The Black Spruce
To understand the black spruce, remember it grows from a fist-sized root ball as grey and compact and crucial as a brain. Each black spruce spindles itself straight up into the crack of the cold, stout branches making a skyward scrub from base to apex all winter night. And below that brain of roots lies permafrost, even in summer. This, then, is a tree that keeps ice in mind.
I remember meeting black spruce during my move from southeast Alaska to the interior. I was ill at the time, a fjordlands creature with an immune system gone haywire, taking temporary leave from the rainforest and a sabbatical from the whole glaciated coast against which my fevers flared. I went inland, aiming for semi-arid, boreal-forested Fairbanks, where I hoped to find a kind of medicine.
It was end-summer when I went, fall-not-winter. The road north took me through Tok. Here is what I remember: I rolled down the highway and the spruce flanking the road shot me an uncanny glance. Thus arrested, I glanced back.
Hello
Said the black spruce
We are the toughest things you have ever met.
Those black spruce on the road to Tok, they told me something about where I was going and what kind of cure I might find. They said it straight—with their tight skyward shape, their dark color, their dry firm trunk-stems as spindly as old canes, their flaking skin bark and waxy stout needles, that fierce clod of roots that looks like a dry brain—they said just what it means to live outside. In winter. And to do it well.
As if falling into step with a tree might heal my ailment.
I reeled a little bit. I was still sick, see—strong enough to drive, but not strong enough to open my car door in a cross wind.
Yet I heard them clearly.
Hello
Said the black spruce
We are the toughest things you have ever met.
I learned something about myself then: if the trees will talk, I will listen.
What did I hear? For starters, those trees’ toughness so far exceeded mine I laughed out loud.
We are the toughest things you have ever met, they repeated, except maybe for chickadees.
I thought of Emily Dickinson, of course—
I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
So it went that on land that loves to be frozen—that lives for it, really—I sidled up to the black spruce. I paused in Fairbanks for a few years to consider it.
In the Goldstream Valley, where I first got to know the boreal forest, the black spruce grow in the low places, wetlands or bogs, while birch trees grow on hills where the ground is drier. But soil type is only one of the differences between birch and spruce habitat. There are also inversions: during winter’s coldest spells, an inversion sends the most bitter air downhill into the bogs while a fluff of warmer air sits on top. Above the inversion among the birches, it may be twenty below—but forty below beneath the inversion among the black spruce.
I wintered both ways. And as it had by the side of the sea, my immune system kept its own counsel. Persistent reactions came and went. Sometimes they swelled, ruptured the skin, and became the site of strange infections.
Have it either way on the question of “warm” and “cold.” Two Rivers poet Derrick Burleson cuts to the chase by gauging not winter’s cold, but winter’s color. He arrives at an understanding of blue, sees that in the winter night the birch trees glow blue, that their shadows cast dense blues on the paler blues of the snowpack. Derrick sees even the blue shadow of his breath. But that breath itself—this makes a cloud of white rolling out into the air over blue snow, against blue treetrunks in a birch stand. I re-read his book Melt to verify all this: indeed, the moon, the snow, the birch—all the hues of winter are blue save one: there is white in the poet’s exhaled breath alone.
I was grateful to Derrick for revealing how shades of blue bind the snow and the moon and the birch trees and everyone’s nightshadows to winter, to cold.
And so imagine my surprise when one night, I perceived red.
It was there among the black spruce, down in the deepest nightcold. Unmistakable. A one-color aphorism inscribed in the trees. I adjusted, centered my attention, and proceeded to study those trees long and hard for many months, for many looping miles. I studied that red by touch and by tongue. I studied by sorrow, by insistence. I found heat. And I didn’t know what to make of it, for with the ebb and flow of my own fevers this much was clear: my illness was at its core also a kind of heat. Yet the black spruce, spindling their heat up into the crack of winter cold, were fine.
I try, now, to consider red as a serious proposition. Yet I don’t know that I found a kind of medicine during those subarctic winters. I do know that I grew quite close to a kind of tree, the black spruce, and that I missed them when I returned to the rainforest.
And so I turn to memory and think back to those winters. How the snow came each October and I skied through the frozen bogs every day to the end of April. I skied by headlamp, by moonlight, by the scrape of sun sending its brief, midday lance across the earth. Especially during an inversion. If it was too cold to breathe or blink or budge, I skied. I think now that I did it specifically to be with the black spruce, over and over, three years in a row. To hear them thinking through the coldest of it, to gather what I could of how well they fared.
That is probably how I began to see beneath the surface of things. Through all the blue of snow and shadows I saw in the black spruce something redhot, something I might now describe as redhot ease with winter, redhot ease with lunar cold, its airless clamp.
What I’m saying is: it is easy to be a black spruce out in forty below.
Though memory reminds me that when I first perceived their ease, again I just laughed. Copying them would be impossible. In my sick strong fragile eager confused animal body, it would be impossible to live as perfectly as a tree. This was as freeing a realization as any other, an echo of Franz Kafka: there is hope but not for us.
Still, I think of red.
Red, the heat of fire.
In the body heat can occur at a cellular level. In excess, it is inflammation.
Medical science ties inflammation to aging. We might infer that aging (cellularly understood) is a condition of increasing inflammation.
But remember: Elders carry knowledge the young cannot fathom.
This strikes me as significant. Thus, what links inflammation to wisdom? What do I mean if I say, “the red heat of the wise”?
Those flecks of red? I’ll tell you what they are. Those flecks of red are a method. It is how a black spruce handles its heat, using it to live well winter upon winter upon winter. It is how a black spruce looks a person in the eye in order to say, this is how to live in step with good, hard cold.
Can a human body mimic the thinking of a tree? I try, I try.
The chickadees, though—they’re something else. Singing this and that at the birdfeeder in forty below. Somehow this is possible: with their teeny black stick-legs and their teeny feathered bodies, somehow it is possible for chickadees to live through the winter night. The black spruce and I, we simply watch. We hold our admiration close where it grows, one neuron at a time, until we can make an idea of it, an idea with a mind of its own, which we quickly knob into the earth and guard until it grows thick as blood, bright as conviction, healthy as nightfall.
Corinna Cook is the author of Leavetakings, a lyric essay collection (University of Alaska Press, 2020). Read more.
Corinna Cook’s “The Black Spruce” was previously published in Alaska Magazine.