I laid the printed photograph in the passenger seat, as if having it next to me the entire drive would act as some sort of charm, a spell to help me find what I’d never, ever seen. As I made one final check of the car—backpack, coat, boots, flashlight, full tank of gas—the wind blew crisp and firm as a touch, running its fingers through my short hair and over my scalp, sending the dried leaves clacking across the road, like a crowd of gray crabs. The first frost had hit the night before, and many trees had dropped their leaves, washing the landscape from kodachrome to sepia just before I embarked on my hunt. Bad luck or bad omen, I wasn’t sure which.
There are many tree species I can identify from only their bark and logic of growth, the particular attitude with which they reach for the sun, their distinct theory of splitting and spreading. Even in winter, the smooth, homey curves of sugar maples distinguish themselves from the ramrod trunks of pin oaks, or the robust arcs of sycamores flowing dappled into the burning sky. These are trees of my childhood, trees with whom I have years of familiarity through every soil and season, trees that tell me their names, even when blight strips their bark or lightning splits a limb. Maple, oak, hickory, hemlock—my mother used to name them, pointing to one canopy after another as she took my sister and me on walks through our hometown or hikes in the hills beyond. Dogwood, willow, poplar, sweet gum—the names spooled out of her like a litany, like the prayers rolling as smooth over her lips as the rosary beads through her fingers, while Sara and I wandered and ran over the grass around her.
“See the raised ridge running down the trunk?” she would say. “That’s a lightning scar.” “See how the inside is all hollowed out, but the tree’s still alive?” she would whisper as we poked our heads into the rotting, growing chimney of a badly trimmed walnut. “It’s because the tree’s veins are just beneath its bark. Someday it will get too top heavy and fall.” We would crawl inside, smell the watery sweetness of the softening wood, pretend we were fairies trapped in a strange, living coffin, laughing. Beech, buckeye, locust, ash—I ducked into the front seat and turned the key. As I drove out of town—the breeze dying to nothing and a dusty stillness settling into the stalks of any corn left standing—I kept praying that Iowa’s barely perceptible ridges would eventually bottom out into something brighter, a patchwork of green fields burnished by flaming orange forests. No matter how much the logical half of my brain retorted that I wasn’t going that far, that the landscape in Kirksville would be no different from the one in Iowa City, I found myself inhaling toward the crest of each ridge and exhaling my way over it, having discovered, once again, that the next valley wasn’t clasping the last bit of September to the banks of its river. That season of full color had already faded, and with it, the easiest markers with which to identify unfamiliar trees.
I glanced at the photograph: a teardrop shape, the size of my palm, its edges toothed with soft points curving up from stem to tip, a yellow aspen leaf. Bigtooth aspens are common in Iowa, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, but not in Missouri, where differences in climate and soil hem their natural range. I’d been told that somewhere in Adair County, in a nature preserve called Big Creek, was the last stand of bigtooth aspen known to exist in the state. When I’d found out, I’d immediately called my mother.
“I’ve got your trees,” I told her.
• • •
When Mom left her own hometown in 1979, sitting in the back of her parents’ enormous green Buick as they drove her north from Westphalia to Kirksville, she hadn’t known she was escaping anything. All she knew was that her whole life—T-shirts, jeans, a few plaid button-downs, and The Eagles’ Their Greatest Hits on cassette—was packed into a suitcase in the trunk, and that the only home she’d ever known lay a hundred miles in the other direction. As her father nosed the Buick into the stream of cars ferrying in freshman from across the state, she sat humming to herself, fingering guitar chords in the air with careful fingers. Her hair was still blond then and fell well past her shoulders, her button nose and wide eyes making her look even younger than she was. They parked in front of a brand-new, four-story brick building, teenagers walking back and forth with arms full of clothes and comforters. Her parents helped carry her suit-case into the room she would share with three strangers, bought McDonald’s, then left before they could see their daughter sitting on the hill in front of her new dorm, stunned into silence that this building held twice as many people as the town she’d come from.
It was late summer then, the hills full emerald around the spattering of white-sided houses and brick college buildings. In just a few days she would start her first set of classes—lectures in biology, husbandry, and ecology; evenings studying textbook diagrams of rainfall and soil erosion; days tramping around in fields to measure plant populations and collect samples—all the parts of a forestry degree at a small public college.
