at her and she put the cigarette out as a fire truck drove by. We walked over to the edge of the cliff as the heavens started to split. Behind them, a sun was setting for a city. We were so far above the sky it seemed the sun could set for hours. She was somehow freezing in her furry coat that made her look like a puffball and asked for mine. I said no way as I walked between the red California buckwheat. I wondered if talking to her had done anything, anything at all. If offering my words of love to her was just me offering myself an I did everything I could. If I had offered her another way to fail. Not the next night but the following she drank again. But I tell myself trees feel time differently. Missing water one year the effects will be seen in the next. Each ring has years of drought, years of devastation.
As we drove down the mountain, our good day done, we found ourselves in the clouds. The side of the cliff was absent gray. I am sure there was cliff there, but no human could see it. If it were someone’s first day on the mountain, I hope they would revisit when the cliffs were naked and burnt. To hear the silence of a place after a fire. To see burnt cacti looking like the wrappings the grocery store puts on a pear to prevent bruising. Come back in a year or two, to see the lower shrubbery fighting its way back. And did I tell you that Western Sycamore trees grow so fast, and so do California Sumacs. And a forest only comes back because birds make it so.
Hally Winters studied English and Creative Writing at The University of California, Berkeley. She is currently an MFA candidate for creative writing at California Institute of the Arts. Her poetry can be found at Cal Literary Arts Magazine. She currently lives in Sunland, California and works at a lovely garden nursery. Follow her on Twitter @hallybearie.