Prompt #5: Fire Ecology and the Serotinous Pine.

I love it when life has long arcs. I know, I know. Dramatic unity is best saved for fiction and creative writing, not real life. Janet Burroway devotes a significant section of her seminal Writing Fiction, to cement this difference in the novice writer. Still, I love it when it happens.

The element of nature I found myself most attracted to was always right in front of me, one of those things that sounded, as a kid (maybe even as an adult), too crazy to be real. I was drawn to it for that, never researched it, and just let it be.

Metaphor and symbol. Ugh. I compare handling them to handling live explosives. Simile is fine. They’re funny, light-hearted, and safe to use. Just noting a casual similarity that evokes. Metaphor is a stronger statement. It is. Not like. Is. I never go looking for them. If they’re in my writing, I’m usually using them by accident. I feel as if they’re too obvious, too unwieldy. They seem incompatible with minimalist writing, an enemy of word economy.

But on rare occasions, metaphors do just simply arise. When they do, they’re usually within nature. I remember a story I wrote about a man repressed, drying out near the Columbia River, reflecting on a member of his family who was far more wild and savage. I didn’t know it then, but the Columbia was perfect for it, really. Long, surging, originally mistaken for the ocean, but now dammed in fourteen different locations, now suppressed, suffocated.

The element I found myself drawn to was two particular kinds of pines, the lodgepole and the ponderosa. When I was with my father, watching the Tyee Creek Fire of 1994 level the North Cascades, and I fretted about the loss of trees, he told me not to worry. He said that the fire caused by lightning was a good fire and that the trees needed it. I was in disbelief, of course, watching firs being set ablaze that fire could give life to the forest. The next year, when we returned to the site of the fire, there were certainly charred trees, specifically firs. But next to them were, what I realize now, were lodgepoles, smaller, but radiant green, and ponderosa, gleaming orange, having shed their old bark.

Trees that only flourish, replicate, and/or reproduce in fire. I mean, that sounds absurd, right? I was obsessed with these trees for years, never knowing their names or how they really functioned until, well, nineteen years later when I had to do research for an environmental piece.

Lodgepole and ponderosa are different, but related. The lodgepole pine is what is called a serotinous tree. The seed release of a serotinous tree is triggered by environmental factors compared to maturity. The American Heritage Science Dictionary gives a slightly different definition: “[A serotinous tree is] late in developing, opening, or blooming. For example, serotinous pine cones may persist unopened on the tree for years and only burst open during a forest fire. Serotinous flowers on trees develop only after the tree has produced leaves.”

Huh. A tree that is late in blooming, only reaching maturity when exposed to an environmental trigger associated with destruction rather than any sort of birth. No, that’s not a slap to the face or a functioning metaphor at all.

The ponderosa is not serotinous the way a lodgepole is. It’s much more adamant than clever. Whereas the Tyee Creek fire consumed the fir, leaving their remains for more than a decade after, the ponderosa stood. Unlike the lodgepole, the ponderosa seeds, their resin containers, don’t need fire to be released. Between 45-60 years old, the cones drop, and the pollen spreads in a golden dust. Fire clears the thicket, the invasives, the squirrels and jays, and the ponderosa, last man standing, blushes orange and is free to reproduce unmolested.

Metaphor for patience and endurance? Nah.

Last thing: My thesis director has noted that of my collection, the one linking theme in every single one of them is fire. Whether it’s a wildfire, explosion, an act of self-immolation, or whiskey spat on embers at a campsite, there is just fire everywhere. I’m still working on it. Fire is still associated with destruction most ways you slice it. But with serotiny? Not so much.