She’d made the rounds with her father since she was a child, had sat beside him in the big green forestry truck on their way to pick up trash at the campgrounds, mow the grass around the firepits and picnic tables, or clear public trails of growth and debris. She enjoyed being outside, enjoyed that her father chose her to accompany him as he drove from one bit of land to another, he with his right hand at twelve o-clock and his left cradling a Winston out the window, she with her long hair flying and her green eyes flashing between her father’s closed face and Osage County’s open fields. He saw the bright capable core in her, a girl good with her hands as well as with tools. Whenever her brothers balked at a particular task, he’d shoo them away, growling, “Achh, Toots can do it,” in his tobacco-burned tenor. She’d come stand beside him, her eyes intent on the careful motions of his hands, focused on doing whatever it was just right. With Ambrose—in the forestry truck, in the woods, in his motorcycle shop behind the house—she could be the tough, dirt-covered girl who felt closest to herself.
• • •
It would be two years before she first heard of the aspens, sitting in lecture as the professor described a piece of land recently donated to the university by a local family. Originally a farm, the ground had been left partially fallow for decades, persimmon and boxelder slowly reclaiming cornfields and cow pasture. A few professors and local foresters had spent months exploring the new property, and it was there that they found the grove of aspens.
“They’d thought the trees were gone,” Mom would tell me often when I was a girl, a sort of soft excitement in her voice, as we drove to the grocery store or dried the dishes. “But then suddenly there they were, the last ones in the whole state.” She’d never gone to see the grove but always held the story delicately, the way she might a bit of ruffle lichen or the dry husks of ground cherries. I don’t remember when the story first swelled from her memory and past her lips, but she told it often enough that by the time I drove to Kirksville, the last Missouri aspens existed with no first telling and no retelling, only a series of summonings from the elastic chords binding me to her.
As I crossed into Kirksville and joined the trickle of Friday traffic, the town out the window seemed quaint and a little tired, the way many Midwestern towns do, the way of peeling paint and well-established hedges gone slightly wild. I refilled my gas tank at the little Conoco station, checked into my hotel, and drove the series of gravel and paved roads to Big Creek Preserve’s southern trailhead, the first step of my hunt. I stood from the car and drew in a long, deep breath.
Barely thirty-six hours earlier I’d been told I would have to find the trees myself. Missouri law barred the rangers from revealing the location of any rare species, for fear of greedy hands pulling Mead’s milkweed and false foxglove up by the roots, fear of initials carved possessively into the last trunks of diamond willow and dwarf oak, and bigtooth aspen—despite repeated assurances that my greed was of a completely different sort.
This had left me with a rental car, a mostly blank map of Big Creek, Internet photos of a tree I’d never seen, and 1,064 acres of savanna and woodland to search in less than three days. As I stood staring out at the wide expanse of foreign woods, I knew I could end up wandering aimlessly, unable to recognize my quarry amongst a horizon of naked, anonymous trunks. I’d done as much research as I could, read over and over that their bark was thick and brown at the base, pale and yellow at the top. That their trunks grew singular and straight, the branches splitting off evenly to form a silhouette that was tall and pointed like an arrowhead. And as much as these descriptions seemed perfectly legible, I knew such theoretical knowledge would prove a loose sieve for separating a tree from a forest. I’d considered cancelling the trip but didn’t. I’d considered calling my mother but didn’t.
There was only one other vehicle in the dirt lot, an old silver camper with curtains drawn. As I started down the trail, a man emerged and leaned on the fence marking the edge of the preserve, his T-shirt clean but sweat-stained, his hands clasped around a can of something, while he watched me walk into woods I didn’t know.
The southern trail follows the crest of Big Creek’s western ridge, a wide swath of grass with forests falling down the slopes on either side. The sun seemed low for three o-clock, and the south-tilting light made my shadow ripple far ahead of me over the grass. A warbler leapt up from the brush of the tree line, its wings glowing in the sun before it disappeared down the slope.
