Wonder is the beginning of wisdom.
Socrates
The tree is gone, but I have my father’s musket.
I also think my father liked to personally connect with history. I saw this many times when I was young and we would look for arrowheads in the fields outside Geneseo, New York, where my grandmother lived and my mother and her two sisters grew up. We would go after a farmer had plowed the soil in preparation for crops, turning up the dirt and revealing weapons and stone tools used by Native Americans centuries before.
Most likely, these were past possessions of the Seneca, members of the Six Nations of the Iroquois League who inhabited the region. (The English name of Geneseo is an anglicization of the Iroquois name for the earlier Iroquois town there, Gen-nis-he-yo, which means ‘beautiful valley’). I can still hear my father say, whenever he would find an arrowhead, “I wonder who was the last person who used this? I bet it hasn’t been touched since now. Can you imagine?”
I understood the wonderment of the moment, and also the fascination with the musket. But the reality is I just didn’t like guns. I had seen them in action, when I went hunting with my father as a child. I was never part of the shooting, instead trailing behind him as he and our dog flushed out pheasant in a buckwheat field or hedgerow. Or sat next to him in a pond-side blind, waiting for geese and duck to fall for the floating decoys and descend within shooting range.
I understood the power of a gun and the importance of being safe around them. My father was responsible this way, ultra careful, always licensed, and respectful of the weapon. Still, guns scared me, and while I valued the beauty and immersion into nature that hunting brought with it, it was just not a sport for me. My father knew this and never pressed it on me.
What I remember most about the musket was my father firing it into the base of a large and very old maple tree. He would do that after going hunting for deer near our family home in upstate New York. There were sprawling hills just across the street, balanced on each side by woods and corn fields. By utilizing a musket, my father could hunt deer earlier in the season. But by the time he had purchased the weapon, his heart wasn’t into the hunt anymore.
What he liked most was being outdoors, watching and observing. He really didn’t want to shoot anything, and he never did, other than the tree, with the musket. But he just couldn’t stop the decades-long momentum of going hunting. He wasn’t a hiker, but he liked to walk in the woods. He also liked to find a quiet spot to sit and think. And I guess having a gun in his hand was more second nature to him when being in nature than anything.
My father’s purpose in targeting the tree was to safely discharge the ball from the muzzle. He also liked to test his aim and use the gun since he went to all the trouble to load it. It was not often he did this, maybe three to four times. He did not damage such a hearty tree or threaten its lifespan in any way. But the balls did lodge inside, so that you could see a round shade of silver, like the side of a nickel, pressed within the thick bark.
A few years after buying the musket, my father stopped deer hunting altogether, and the gun from then on was retired to his basement. But whenever I visited my father and mother from my home just outside New York City, about a 6 hour drive, I would often hike up to that tree and sit. It was high enough that it held a great view of the Rochester horizon below, and the space and quiet was a welcome transition from the hectic and noisy life of the City. I would also always check out the musket ball marks my father had made, noting how between visits, the bark had grown around them, making them smaller and smaller. The tree, in its way, was covering up the wounds, and, with new growth, making itself stronger in the broken parts.
Over time, that spot, the tree, became sort of safe haven for me, even if I was not home. Sometimes, during a stressful time in the City, I would think of the tree, the view, the silence, the bark moving glacially around the musket balls, and it would help me relax. I was comforted to know it was there, waiting for me on my next visit, ready to provide me with solace and solitude.
Then, on one visit, I hiked up as usual, my dog in tow, and was shocked to see the tree was gone. In fact, that whole section of the woods had been cleared out for new housing. I was crushed and dismayed. I could still see the horizon from that spot, but it now also contained, on the ground, markings where other lots for homes would be laid out.
And by my next visit, homes were going up.
After my father passed, last year in late summer, I inherited the musket. As I picked it up, I had a strong memory of watching him on that hill, discharging the weapon into the tree. I dearly wish he was still here. And that tree. But I only have memories. And fantasies of a different future.
For example, I see, years and years from now, a father and his young son hiking up that hill. The homes are gone and the woods and cornfields have returned. They stop at that great maple and notice little flicks of silver embedded in the trunk. They are filled with wonderment as they try to figure out the marks and who might have done this?
Can you imagine?
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