I have always felt an affinity for nature, a deep atavistic sense
of kinship or belonging when walking in the woods, climbing a mountain, or
strolling along a deserted beach. Strange, I suppose, for a kid from the Bronx,
but there you have it, a connection where least you’d expect it.
We didn’t have
many trees in our neighborhood when I was growing up. In fact, we had none at
all in the unadorned urban stonescape of our block. The closest trees were marooned in the middle of Fordham Road in a small
crescent island of soil surrounded by lanes of bustling traffic. Banana Park,
we called it, owing to its shape. There were many more trees, of course—in Poe Park, three blocks north;
St. James Park, four blocks west; Moshulu Parkway, about ten blocks north; and
the Botanical Gardens, a good ten blocks east, though we were mindful in such
places of being beyond the pale of our Tiebout Avenue neighborhood.
But trees
themselves were nondescript in our world. While Eskimos are said to have some twenty
words for “snow,” given their exposure to the various kinds of precipitation in their
arctic experience, our lexicon of trees was strikingly impoverished. Those of
us growing up devoid of much direct contact with nature were largely unaware of
the rich diversity of tree species. With two delightful exceptions, to us a
tree was merely a tree.
We knew, of
course, that a Christmas tree was an evergreen, but we could not tell a pine from a fir or a spruce—all that mattered was to nudge our noses among the branches for an
aromatic whiff of the season. When the holiday lights of December gave way to the brittle dark of a new year, we’d watch the annual
ritual of the burning of the green as the older crowd gathered the trees
discarded curbside from the apartments in the neighborhood, and set them alight
in the gutter. The dried-out bristles and branches would flare and snap,
illuminating the night, and the sap would pop in the hard January air of the
city. 
The object of “chestnut fights,” as we called them, was not to beat each other with them, though that inadvertently happened when we’d miss the intended target from time to time. The idea was to hold high the shoelace, then lift the tethered chestnut as far back as you could and fire it at the chestnut your opponent dangled in the air. If your chestnut eventually cracked your foe’s, you added his total number of victories to your own and strutted about the block in search of another victim. It was a ritual, I was years later to discover, that must have been brought across the sea with the Irish immigrants in the 19th century, for there it is in the pages of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, with its reference to a “seasoned hacking chestnut, the conqueror of forty.” Well, we’d hack away at those dangling brown beauties until the next street game vied for our attention—spinning tops, or Skully, or stickball in the spring, by which time we were once again largely oblivious of trees
Then, nearly forty years ago now, we moved to the outer suburbs of Putnam County, where I was to
become acquainted with a host of oak, and maple, and birch, hemlock, choke
cherry, ash, and spruce, along with an abundance of other species, coming
eventually to know each by sight and by name, and to relish the form, beauty,
and presence of each tree. I came to know them as if they were old friends I
was recognizing once again, for among the trees—especially in the
woods—I felt a familiarity, a sense of feeling attuned, of being in a place where
I belonged. I felt the oneness of God’s creation.
And so it came as
no surprise to me that I should feel a similar affinity in another place I’m
fond of, Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, where Portals & Passageways: An Environmental
Art and Sculpture Exhibition, has opened at Highfield Hall & Gardens. All along the road leading up to the
mansion, as throughout the grounds and in the adjacent woods, regional artists
have installed yarn, glass, and wood creations intended to transport the viewer
to a higher awareness of the rhythms and energy of nature. Branch arbors, rough-hewn
wooden chairs, hand-blown glass orbs dangling from branches adorn the site. Crocheted or knit patterns called "yarn bombing" cling like colorful sweaters to the trunks and limbs
of birch, and beech, locust, maples, oaks and sycamores. A wooden walking labyrinth
beside a rhododendron garden invites further contemplation of one’s place in
the grand scheme of things.
