We planted thousands of trees in sunlit mountains as our world grew darker.
I do not know
what happens to a body when it stops.
But tell me a story that did not begin with love.
—Aracelis Girmay
This is a love story. It begins with an ending.
In most years, autumn is both loss and anticipation. It bids farewell to long sunlit days, swimming in lakes, and barbecues with friends, and welcomes crisp air, turning leaves, and evenings curled up at home with a hot drink and good book. But in 2020, autumn changed.
Loss morphed into horror as a pandemic raged unchecked. Anticipation turned into dread as the November election approached. The results would change everything, for better or worse, and I wanted to make the most of the remaining days, to build reserves of autumn joy against winter scarcity.
“On the last day of the world / I would want to plant a tree,” wrote the poet and conservationist W. S. Merwin. In California, autumn is also the season to begin planting trees. That remained true, even in 2020.
I would plant trees. I’d spent a year volunteering in the native plant nursery at the non-profit organization TreePeople, growing seedlings for restoration projects in Southern California, when Jack, the nursery manager, took on a new project to begin on Election Day. TreePeople would plant 3,660 oak, walnut, and willow trees on ancestral Chumash land at Paramount Ranch and Cheeseboro Canyon, which were devastated by the 2018 Woolsey Fire and years of drought and deforestation.
TreePeople staff and volunteers voted early and came to Paramount Ranch on Election Day, not knowing what the day held in store for our country. We still didn’t know the next day, but we made that first day a happy if chaotic one, scrambling to carry buckets of water and mulch, flag spots to plant, and put seedlings in the ground.
One day followed another. The project goal felt impossible, so we focused on planting one meadow, one hill, one creek bank at a time. After all, each tree in the ground was a tree that was not there before. As the project’s initial flurry passed, Jack and his coordinator Emily got a chance to tally the trees planted in the first three weeks of November: 642. Now we knew we were on track to meet the spring deadline. Meanwhile, back at the nursery, seven hundred walnuts sprouted faster than expected while we planted their siblings. They grew several inches in just a month or two, lifting bright lanceolate leaves as if waving their hands to say they wanted to be planted soon too.
Then Covid restrictions tightened with another surge of infections, so most volunteers could no longer join planting days. Only a small band of us remained, mostly staff and a few long-time volunteers. We kept planting, placing 1,360 trees at Paramount Ranch by mid-January.
When you plant a tree, you look down at the ground a lot. You dig a hole, using only a shovel if you’re lucky, a pickaxe if you need to break through rock. (We swung pickaxes regularly at Paramount Ranch.) You splash water into the hole, wrap the seedling’s roots in a wire cage to protect them from gophers, place the seedling so its root crown sits just under ground level (or it will die), fill the hole with more soil, break up surrounding soil to form a basin, pour in water, place another wire cage above ground to protect the seedling from foraging animals, pile on mulch and straw for frost and sun protection, and sow a few lupine seeds to enrich the soil with nitrogen. It’s a lot.
We had a lot of trees to plant, so we spent a lot of time looking at the ground. But every time someone said, “Look!” and pointed upward, we did. We stood mesmerized as golden whirlwinds of valley oak leaves danced across a gully, great blue herons and coyotes hunted prey, and red-tailed hawks circled overhead, screaming as if for the sheer joy of hearing their cries echo through the hills. These “Look!” moments became our daily meditations.
Meanwhile, the world beyond the hills grew more bleak. The U.S. Covid death toll rose almost 50 percent to over 341,000 between Election Day and New Year’s Day. The Washington Post reported a rise in shoplifting of staples like bread and baby formula as unemployment soared and people grew desperate with hunger. The president would not concede the election. His followers stormed the U.S. Capitol with weapons and Confederate flags. Covid infections and deaths kept rising in January, no end in sight, vaccines in short supply.
The California winter settled in, the scenery changing before our eyes a hundred times every morning as fog banks slipped through the hills. Valley oaks lifted dark leafless branches into fog-swirled sunlight, gnarled shapes formed by weather and circumstance hundreds of years ago. Squirrels and woodpeckers searched for acorns they had stashed in autumn against winter famine.
We began planting at Cheeseboro Canyon. The first few days, we sank our shovels into soil as soft as cinnamon and thought planting would get easier—until we realized this winter would not bring rain to water our seedlings; until we planted willows in rocky creek beds so narrow we couldn’t swing pickaxes and instead had to choke up on the handles and chip away bit by bit; until the on-site fire hydrant began to slam a battering ram of water into anyone who tried to attach a hose to fill the water truck, so that Jack had to go to Paramount Ranch every morning to fetch water from its low pressure hydrant instead, a trip that took yet another hour.
