Back to the Root

White Pine, Itasca State Park

I recently returned from northern Minnesota, where the root, trunk and many branches of my family tree are located. My parents are second generation Scandinavians from Norway and Denmark, all born in Minnesota. I was born in Thief River Falls, only 70 miles south of the Canadian border. Several of my siblings live in Minnesota and the cabin near Laporte is ground zero for family gatherings.

This year, there was a lot of discussion about trees! All three of my sisters were reading The Overstory, by Richard Powers. I have it on hold at the Los Angeles Public Library and cannot wait to read it myself. But it isn’t as if I need to. My parents deeply loved trees and planted them everywhere. In the front yard of the home his parents built in Renville, Minnesota, Dad planted a dogwood which grew quite tall. To me it was an exotic. I had never seen one anywhere else, except in Yosemite in the spring, when the dogwood flowers bloomed white and ethereal between the dark trunks of the forest.

At the parsonages I grew up in, Dad often planted apple trees. I remember several across northern Iowa. Planting an apple tree has no downside. When we began to go up to the lake cabin I mentioned above, he would stop at the Badoura Nursery in the spring and collect the seedlings he had ordered (you could not order less than 500 if you wanted a mixed pack of seedlings), planting them on the property. I remember being on at least one of these spring trips, when the air was still quite cold, and I was happy to spade up soil, insert seedlings and tamp them down to keep warm!

I’ve been amazed to learn how few seedlings survive and grow to maturity. Peter Wohlleben describes in The Hidden Life of Trees how prolific tree seedlings must be to get even a few trees to make it. Partly it is a matter of photosynthesis, young trees fighting for light, though they live under their “mothers,” who share nutrients with them. He points out that slow growth is good for a tree. But also it is a matter of animals eating the fresh, tender shoots, the salad of the forest. So I was impressed that my sister had broken up the ancient stone firepit my Dad built at the edge of the lawn. She was afraid using it would damage the two white pines, grown from Dad’s seedlings, which now towered above the cabin at that spot.

White pines are fluffier, my brother pointed out, with five needles to a clump. Red pines, what my parents called Norways, have two needles per clump and look stiffer, not as wispy as a white pine. They are all native, and looking up at the red pine at the edge of the lake, we thought that some of them were certainly over one hundred years old. Perhaps two hundred. When Dad established the dock, more than 50 years ago, he built it in among these favorite “Norways.” Mother loved them. I didn’t count them, but there seemed to be at least ten along the shoreline.

As a group, we went over to Itasca, a Minnesota State Park which was only the second in the country, after Niagara Falls. It was established because logging was ferocious at the time, and Jacob V. Brower got the state legislature to pass, by one vote, a bill establishing the park in 1891. Brower wanted to save some of the stands of red and white pines still thriving at the time. We visited a protected 300-year-old white pine, and noted the loss of the crown of an ancient red pine nearby, along the “wilderness loop” running through the park. I have very early memories of this park, as my aunt, Esther Frost, worked at the lodge during the summers when she was a young woman. She rented cabins for us to vacation in for a few summers also, before the cabin at the lake was established.

Everyone knows, by now, that trees take carbon from the air and process it, helping to cool our over-heated planet. Forest protection, regeneration and cultivation mitigate the inroads our comfort-seeking cultures have made on the earth. Families too thrive in an atmosphere of conservation and care. I was thrilled to visit the roots of my own.