Portal to Planet Winter. This big leaning Sugar Pine had a burnt out hollow on its uphill side, which was tall enough for me to stand in like a phone booth, for shelter during squalls. It’s trunk would creak as it tossed its ponderous outstretched branches in the wind, foot long cones swinging from the tips.
This Sugar Pine was right near the top of a sweet little ski run, that I would run laps on from home, and was protected well enough inside to have a bare duff floor for much of the winter. Sometimes during storms, I would click out of my skis and kick steps down into the hollow, and me and the dog would sit in here for a little snack break; called it my ski hut.
Having survived disfiguring burns with grace for the better part of a half millennium, the exposed wood around the opening had swirls of dense, burnished grain and crystalized resin where it had tried to heal. Not sure when it last burned like that around here, but it could well have been precontact Indigenous burns that hollowed it out. It was a tree of great distinction and character, which I had known and found shelter in for many years.
This leaning Sugar Pine was toppled by a gale a few winters back; a big weird blow, backdoor out of the east, on a day so gnarly I would not have been out here any which way. But it toppled without disturbing the cavity walls, now roofless but intact.
I could sort of picture myself standing inside there in the immediate aftermath of the collapse, surrounded by the twisted carnage and settling dust, unscathed but shaking, in a crackling torrent of endorphins, from the massive release of energy at the climax of that one mounting penultimate gust, roaring in from the farthest reaches. Because sometimes it’s like that around here.
