Not seeing the trees for the forest

Many in Connecticut fear losing taxpaying residents who move to so-called greener pastures

I’m stopped at a traffic light in Farmington at the entrance to Interstate 84 when I noticed, in my peripheral vision, not the familiar ocean of green woods but a line of office buildings, looming like grounded cruise ships.

I’m sure many other longtime Connecticut residents share my Chicken Little sense that the sky we’ve known for so long seems to be falling.

In fact, according to Tom Worthley, an associate professor with the UConn Extension Service, Connecticut has suffered 80,000 to 90,000 acres of severe tree canopy loss in the past few years — due not only to development but also to pest infestation, drought, climate change, pollution, severe storms, DOT clear-cutting and utility power-line trimming.

And though I now mourn this thinning of the state’s identity and nature, I once would have welcomed it. When the poet William Blake once wrote “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” he probably had this city boy in mind. When I arrived in Connecticut 47 years ago to attend college, I saw nothing but a bunch of green things in the way.

On the flat plains of my Midwest home, the sky stretched like a blue canyon; the eastern horizon was interrupted only by the pinpoints of downtown Chicago skyscrapers, three miles away from my neighborhood. Sure, there were trees, but they were like sprigs of parsley arranged on the cement plate of the city — saplings planted uniformly along streets according to some algorithm concocted by frugal city planners.

So, when the airport bus first whisked me along a Connecticut country road lined with seamless leafy curtains, the sky seemed narrowed to the diameter of a manhole cover. The surrounding hills bristled with what appeared to be enormous heads of broccoli, as unappetizing to my eyes as the offending vegetable was to my taste buds. Only after I arrived at my city campus, where the trees had been cut back to a civilized distance, could I safely inhale the familiar scent of exhaust in the air. Why New Englanders hadn’t paved over its enormous no man’s land lay beyond my ken.

But over time, my Connecticut classmates coaxed me from the city into the state’s more bucolic parts, where we hiked Talcott Mountain; leaf peeped in the Litchfield hills; picnicked in People’s State Forest; canoed on the Farmington River and strolled along the Barkhamsted Reservoir.

Stepping behind the opaque curtains of the woods, I began a new kind of education that turned my world inside out. It revealed an unknown interior life that dwarfed the concrete jungle in which I’d been raised. What I may have lost to farsightedness I began to gain in insight.

I discovered a living sanctuary, not only for its natural residents of squirrels, birds and wood-burrowing bugs, but also, for me. The articulate silence of the trees drowned away my city bluster. These paragons of patience and slow growth calmed my racing mind and centered my soul. Under the improvisational architecture of tree branches reaching and bending toward the light, I found this transplanted city boy putting down new roots, reaching for a place to grow.

Here was an ancient civilization of trees that offered not only oxygen, wood, shade and energy but also subtle lessons in character and values. Faced with aggressive winds, they swayed and bowed but stood their ground. In winter cold, they retreated inward, saving energy to bloom in spring. In summer heat, they caught sunlight in green leaves that cast cool shadows. And no matter the weather, they possessed the composure of Buddha, accepting all as it is.

In short, these natural philosophers seem to possess the inner peace that so many of us would like to achieve. In the woods, which I had considered a no man’s land, I began to plumb the better angels of human nature.

So, in an inverse to the idiom: I had failed to see the trees for the forest. And I guess you could say the trees have since grown on me. Today they are literally my closest neighbors, arm’s length from my Connecticut back porch, where every morning, in the words of Emerson, “They nod to me, and I to them.” Now it’s my hope they will grow “in” me, like the mighty oak latent in an acorn.

Today, many in our state fear losing taxpaying residents who move to so-called greener pastures; but I dread losing our native, green residents that can move some to tears of joy.