Peeling

The white bark peels in sheets thin enough to write on. People have done this. The Ojibwe used birch bark for everything — canoes, containers, scrolls, maps, messages. The bark is waterproof, flexible, and available in sheets the size of a page if you know how to harvest it, which I do because someone taught me, though I won't harvest a living tree, and neither should you. I work in forestry. Not the romantic kind with an axe and a checked shirt. The kind with spreadsheets and tree health surveys and meetings about grant funding for replanting schemes. I spend most of my time in an office in Inverness and the rest of it in the woods, which is the right proportion in the wrong order. Birch is the pioneer. It's the first tree to colonize open ground — after a fire, after a clearance, after the glaciers retreated ten thousand years ago. It grows fast, lives short, and makes way for the trees that will outlast it. Oak will follow birch. Scots pine will follow birch. The birch won't be there to see it. It did its work. I think about this more than a person should. The pioneer that doesn't benefit from its own pioneering. The tree that makes the soil better for other trees and then dies. Ecologists call this facilitation. I call it Tuesday, because my job is planting trees that will be mature fifty years after I retire, and the satisfaction has to be theoretical. The birch in my garden is twelve years old. I planted it as a sapling, three feet tall, on the day my daughter was born. She's twelve now. The tree is twenty feet. They're both doing fine, though the tree requires less supervision and doesn't need to be reminded about homework. The bark started peeling last year. Young birch is smooth and dark. Mature birch peels. It's a sign of age, though age in a birch isn't the same as age in an oak — a birch at sixty is ancient, an oak at sixty is adolescent. The birch lives fast, which is not a metaphor for anything, or if it is, it's a metaphor I'm choosing not to complete. I peel a strip of bark from the dead branch that fell in last month's wind. Paper-thin. White on the outside, orange on the inside. I hold it up to the light and it glows. I could write on this. A note, a message, a line of something important. Instead I put it in my pocket and walk home. The tree is still growing. The daughter is still growing. The forest I planted seven years ago is knee-high and will be head-high by the time anyone reads this and towering by the time my daughter has children, if she has children, if the deer don't eat it, if the climate cooperates, if. A lot of ifs. Forestry is faith. You plant, and you trust, and you don't get to see.