Along the ditch bank, green grass is blending with the dead, dry stalks of late summer, creating a sense of time and the passing of a season.
About a month ago, a farmer with a tractor and chain ripped out whole sections of brush along this ditch bank, and I was afraid he might take this old volunteer apple tree, but he stopped just short of it. Even so, one whole side is open and exposed. Somewhere in the past, a wind or storm or the snow of a heavy winter snapped a major limb, peeling the thing open on that side, baring the trunk and a gash of heartwood.At one point I used this tree in a painting, a winter painting of violet sunset and a broad field of snow with two boys and a sled - one pulling the other - leaning into the sunset, heading home. The tree is close and dark, a silhouette, and its limbs curl upward out the top of the painting, then hang back down again in drooping dark, lacy limbs with brown frozen apples floating in midair.
There is a sudden, blustery noise. A covey of quail has been stirred up. They scatter through the high grass and broken limbs, wings flapping. Their nervous cooing creates a moment of tenseness. A few stragglers take brief flight through the apple's thick limbs. They push against the dense foliage, finally breaking free and exploding into the broad spaces beyond the fence.
I settle and study the tree itself, observing the random and twisted patterns of its trunk, consisting of several unpruned limbs that over time have grown around each other in a wooden braid that, as it expanded, has knotted tighter and tighter until the several limbs have meshed into one.
Had it been in an orchard and trimmed it might have grown better and produced more fruit. Wild as it is, there is a sense of randomness about it, but also an immense, unbridled beauty.
I wonder if the three or four ants now working themselves through a forest of grass by my knee are even aware of the tree. Do ants see as far as the upper branches? Or is their sight restricted to only an inch or two? If they could see, and comprehend, would the tree be as major a feature for them as our most heady mountain peaks?
Would they plan expeditions to the highest peaks, climbing the bark as easily as we tread flat ground, twisting upward and higher along its rounded and purple Everest ridges, and outward to the farthest branches, and downward along the twigs, encircling massive green knots of wormy fruit, then down along the intersections of tiny twigs to the very tips, where, hanging by one leg, they could survey the world of their awareness? Unless, of course, they do only see an inch or two, which would mean they hang unaware over thousands of feet below and around them, where a fall that would kill a man, would have no effect at all, except that the ant might, at that point, forget the expedition altogether and walk back home, knowing, somehow, how to get there.
There is a sudden, earth-shaking rumble in the distance, a passing car 20 feet or 20 miles away, depending on how you see it, out on the broad asphalt desert where huge, black, round, rubber forms come out of nowhere and kill unsuspecting ants who venture too far away from home.
Spots of sun are glimmering through the branches. An apple falls. It rolls a foot or two and settles in the stream bed, an orb of green nestled among the hard, stream-rolled rocks that have come from somewhere to cradle it while it rots, or is found by the ants or the quail or someone else.
I feel myself passing now beyond the ditch bank and final remains of summer, climbing the fence and entering the flat crusted snow of the painting beyond, struggling to keep my feet afloat, above the snow. Behind and over me, the tree is reaching out its several arms, hanging them down like the rescue cables of those big helicopters you see that pluck people from sinking boats.
They are reaching through the layers of time and the fields of distant explorations, their twigs like baskets, cradling me upward and carrying me homeward.