46 O R I O N november | december 201646

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november | december 2016 O R I O N 47

I had not expected to see all this mutilation. It would seem something of a tradition. Along this trail, the slen-der and old madrones, each and every one, are carved with the whims of passersby, resembling the arborglyphs of

lonely shepherds on aspen around the West. But do you know the madrone? It is the most human of trees. It has soft, smooth skin and often bends like a dancer twisting myriad, dryadic arms. It exfoliates as it grows, shedding translucent cinnamon curls, burst-ing at its seams. This tree, with the milky undercolor of a honey-dew melon rind, flares from nude to satin orange to fillet red, and it sometimes deigns to grow a scaly bark, rough and gray. The quintessence of umbilical, the mother tree: madrone.

Like revelers at a tavern table, we carve into this body, peanut shells underfoot. We have nothing here if not time and keys. Walk-ing this trail to the top of Lower Table Rock near Medford, Oregon, you climb under power lines through black oak and glossy man-zanita (some little cousin, by language, family, and texture) and then the madrones take hold in the nutrient-poor soil, where they thrive and wait for fire. That’s where I begin to slow, noticing these inscriptions. Studying this proliferation of incisions. They build in number until you can’t ignore them. Is this simple gra=iti or col-lective art? A memorial or a gallery of horrors?

As a kid in California, I was taught to call these “refrigerator trees.” Put your hand on its smooth surface, docents and teach-ers said. Press your cheek to it. Wrap yourself around it and feel the chill of sap close beneath the skin. As if magnetized, we are attracted. On this trail, we leave on them missives and sketches, the equivalent of family photos and shopping lists. Some trees are cut so profusely that they are unreadable, sorely disfigured. Others are only lightly marked. With smiley faces, penises, and other likable vulgarities. With indiscriminant scratches, the passing glance of a fingernail.

But most of all with names and, especially, initials. We remind these trees and ourselves of our persistence. SETH scrawled as if with claws. Inez. Emily. Noah. MICAH. MJ, KLB. IN (or HZ, depending on how you read it). Pick any two letters. There is a multiplication of equations: S + J, KD + MN. J + A 4 EVER. A + C = <. John + Chris. Shaila y Martin 2012 → . . . Some of them so fresh, so viscous green, they might have been excavated this afternoon.

In a certain light, this place is violent (and how the light does shift as the clouds pass in a high wind, spotlights playing through the trees). There is, here, the pseudo-masochistic attempt to define another’s skin. Don’t pretend you don’t see it. These trees are nothing if not figurative. They have accidental pimples and impromptu teats, swellings and cavities where the trees’ flesh has died back or grown over broken limbs. And I don’t doubt that some of these carvers imagined the skin of a madrone was someone else’s. Or their own. We play at vivisection, at surgery. We are the tattoo or the tortured artists. This walk is a reminder that stories (you plus me) are often scouring, and sometimes involve the erasure of something. What is an essay, or a book, but an incision into a tree?

But most carve not because the tree stands for the body — not consciously, I believe — but because it is softer than rock. These madrones present themselves, a supple medium to bind our love in its blindness. There is such ultimate sweetness in such severe writing. This trail is a lovers’ arbor, a linear bower with a long memory of holding hands. After all, the primary symbols here are pluses and hearts, one kept safe in the bubble of the other. And maybe it should come as no surprise that before the heart symbol — that dimpled inversion of a teardrop — came to mean “love” in the thirteenth century, the shape already existed on her-aldry as a representation of foliage. Of water lily and ivy and, in nearby forests, the sorrel that lies at the feet of giants.

N I C K N E E L Y

Meet the madrone, on whose skin we leave our mark

A Body of Treesp h o t o g r a p h s b y E I R I K J O H N S O N

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48 O R I O N november | december 2016

There are, as well, the stars and crosses of sanctioned faith, but the di=erence between a plus sign and a cross, I see now, is a mere and tenuous extension. Jesus Team A is also carved here and there, and is everywhere implied, I imagine, for those who carry the letter in their hearts. Nearby is the circle-A of anarchy, and, as I near the summit of the trail, another svelte bole reads, Dios te quiero mucho — God I love you so much — in a vertical cas-cade. But who is this you: God, or some other a=ection?

