I have a tree. And I have a box of lights from garage sales and deceased relatives. One called out to the other and I responded.
In Phil Connor’s book Fire Season he looks northwest from his tower perch near Emory Pass (elev. 8,000 feet and change) and knows that there is not a single residence for over a hundred miles. I am not quite as lucky.
There are eight houses past my home in the Gila Wilderness foothills. Some people who live in those homes drive past my tree when they come home from work. One is a nurse. One I know is at university. Several more are retired. Some are Hispanic. Some are Anglo. They are the standard Whitman’s sampler of America, without the fun of a creamy caramel center.
From space, my tree is not visible, unlike the open pit copper mine that gapes several miles from our town center. A power plant in southern Arizona that runs on splitting atoms powers my tree. It shares the electron highway with power created by the combustion of dinosaur poo that was harvested from deep underground by means of metal straws driven sideways for up to five miles and then packed safely with concrete to insure that the groundwater will be fit for human consumption for a billion years. It’s that safe. They promise this until someone’s tap water catches fire at the spigot and gets on TV. Then it’s human error. Or Congress. Or the EPA’s fault for over-regulation. Either way, comics light cigarettes with the flames and somehow, we carry on.
Some of the lights on my tree were from my home at 6859 Chantilly Lane in Dallas, Texas. I find it odd to write out an address that I haven’t used for 45 years, even odder that I can see it in my mind and that I can even see the red lights, evenly spaced on the eave and the lunch sacks filled with sand and votive candles by the street, flickering shadows as the bus makes the turn for the last scheduled run before the barn.
Other lights were used by my Aunt Lillian, a prescription drug addict before that was made popular by Conservative radio talk show hosts. They twinkle in a way she never did. They sit high in my tree, strung there with the aid of a ski pole I found in the Santa Fe basin. If she looks down from heaven, and way to the right of the open pit mine, maybe, at the right angle, she can see her lights.
Since I cannot verify that she will do this, I offer these lights to any who drive by. Few do, but that doesn’t matter. It matters that I am splitting atoms and emitting carbon dioxide, but I am willing to make some sacrifice (don’t run this, turn down or off another) in order to perform what I consider to be a Public Service.
Creating Joy, no matter how fleeting, no matter how insignificant is a public service.
For about seven seconds on someone’s commute in the valley below or in the winding mountain turns taken to get back to the remainder of the foothills, my tree can be seen glistening in the steel tempered darkness of the New Mexico night. It isn’t brazen or color co-ordinated. Martha Stewart has filed a complaint regarding my tree to the appropriate authorities. And still it serves, without comment, to all those who would look. It asks for nothing. It gives all it has.
I gaze from my study down the driveway at my tree expecting to see deer and coyotes in waterhole agreement, bending knee in its glow. That hasn’t happened yet. But there’s still time.
I have only seen my tree from a distance just once. It was the only light (and a colorful, sparkly one at that) in a circumference of black. It was a metaphor, of sorts, for any hope, for any love, for any spirited defense of anything good left in the world.
When I have looked at it, and that was only briefly from afar, I have thought how sneaky it was to trap the innocent attention given it to deliver a message freely, without expectation, without risk; and this message writ in split atoms and Chinese plastic, in bark and needle, in sap and blood, this message from all hearts to all hearts, so simple as to destroy and renew in a single breath, is to love one another, as best we can, on bended knee, in humble supplication, before the infinite star filled darkness that is the life we share together.
Happy Whatever
Rearnheart
Silver City