Pinaceae

In German a spruce is a Fichte. A pine is a Kiefer. A fir is a Tanne. Picea, Pinus, Abies. Larch, Tamarack, Lärche, Larix. The names are equals, equivalents, interchangeable. The trees too, have something in common with each other, though I am no forester to be able to detail what. I can barely understand leaf scars or budding patterns. The spruce cones dangle, those of the fir stand up, and pines have bunched needles. This is simple enough for me. But there is something else. Some personality that carries over, mixes in the various genus of these trees. Pines are harder, sparser, more ascetic in their numbers and their limbs. The spruces and the firs impersonate each other, needles sometimes sharp and sometimes soft, mostly dark, always thickly shielding the trunks from the world. The larches are careful but unyielding, dropping their needles, staying tall and straight and growing their clean firewood.

We have these names, words that translate. I can walk in the woods and use what I have learned of my forests to unlock these unfamiliar ones. The forests are full of trees, and they seem familiar while still new. The species are various. No lodgepoles in the Alps. A map tells me that the subalpine fir, grows only in the northern Rockies, the ponderosa as well. The range appears so small on the map, when I have known these trees all my life. I can hold in my mind twenty different ponderosas, all leaning at least a bit, strong and yellow in the Idaho sun. There is the one before the parking lot at the Grand Jean trailhead. It has seen me come and go five times or more, over more than as many years. It does not know me, but I it. On the banks of the Little Wieser there is a brace of trees that lean together first, then straighten and hold. They nod toward learning mathematical limits in high school, the joy of dropping calculus, and the scent of senior year asphalt in May, as we drove off the parking lot one last time. There are no ponderosas on the Nockspitz.

But then, there are no Latchen in the Sawtooths. Those seas of stunted hard green pines that grow shoulder high on the limestone massive of the East Alps. Their name is synonymous with a hard hike, with shadeless fatigue in the high summer sun. There are no Zirbel, whose sap and seeds are distilled into schnapps. The burning flavor of years in hot sun, tearing wind, and suffocating snow is strictly Alpine, and it is not pleasant for itself, but for the strength it carries from those trees.

And so I seek to translate, to explain what I know to others, but it stumbles on its size. A satisfying photo of a sequoia is impossible. Just so a doug fir or a Fichte, a Föhre or a Englemann Spruce cannot be known from its name. I can imply, I can point, I can speak of needles and cones and ranges—but the trees are still growing in soil, with their branches in the wind. I cannot give anyone more than a hopeful snatch of melody. The trees, in their names and forests and attitudes, yearn to be known orchestrally.