mildlybasic

[mildlybasic]

Apex species

Sorrel, plantain, thyme, Good King Henry, chickweed, yarrow leaves, chives, red clover, lemon balm, sorrel, mugwort, marjoram, sage, dandelion leaves, marigold leaves, Japanese basil. All picked in the garden of the Romanian cabin I’m sitting in now, or in the forests and fields around, where cows lie with bells around their neck, thunder growls from across a valley and wildflowers speckle hills with gold, fuchsia and violet.

That was part of the dinner shared with me last night by a homesteading couple, Zsuzsi  and Roger (originally from Bulgaria and Mexico City). The rest was a wheel of cooked polenta, looking like a cheesecake and decorated with wildflowers; two stews, one made from dried peas and the other from local sausage; and homemade bread with freshly churned butter. The tastes were foresty, bright and variegated. We seasoned our food with sage salt and drank tea made from more plants picked nearby.

I’m here in eastern Romania mostly to read, write and walk with a lot of space and silence around me, but being here is helping me join the dots between a few preoccupations that have been creeping up on me—someone who grew up in suburbia, the back garden a neat lawn mown in stripes, food something that you bought at the supermarket.

I’ve been thinking about the recent UN report stating that a million species are at risk of extinction. I’ve been thinking about the calm that descends on me every time I take the scenic route to my office and see moorhens nesting (and sometimes, ruining the moment, fighting sadistically) on the River Lea. I’ve been imagining a world denuded of this kind of refreshment for the heart.

On the plane to Cluj, I started devouring Richard Power’s unique and beautiful work of fiction Overstory. I’m about halfway through now, and the book seems to be telling the life stories of individual trees, through the people who plant, climb, derive solace from and are occasionally destroyed by them. In one tale, multiple generations of the same Midwestern Swedish-Irish family take monthly photographs of their chestnut tree, which outlasts them all. Time flows past quickly in many of the stories. People grow, experience love and tragedy, and are replaced. A mood of equanimity persists. The catastrophes you feel are the blights that claim swathes of forest, billions of trees dying and nothing that can be done to stop it.

Back in London last week, I binged the TV miniseries Chernobyl in a few days filled with an excited, jittery dread. Part of the genius of the show is that it doesn’t just detail the systems failures that caused one catastrophe. It also painstakingly demonstrates how much easier it is to prevent a big mistake than it is to fix it after it has happened. The obvious parallel is climate change. A Herculean effort now, versus the rest of human existence fighting a battle that grows more crushing and hopeless with each passing year.

I’m hoping to tell the stories of some trees this summer. The spruces in the Polish Białowieża forest that are being eaten by bark beetles and/or cleared for profit, depending on who you believe. The Caledonian pinewoods in Scotland that date back to the Ice Age, that are starting to die from fungal blight usually seen much further south. I’d like to find out the myths and stories that have grown up around these trees, and what other lives they support. In other words, what losing them would mean.