Heart Rot

Last Saturday I skipped a group run in favor of a solo jaunt on the Leatherstocking Trail where I came upon a massive waylaid beech tree. I came out here to clear my head, so I was tempted to keep jogging, but it was too impressive to ignore. Sawed into chunks, the beech revealed its entirely hollow core. I counted 67 rings before reaching the great black maw.

I wondered what this section of trail looked like in 1959, when this tree was 67 rings younger. That was just before the running boom. Maybe a lot quieter then—or so it would seem. But the events that would mark the 1960s were on the horizon: Bay of Pigs. Rolling Thunder. Selma. Now, we’ve got January 6. Renee Good. How will history remember this decade? Heavy thoughts for a morning in the woods.

Examining the tree offered a distraction, so I decided to poke around. The tree appeared to have suffered from heart rot, something that sounds fatal, but the surrounding sapwood ferries nutrients up and down the tree, so an infected specimen can live for decades. Feeling the soft innards of the tree, I recalled from Curt Stager’s book Field Notes from the Northern Forest that heart rot occurs when a fungus slowly ingests the heartwood. The tree can stand for decades, looking solid, until one day it’s not. My mind wandered back to the present: After the Minneapolis raids, who’s next? How long until the rot eats everything? What might I do? Would I be brave or watch events unfold from my couch? No answers were to be had in the hollow of the tree.

I stepped gingerly around the mass of shallow roots and returned to the trail. Snow and ice started to fall, and I was relieved to be heading home. I almost made it back to Weaver Street until I went down hard on a slippery escarpment. I lay there considering how I couldn’t check out that morning. Trail running is usually a chance to shunt the harder thoughts aside, at least for an hour. I used to return scraped up but happier. Lately, I just return scraped up.