A Tiny Boost
One 3/4 miles up the face of a mountain overlooking Salt Lake City was a tree trunk smoothed to a knob.
It was perfectly unremarkable, and also perfectly positioned for a human hand to grasp in leverage. There was a large step up right there and it gave me the smallest extra bit of stability on my ascent. It was immediately clear how many passersby had taken advantage of it - right there, when and where needed. Enough that its surface felt like polished stone warmed by the sun instead of the living wood it once was.
Because that low, smooth branch - it was dead.
The juniper had clearly ceased active living processes some time ago yet it still supported hundreds, thousands, who knows how many people on their way up and back. It still existed (and with strength) despite the halt to photosynthesis and the Krebs cycle and the work of its mitochondria.
It was dead and it still helped. Much like the nurse trees in the forests of the Pacific Northwest whose deaths provide the ideal creche for thousands of plants, mosses, fungi, and bacteria that make the rainforest what it is. Their gradual falling from the canopy to the dirt allows other trees to reach the canopy again - a cycle that has and will repeat.
There is strength in the death and in falling for those rainforest trees, but also this one stout and spindly juniper. The one standing most of the way up the face of a modest mountain in the Wasatch Range of Utah, lending it’s perfect moment of assistance for all the humans who choose to seek a different view every now and then.
Inspired by events on
Grandeur Peak, Salt Lake City, Utah
Share to