After about twenty minutes, a narrower path opened on my right. I followed it. Then that path forked. I followed. Then the fork’s fork forked. I followed each, scrambled down a gully until I found a stream and a barbed wire fence, the edge of the preserve. I returned to the ridge, paused for a moment as I stared across the valley, wondering, would the grove stand out? Or was it possible I could walk past it, my eye caught by a different set of trees or the turnings inside my own head. I carried on, followed another path down the western side of the ridge, picked up one leaf then another, scrabbled down steep slopes chasing a trunk I didn’t recognize, climbed back up to find a pond, find a deer, find a dead raccoon lying in the tall grass, its body thinned of all flesh, its perfect gray pelt laid over its bones, deep holes receding where glittering black eyes had been. The sky darkened.
For my mother, the woods have always been a place of haven. As a girl she would walk alone from the farmhouse on summer afternoons, following a path formed by habit down into the valley. There the cornfields filled the soft, dark soil between the river and the woods, and she would keep to the tree line before cutting left into the forest, following a dry streambed until—after climbing over the tumbled gray boulders, across a few tilting barbed wire fences—she came to the bent oak.
It was an enormous tree, its trunk as wide as a kitchen table, jutting from beneath a rocky ledge and growing horizontal for twenty feet before turning upward again. She liked to hunt beneath it for treasures—acorns, quartz crystals, jay feathers—that she would stash in the perfect, slot-shaped cubbies eroded in the rocks nearby. Then she would climb up and sit on the high, natural bench of the tree, linger with this body contorted by shadow and its search for the sun. The woods became her hiding place, a sanctuary where she could wait out the long summer days until dinnertime, when she traced her path back to the farmhouse.
When I’m alone among the trees I always see snakes in the autumn leaves and spiders just over the lip of the boulder, a quiet step behind me in the grass. Hiking back to the rental car, the shadowed side of six o-clock, I felt my shoulders over-squaring, an idiot response to imagined snaps and crunches behind me. I fear the thing that can hurt me before I know it’s there, the unforeseen instant that changes everything.
As a teenager, my mother began to experience severe back pain, pain so intense she couldn’t stand—spent a summer of her life crawling between her bed and the bathroom, laying heating pads on her skin until they burned. “The Bocklage back,” Ambrose called it, referring to his side of the family. “We all have it.” But none of them had it this bad. And none of them had the strange mini-seizures that accompanied her pain, nor the severe headaches that seemed to blast out of nowhere. After the first year the symptoms subsided enough that she could resume her normal life, but from seventeen to thirty she’d see an endless parade of doctors and specialists, none of them able to explain what was happening to her, none of them able to make it stop. Then, a year after I was born, about six months after her father’s death, a neurologist asked her a simple, but loaded, question. She tried to say “no” but somehow couldn’t, somehow felt a familiar coldness breathe up from her stomach. “I don’t know,” she said, and left the clinic. That evening, as rain pattered on the window of my parents’ small apartment, she lay down on the couch and was suddenly a girl again, maybe nine or ten, her blond hair falling to the middle of her back as she lay on a rough wooden table, in a cabin by the Osage River. It was dark. Her father was taking off her clothes. He set them aside, pushed her knees up to her chest and slid her to the edge of the table. With his left hand he pressed down hard on her chest. With his right he unzipped his pants and pushed her knees down. She screamed once, and then was quiet. When he was done, another man came in through the screen door, handed him a beer. That man stepped up to the table and unzipped his pants. And then another. And then they left her. She rolled onto her side, down onto the bench next to the table, groping through the dark. She couldn’t find where he’d put her clothes. She didn’t know what he’d done with them.
The rain fell harder against the window as that girl returned to her older self, almost thirty years later, crying because it couldn’t be real, crying because she knew it was, crying because more would come, so many memories tucked away into the sinews of her body. So many dark rooms tucked away within her life.
I jogged the last quarter mile to the car, tried not to look at the drawn curtains of the camper, backed up a little too fast in the gravel lot, and returned to town.
• • •
For the first fifteen years of my life I didn’t know my mother had been sexually abused by her father. To me, her habits were like the stars in the sky, their patterns self-evident: she often read during the two hours before dawn, often slept on the couch, often gasped when woken, often flinched if you came up behind her. I didn’t know why. I never imagined that “why” was a question to be asked. Instead, I learned to balance risk and reward when I flailed up from my own nightmares, learned to weigh seriously each decision to pad down the hall to the other bedroom, where my father slept too heavy to be stirred and my mother too lightly to be comfortable. “Mom,” I would whisper at the side of the bed. “Mom. Mom,” as I reached hesitant fingers to her wrist, barely brushing skin before the hand shot up to shield the face suddenly alert and contorted, a soundless scream.
