BIG PINE VERSUS THE COMIC ZONE

I thought of renaming this blog The Comic Zone, after the little altar at which I worked for some years.  Then I remembered why I call this The Big Pine.

For years I thought pines were lower class trees.  (I can be as attitudinal as a teenager or a Tea Party pundit.)  Pines are beautiful, but it's a Neanderthal beauty, bare earth beautiful.

You'd expect them to be cranky, they're so tough,  but they are wonderfully loving and innocent.  And giving: more about that later.  They are in deep synergy with the mycelium and microbes and they know it. When I realized that those mountains would be unwooded if it weren't for pines, my appreciation bounded.

The first torrential rains, remember them?  When the hot Earth at last broke the sky and the first rain fell.  When there were enough slicks of algae, lichen, or simpler living things putting up such a wide plane of prayer, "Let us live," that the Grand Architect consented to opened the sprinklers.

Or would you rather consider how life tempers the atmosphere with gases.  You might even imagine a bubble of cool gathering in a low place catalyzing precipitation.  But it had never rained before, right?  All the tons of water pumped up by volcanoes and evaporation just stayed suspended in a well heated atmosphere.  Until an overwhelming bubble of cool arose one night and broke it like a paper sack of water.

Water is the catalyst and crown of proliferate life.

So I look at the pine anew.  They can grow on a wild hillside so dry the grasshoppers creak.  A slope open, rocky, sandy, clayie, with 18" between plants.  They grip the earth and absorb sun while they grip water.  In their shade, in their duff, in their decaying wood, and even in their ashes, they soften the nursery for other life.  Pioneer pines: ancestors of Forests.

In the aged shade of a pine the fir can catch on.  They need the shade.  They come up like a busload of school kids.  All over the place shoulder to shoulder.  Beautiful and confident as teenagers.  Although selection will take most of them, it is amazing how close together mature fir can grow.  I found a small copse of six large Douglas Fir so close together that I could barely manage to put down my sleeping bag straight between them.

The natural progress of my thought opened upon this: the Umbilicus, the Great Conduit, that gives us life, is reinforced majestically by the Ponderosa Pine.