The One On The Path
Sunday afternoon I walked my dog along a stretch of trail behind our house I’ve walked a hundred times, and I couldn’t take a step without crushing something. Acorns. Not the scattered dozen you kick aside on an ordinary October walk but a carpet of them, thousands, so thick in places that the leaf litter had gone from brown to the color of a wet saddle. They were in the ruts. They were in the dry washes. They had rolled down the slope and pooled against a fallen log the way gravel pools against a curb. I stopped counting the oaks that could have produced them, because the answer was all of them, and because the answer was also, I suspect, every white oak on the ridge, and every white oak on the next ridge, and oaks I will never see.
I stood for a while over one in particular. It was lying in the middle of the path, the hard-packed part, where nothing has grown since the trail was cut. It was a good acorn. Fat, unblemished, the cap off, the shell gone the color of a violin. If you were going to pick one acorn out of ten thousand to carry the oak forward, you might have picked this one. It was on the one patch of ground where it had no chance at all.
I thought: what a waste.
And then I noticed I’d thought it, and that the thought had arrived fully formed, with a feeling attached, one that had arrived before I’d done any thinking at all.
Most years an oak drops a modest crop. Then, every few years, on a schedule no one has fully decoded, the oaks across a whole region drop everything at once. Foresters call it a mast year, and this may be one, at least for the white oaks. The trees don’t confer. They seem to read the same spring, the same weather, the same dry summer two years back, and arrive at the same answer independently, which is that this is the year to bury the forest floor. The purpose, if a tree can be said to have one, is not as simple as dropping more acorns to make more trees. It is to make more acorns than the squirrels and the deer and the jays and the turkeys and the mice can possibly eat. Biologists call this predator satiation, one of those rare wonderful technical terms that says exactly what it means. The oak’s strategy is to feed its enemies past the point of appetite, so that the ones left over, the ones nobody got to, have a chance.
White oaks have it harder than most. Their acorns are sweet, low in the tannin that makes a red oak acorn bitter enough to lie on the ground all winter untouched, and so a white oak acorn is the one the squirrel eats first, on the spot, no caching, no forgetting. The oak’s answer is to have the acorn sprout immediately, in October, within days of hitting the ground, driving a root into whatever it landed on before anything can carry it off. It doesn’t wait for spring. It doesn’t wait for good ground. It can’t afford to.
None of this is a strategy the oak adopted. It’s one the oak arrived at, the way a river arrives at the sea. White oaks that dumped everything at once and sprouted on contact outlasted white oaks that didn’t, over a span of time I can’t hold in my head, and here we are, and the trail is impassable. The tree has no favorite. The tree does not suspect that any particular acorn is the one. The waste is the method.
Standing there, my dog looking back at me from the turn in the trail up ahead, the phrase that came to me was survival of the fittest. It wasn’t Darwin’s, originally. Herbert Spencer coined it and Darwin borrowed it late, and fittest never meant strongest or best. It meant best fitted, the glove to the hand. What gets fitted isn’t the acorn. It’s the gamble. It’s the whole profligate method, measured only by whether it got carried forward. The oak isn’t sacrificing its acorns for the good of oaks. The oak is an individual whose way of being an individual is to throw ten thousand of itself into the dark of the forest floor.
I can know that and still not feel it. What I feel, standing over the one on the path, is waste. Wasted material. Wasted effort. Wasted potential. The feeling arrives before the thought, and the feeling is not about the acorn. It’s about me. Me, the animal that can’t see a seed without seeing a candidate, because I have spent my whole life inside a single skull, and from inside the skull every life looks like the one that is supposed to make it. I have a word for the ones that don’t make it, and that word is tragedy, and I wouldn’t know what to call an oak that felt tragedy ten thousand times every autumn, except that I might call it insane.
The oak doesn’t feel it. But I do, and that’s the part I kept turning over in my head on the walk home: I’m no better at seeing my own strategy than the acorn is at seeing the oak’s. Whatever I am, I also arrived at it rather than adopting it. The urge that makes me look at the acorn and feel loss was fitted to something, over a span of time I also can’t hold in my head, and it wasn’t fitted to me. I feel what I feel. I find the reasons afterward. The reasons tend to put me at the center, and I’m not sure, on reflection, whether they are any more reliable than the acorn’s opinion of the path.
Every fall the state forestry division asks people like me to go out and gather white oak acorns for the nursery in Delano, where they’re grown into seedlings and planted back into forests that aren’t regenerating on their own. Caps off. No weevil holes. If it rattles, leave it. I think it’s a good program and I may do it. But I notice what it offers me, which is a way to make one acorn matter. To pick it up, carry it, be the reason. The oak has no such need. The forest it made is the forest that didn’t need anyone to care which acorn made it. That’s not an argument against the nursery. I think it’s just the first thing we reach for, every time, when we set out to help something that got here without us.
Following my dog on the way back up the hill towards home, I found one more. It was there, on the bare dirt at the edge of the trail, split along one seam, and out of the split had come a pale root about the length of my thumbnail, bent at the tip where it had met the ground and started to push. It is a white oak, and it is October, and it has no choice. It has nowhere to go but down into packed clay, and so it is going.
I didn’t move it. I thought about moving it. That was the feeling again, the candidate feeling, wanting to pick the one and carry it forward. I told myself the oak had already picked, that the oak had picked all of them, that the oak was right. Then I thought about what I had just thought. The oak isn’t right. That implies some deliberation the oak wasn’t doing. It was just another reason, arriving afterward, to make myself feel better about leaving.
I left it anyway. The dog was impatient to get home. I walked on, and felt one crunch under my boot, one of thousands, and did not know which.
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