Without realizing what I was doing, I arranged the oddities around me into normalcy, my brain automatically correcting a world that would have otherwise appeared upside down. I learned to navigate by an incomplete set of stars, assumed my mother had nightmares the way I had nightmares, the same way we both had light brown hair and big, angular ears. I used her bad nights to explain my own, found comfort in the explanation, believed I was following her down life’s trail.
And then one afternoon in late summer, she asked my sister and me to take a seat on the living room couch, with a stiff formality neither of us were used to. As we perched on the cushions, she sat across from us in her great-grandmother’s rocking chair. I watched the water build in her eyes. I do not remember what sentence she used, “My father used to sexually assault me”; “My father was sexually abusive”; “My father raped me.” I knew the words but couldn’t understand them. I cried only because she did. Beside me on the couch, Sara did, too. “This has already happened,” Mom told us. “It’s just that now you know. Now you know why I don’t sleep. Now you know what my nightmares are. Now you know who your grandfather was.” A world upended. Nothing changed but everything different.
• • •
The second morning of my search, I drove to the eastern trailhead before the sun had cleared the ridge, frost casting the ground in metal tones. As I hiked down among the fescue fields, grasshoppers leapt from my boot steps as if I were splashing through a pool of bright green bodies. The ice on bluestem glistened.
Looking across the meadow, I noticed a row of pale, straight trunks to my right, their leaves already brown but almost the same shape as the one in my photo. I scrabbled down into an empty streambed, grabbed hold of a vine, and earned eight parallel scratches from wrist to thumb, the red looking bright among all the grays. I made it to the trees, but the curled leaves I found beneath were too triangular, the teeth lining their edges too small. I returned to the field to chase down a bunch of sycamores, then an unfamiliar type of birch, then some cottonwood. On and on, zigzagging through the woods.
As the shadows disappeared under the high sun, I hiked along a creek in the deep valley of the preserve, my boots sinking far into the silt, a crow startling each time I rounded a bend, leaping up with its harsh cry to fly farther downstream, ever ahead of me. From the east ridge I’d seen a group of light-gray branches reaching up above the dark mess of forest. Gray was not yellow, but the little hope I had left needed direction to keep burning. I crossed a fork in the stream and found the trees clustered around a giant oak that had fallen across the water. Perching on its moss-covered bench, I ate an apple, and I tried to ignore the fact that their bark was the wrong color, the leaves shaped more like spades than teardrops. I tried to tell myself these were the aspen, that somehow the photographs were wrong, or that I’d misunderstood the online descriptions. My feet ached. The crow cawed somewhere out of sight.
Before the flashbacks began, Mom always believed her love of the trees was intrinsic to her, as close as her green eyes and blond hair, just like I have always known the pleasure I take in rolling their names through my mouth—sycamore—the upward pressure in my chest at the stained-glass light of summer woods, comes from her. Of course, we have always known that our love stems in part from the forester, from the man smoking Winstons in the cab of his truck, but, in the same way that our parents’ noses simply become our noses, we never questioned the origin of our tree love. We never hesitated at this guidepost of who we are. The revelation of the abuse also revealed that this simple love is more complicated than we’d imagined. To the girl my mother once was—wandering the boulder-strewn hills, sitting on the trunk of the bent oak—the shade of the forest felt better than that of the farmhouse. It felt safer, even if she didn’t recognize the feeling at the time.
“I left her out here,” Mom says to me sometimes, meaning the part of herself she forgot for thirty years, that overtakes her in the darkness of her bedroom, the girl with tears beading on her cheeks who never makes a sound. I know a little bit what she means. There is a split between two halves of our lives. Between our lives before we knew, and after, but also, for her, the between the self she carried with her from year to year, and the self her mind buried in its bid to survive, the self she forgot until after her father’s death. So much lost then regained, so much held but already slipping through our fingers.
I finished my apple and looked around. These were not the aspens, not the place my mother had cradled in her mind from her early twenties to now. I tossed the core away, jumped down from the fallen trunk, and walked back upstream the way I had come.
