How I Got Through This
I Got, Like, Super Into Trees This Year
Feeling disconnected, it was time to commune with the Wood Wide Web
On the sad curve of what passed for big fun in 2020, going for a walk in the woods was the Covid equivalent of… I don’t know, checking into a luxe hotel for a three-day weekend?
My wife and I went for a lot of nature walks this year: the Staten Island Greenbelt, the Rockefeller State Park Preserve in Westchester County, Tallman Mountain State Park across the Hudson along the Palisades. At first, our impulse was anything that gets us out of this apartment. This was back in spring, when the trails were muddy and crowded with masked humans desperate for a little space. But as the months wore on and the crowds thinned out, it was possible to pass long stretches alone with the full-time citizens of the woods.
Yep, I got into trees this year. It wasn’t just the strolls among the oaks, maples, beeches, sweet gums, and musclewoods of the tristate area that turned me into a weekend philosopher of the forest; this was also the perfect year to read Richard Powers’ The Overstory, the Pulitzer Prize–winning 2018 novel of environmental activism that asks the question — one character, a Vietnam vet turned eco-warrior, literally asks it — “What the fuck went wrong…