All of these symbols, these letters, are a kind of arrow point-ing to the self as well as to the ancient plateau of Lower Table Rock, where you can stand on the edge of basalt cli=s and look out at the fertile Rogue Valley, a gouge in time. Where you can survey the S-curves of the river and the pear orchards, their white spoiling blossoms, and see Medford in the distance and Interstate 5 cutting through. Mount McLoughlin is a snowy stratovolcano on the horizon. The red-faced vultures soar along the cli=s below, swerving hard in the warm updrafts that blow across our cheeks.

The madrone, I should say, was given its name by a certain Father Crespi on the first Spanish expedition into Alta, Califor-nia, not far from where I grew up beside San Francisco Bay. He didn’t care for its native name — the Spanish had come to evan-gelize — and he didn’t name it the refrigerator tree. Instead, this tree, which from Baja to British Columbia grows along the coast wherever it isn’t too wet, made him remember the madroño of his homeland: the strawberry tree, with fruits that do resemble fresas. It is another in the Arbutus genus, a close relative of our madroño. And “The Strawberry Tree,” you might be interested to hear, was also the original name for Hierony-mus Bosch’s most famous triptych, the altarpiece now in the Prado known as The Garden of Earthly Delights. In the early six-teenth century, paintings weren’t titled, but in the catalogue of the Court of Spain, this one from the Netherlands later became known as La Pintura del Madroño.

The left panel of Bosch’s wild masterpiece is the unblemished paradise of Adam and Eve; the right depicts a wondrous but woe-ful damnation in an underworld of fire and demons. The largest, the center panel, overflows with a strange fantasy of nudes and fruits, either a picture of sin before the flood or, perhaps, if we read more generously, of paradise realized. No one really knows; we interpret according to our tastes. Pale, attenuated bodies lean against and pick from the strawberry trees; they hold and wear what look like cherries but which, to my mind, could just as easily be the edible berries of our madrone: bloodred and a favorite of birds, but mostly tasteless to us. Bosch’s people seem to cavort and contort with each other and animals in a landscape of excess that if you study their small faces, isn’t necessarily the same as bliss. Nor is it meant to be.

Here I stand, alive, in the garden del Madroño. There are nudes all around, twisting. There is love, and there are the knives that lacerate it. That prove it. O= the trail, in a nexus of trunks, I even find one on the ground: a burnished, winking serration with a black plastic handle. The knife lies dropped or hidden, as if a couple had been caught in the act and fled, leaving this evidence, as if they wanted it to be found. As if they planned to return and continue their clandestine, bawdy art. To cut their hearts out all over again. Or is it left here intentionally so that others — so that I — will take it up and add to the writing? I think of the third panel of Bosch’s garden, a netherworld where knives loom, splitting a pair of gigantic ears and piercing hands and stomachs. Pinning its people like moths. This realm is hinged to all the others.

Soon I begin to doubt whether particular windows into the gray heartwood are old letters or natural scars. Soon the innate patterns of bark, all checkers and curls, begin to pulse and blend with alphabet. I think a tree says fear, when it may say pearl. I think a heart holds Dad, and am disappointed when it is only D + D. Everywhere on these trees is the reminder of growth and change. All these letters will be distorted, subsumed, by new skin. Even the deepest shapes, the largest hearts, slowly infold. Most of these equations are left unfinished. Gradually the living phloem moves forward, like a lava flow always on the verge of cooling.

The biggest trees hold the longest memory, but it is the younger madrones that are ripest for paring, with their soft, herbal skin. Those near the trail’s few benches (also carved) are especially vulnerable, most popular, and I wander through these groves, a voyeur with his instruments — his camera and his notebook. Red- Neck, reads one tree, and the words are so apt, so freighted, they rise to utter significance. They’re stacked one atop another, the hyphen a copy editor’s afterthought, the words a put-down and a coming together and a declaration of identity. But I think also of all the necking that has gone on in places like this, from here to 4 ever.

Down the trail comes a pair. She is, like the hue of the madro-ne, a redhead, and her shoulder-length hair is windswept like the meadow and its ephemeral pools atop Lower Table Rock; her eyebrows are pierced, a deflated backpack is on her shoulders. He is wearing black-and-white camo shorts that hang below his knees, tall white socks pulled over his angular calves. His black t-shirt reads Fried Chicken and Gasoline, and I don’t quite know its degree of irony. Down the trail they flow, holding hands, a jaunt in their step and with the relaxed, faint smiles of electric com-panionship. On this unexpectedly sunny afternoon, his exposed and chiseled triceps have burned rosy. Their necks are the pink of their a=ection. A hermit thrush sings from the understory with its ruddy tail. a

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november | december 2016 O R I O N 49

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