• • •
When Mom told my sister and me, “This has already happened; it’s just that now you know,” she’d meant it as a comfort, a sign that things were not so different. She was trying to imply that we were already living this truth. But of course we weren’t, not really. A few days after Mom told us what her father had done, what he had been, I stood next to her in church and watched her shake, her head whipping back and forth, her arms locked at her sides, as if she was trying to break out of someone’s grip. I had never noticed until that Sunday, even though she told me later it happened almost every week. How many Sundays of my life was that? How many times that I’d sat next to her without noticing?
Across the aisle the family that always sat new from there went on singing, either not noticing or carefully not looking. Beside me, Dad was staring down at his hymnal, mouthing along in his usual pitch-free mumble. Only Sara—standing on Mom’s other side—was also staring, her mouth slightly open, her dark eyes full of all the deep water I was trying to wade out of. She noticed me looking at her, and, for a moment, we stared into each other’s faces, not so much seeing the other person as searching them, fighting for purchase on ground turned to marsh. The hymn carried on without us. Her black eyes looked bottomless. Where were we standing? What was this place? Who were these people? Where was the door, the sun, the way out of this air we were suddenly breathing?
The hymn ended. Mom stilled. Dad reached behind me to rub her shoulder. She patted his hand twice before joining the prayers with the rest of the crowd. Sara and I watched, still silent, still stunned.
When something terrible happens in the present tense—car crash, injury, violence, assault—the main arena of change is the future. Plans interrupted. Relationships altered. A river flowing forward suddenly dammed and forced to change course. As Sara and I stood staring at each other, our gazes empty, our mother reliving her childhood in the space between us, I realized: when the past changes, it takes everything with it.
• • •
As I hiked back to the car—down the riverbed and up the ridge, through the fescue fields—I no longer had an eye for trees. I didn’t want to acknowledge the possibility that I’d missed something on the walk down, and I was too tired to let my return trip take the same meandering path the outbound one had. Batting away the brambles that left my sweater peppered with Velcro seeds, I told myself that I would drive to the last trailhead on the map, hike it, return to my hotel, watch crappy TV, and head home in the morning. Wave the white flag and sound the retreat.
I got back in the car around two-o-clock. Sitting in the driver’s seat, I glowered at the highly minimalist map on the Big Grove brochure, comparing it to the highly uncertain GPS on my phone. I wasn’t at all sure I’d covered even a fraction of the preserve. Throwing the car in reverse, I glanced out the windshield and noticed a slight opening in the trees fifteen feet beyond my right headlight, an opening marked nowhere on my paper and digital guides. I hesitated, wanting nothing more than to drive to the country deli and get a bad sandwich, to hike the northern trail and declare my mission impossible, the trees disappeared or lost, the mirage vanished into fantasy. I wavered. Then sighed. Standing from the car, my map still lying in the passenger’s seat, I let out a long breath and walked past the bright orange blaze into the woods.
• • •
I’ve often asked Mom why she told the story of the aspens so frequently. “I don’t know,” she’d say and shrug. “It just seemed interesting.” That response doesn’t square with the tone of her voice when she tells it, doesn’t square with the decades that she carried that one scrap of lecture with her.
I sometimes wonder if her thirty-year-old self—caught among flashbacks and an unraveling sense of her own past—began telling the story to her children as an act of salvage, the dream of a grove whose comfort was not undergirded by fear. The aspens were trees she could pass on to us without complication, a place where the forester had never ever set foot. “Call me Nancy,” she said in a letter to him a few years after his death, denying him the pet name, “Toots,” he’d called her for her entire life.
As I hiked the unmapped trail into Big Grove, wandering the narrow dirt track deeper into the trees, I knew that for me the aspens had slowly come to symbolize a bit of the past I wasn’t ready to let go, the past before I knew how much we’d already lost. Hickory, walnut, redbud, willow—my mantra steadies me less with rough hands all mixed up in it. The tree names of Missouri, even of the Ohio woods where I grew up, come from the forester. Our very words, our very landscape begins to bend.
“I was having a memory,” Mom will say, part of our code, our way of shielding ourselves from the air we walk through. Memory means flashback. Tired is when the memories loom up, threatening to grab her. Shaky is the final precursor. Laying down means jumping into the jaws of the past, letting it have her.