It did not get easier, but we got better. We found new ways to plant and care for our trees and became more efficient as a team. We developed our own vocabulary with phrases like blue richards (a pretty perennial commonly and unfortunately called blue dicks) and snow skirts (straw shelters we piled around seedlings as frost protection, named after the insulated skirts I wear in cold weather). We learned what we could (and could not) do.
Still, global and personal troubles took their toll on all of us in different ways. One February day, I received news of a friend’s death just as I finished planting my last seedling. My teammates had worked for several hours already, but they sat with me around the tiny coast live oak for two more hours as I alternately mourned my friend and babied the tree, swaddling it with layer upon layer of straw to shield it from sun and frost.
My gift for living in the present moment, which spurred me to join the planting project in the fall, became a curse in the new year because I could not balance it with faith in a future I’d want to live in. Consumed by ongoing loss and isolation, I began to despair. “It’s going to be a nice looking grove in five years,” said Jack one day as he looked at the creek banks we had just planted. “Five years isn’t really that long,” he added. I can’t live that long, I thought. I don’t want to live that long.
The night before every planting day, I began to feel reluctant to go. I loved being with the seedlings and the team once the day began; but the night before, I couldn’t imagine a good tomorrow, let alone five years from now. I was so tired. I’d promised to help, though, so I kept showing up.
Invasive plants like black mustard and ripgut brome started showing up too, sprouting around our seedlings and inside their cages. But alongside these we saw native wildflower sprouts we wanted to protect, so we weeded inside the cages by hand, threading out invasives as the wires laced our arms with scratches.
I hauled buckets of water across meadows and up hills, two buckets at a time to each seedling, each bucket weighing twenty pounds. I dug holes into rocky soil and tore an invasive pepper tree out of a creek bank. Muscles began to trace subtle new lines on my arms, my abdomen, my legs. I asked my body to do more, longing for the way movement stilled anguish, and it said yes every time and felt less tired afterward. Each day, I became a little stronger and a little more sure of what I could (and could not) do. Little by little, with each new discovery, I began to marvel at this body that kept going even when I didn’t want to go on.
I loved being in my body. I loved my body, alive. I wanted to be alive.
We began to find wildflowers like poppies and red maids blooming amongst our seedlings. We saw newborn ducklings in the creek, their mother herding them close to shore as if to keep them in the shallows until they learned to swim better. We watched velvet leaves bud forth on valley oak branches, scattered green stars at first, then so numerous they crowned the oaks with verdant halos against cerulean sky.
We chattered and laughed like the swifts who danced in flight above us. We talked about our families, hummingbird anatomy (they wrap their tongues around their brains and eyeballs), and questions like these: “Would you rather eat the same food or listen to the same song every day? Would you rather wear mismatched shoes or your shirt inside out? Would you rather have teeth for hair or hair for teeth?” (Teeth for hair, no doubt.)
We came to rely on the animals’ presence as surely as we relied on each other. A red-tailed hawk perched atop an oak tree at Paramount Ranch every morning and watched as Jack filled the water truck. At Cheeseboro Canyon, a cottontail rabbit ate his daily breakfast by the spot where Emily parked her truck. Coyotes roamed through our plantings, and when fog lingered in the morning, they sang. Barn owls flew from their perches, the snowy-feathered underside of their wings flashing in the sun. Later we found some of their bodies, mauled by predators, and we mourned them and planted trees around them.
How strange and dear it is to mourn by planting a tree. In February when my friend passed away, Jack wrote her name on the flag marking the seedling I had just planted. Two months later and six months after we broke ground at Paramount Ranch, on the April day when we planted the last 29 of our 3,660 trees, we gathered again at her tree. Where else could we finish our journey but there? Every journey ends at home.
Homecoming is a time to bear witness to grief, celebrate beauty created amidst desolation, and give thanks for those who bear witness and create beauty. Moments after this little seedling stood in the ground for the first time, it helped us to do these things; now all our trees were home at last.
Our trees, we say, but no one can claim possession of another being. No, they are our trees because we brought them into the sunlight, just as they did for us, together.
The night before my last planting day at Paramount Ranch, I dreamt I was walking through its hills. Green of many shades blanketed the slopes—the canopies of our oaks, walnuts, and willows, with other native plants like sagebrush and buckwheat growing underneath. The trees stood taller than they will in my lifetime. Yet I was still alive, telling someone unknown about the trees and the people who planted them.
This is a true dream, for we are woven into the air and the soil now. Our laughter lingers in the air, and our bodies’ salt and blood in the soil that nourishes our trees. This is a love story, after all. It ends with a beginning.
In the many things I could say, it would all wrap up to say, thank you. Thank you for caring for the land we love and for taking the time to share of your journey. Our work as volunteers can at times be unacknowledged, time-consuming, tiring. But we have comfort in knowing we live our lives not just for ourselves in the now, but for others, and for ourselves "in five years." And as Jack said, “Five years isn’t really that long”. So again, thanks.
I.Vasquez