“I’ve already lived through this,” she tells herself on the bad days, the days she spends in bed while everyone else tiptoes on the floor above. When Dad moves around the basement, getting ready for work in the early morning, he taps the walls as he walks, making himself a constant presence on her radar, because if someone walks up behind her that she doesn’t know is there, the surprise can make her collapse to the floor, where she lies fully conscious but unable to command her own muscles. “He scared me,” she says. When that happens, laughter is the most reliable cure. Some of the family’s favorite jokes are the punch lines that woke her from paralysis. We repeat them at the dinner table. They pepper our long-distance phone conversations. This is our way of treading lightly, of acknowledging the uncertain ground we walk on while carrying on our way.
• • •
The trail wound down through stands of oak and pine along a west-facing slope before curving across the stream to climb toward the preserve’s farthest edge. What would Mom’s younger self have thought if she’d come here, I wondered, walking through the trees in search of the grove thought lost. I used to think that longing for the time before I knew—before Mom asked Sara and me to take a seat on the couch, before tree names came with bruises—was a sign of weakness, a nostalgia for a past that never actually existed, the childish part of me wanting to hide from ugly truths that had always been there. But to deny that longing—to deny the past I lived, Mom lived, Sara lived—is to reduce everything we are to the ashes of a fire set by Ambrose’s hands. “We are not that,” I grunted as I walked higher and higher up the ridge, the trail turning from gravel to sand beneath my boots. I know it is important not to let ourselves die beneath the weight of what we learned. The father, childhood, life, and self that Mom knew before the flashbacks was not false, simply partial.
A bright, yellow leaf lay between my boot tips. I started, pulled the folded photograph out of my pocket and laid it on the dirt. The two glowed beside each other, the charm and its fulfillment. I bent and picked up one in each hand, holding them up to the trees around me. The leaf was a smooth, unbruised yellow, without the black spots of decay or pinpricks of insect bites. It hadn’t been lying on the path very long, had probably fallen earlier that day. Which way was the wind blowing? I stared around, searching, walking. I came to the top of the ridge, and there they were, a cluster of pale yellow trunks standing crisp against the autumn sky. I left the trail, wading through wintercreeper and multiflora rose until I could put both hands against their bark, could string my body between two trees and breathe the space between them.
The grove in Mom’s story is more than a grove: beneath the ground the trees have woven a connected floor of roots, the same organism, the same DNA, sharing water and food amongst its many selves. Aspens are particular in how they grow. They can reproduce from seeds like other trees, but a single tree can also send its roots far around itself, growing clones in the sunshine it finds nearby, saplings to replace the older trees that died and fell, blackened at their broken tips. The trees of my mother’s story are not separate any more than the five fingers of my hand, and to sit among them is to sit within a single, living organism, a room growing within the forest, a womb.
I set my pack down and lay with my back against it, watching the tips of the trees shuddering against the bright atmosphere, imagining their roots coiling beneath me. The rangers say it’s possible that these trees never belonged here, that my mother’s story—a past in which aspens grew more commonly in Missouri, but slowly died back, leaving this southern island—is only one theory among several. In other forests they have found similar, isolated groves: a stand of persimmons not native to the area, a pair of magnolias on the bank of a lake, a sudden field of Calgary pear. Near some of those trees they found broken rectangles of stacked stone, iron nails, bits of rust, evidence of a homesteader who came to this territory centuries ago, built a house, planted trees to shade her door and block the wind, to keep a little scrap of whatever home she’d come from, to hold on. No one has found such clues near my mother’s aspens, but that gives little proof in either direction. It’s possible there was once a home here, its histories forgotten or only imagined, possible that four walls and a roof have been replaced by a loose arrangement of trunks waving pale fingers in the blue sky.
Annie Sand is a writer and teacher from southeast Ohio. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa in 2017 and has published essays in HOW and Literary Orphans. She currently works as a lecturer in the University of Iowa's Rhetoric Department and is writing a memoir that explores the effects of sexual abuse across three generations of her family.
*Originally published in the Normal School final print edition, vol. 12, issue 1.
Photo by catmccray on Foter.com / CC BY-NC-ND