A Tale of Two Trees
Mountain Letter, 16 March 2025
After three weeks of relentless rain hammering the roof —an ordeal that would test even Noah’s patience— the clouds finally split open this morning. I woke to sunlight spilling into the room, sharp and clean, framing a view that stopped me cold: the Sierra Nevada range, draped in a blinding sheet of white. It’s the kind of sight that makes you forget the damp socks and the cabin fever, the endless mugs of herbal tea by the fire while the world outside turned to mud.
Those weeks indoors left me sifting through old books, their pages yellowed and musty, pulling me back to a past I can barely claim as mine. I’m a fossil, really—born before the internet, before digital clocks or smartphones swallowed time whole. I think of my great-grandfather, Pé van Melle, born in the late 1800s, when the Wild West still echoed with gunshots and the Belgian Congo bled ivory and rubber. He’d sit at the kitchen table in that little dower house behind the manor—Landgoed ten Berg, where his son lived—carving lamps out of sugar beets while I watched, wide-eyed. I could see it all in his eyes: cowboys, white missionaries, severed black hands, two world wars, the raw churn of history. The good old days. Back then, I’d trail him to the kitchen garden lined by the estate’s high brick wall, where a glass greenhouse kept watch over rows of herbs and potatoes. Pé would shuffle through the dirt, muttering to his plants, or doze off in a wooden chair by a molehill, spade in hand, out of the wind, watching silently to catch the beast the second it surfaced. This man shaped me. For a while, I even dreamed of being a mole catcher—trapping the little garden devils and selling their pelts to hatmakers. But that trade was already long dead by the time I came around, the black hats relegated to faded analog photos of the garden parties in the park. So I set my sights on something simpler: a life where I could tend my own patch of earth and nap in the sun, pretending to hunt moles. Instead, I landed here, in the cracked, dry hills of southern Spain—no moles, just the occasional snake or centipede skittering through the dust. My Flanders, my verdure tapestry, why have you forsaken me?
Who am I even writing this for? Most of the people I’d tell are gone now, dust themselves. The few left are either stubborn relics like me or kids who think wristwatches are cool jewelry, not tools. On rainy days, my mind drifts back to that estate in Oosterzele, to the green park where I spent my summers. There was a copper beech tree there, a giant with a crown of dark, reddish-brown leaves that shimmered in the light. Back then, the Berlin Wall still stood, climate change was just a whisper, and life tasted like homemade ice cream and cold Coke in glass bottles. That tree was a colossus—we’d need the whole family to circle its trunk. My brother and I slung a rope from its branches and swung like wild things, Tarzans in a suburban jungle. I climbed it too, like a little baron ruling the canopy.
One day, we struck it with some tool—kids—and a chunk of bark peeled off, exposing the pale wood beneath. It looked like flesh, raw and bleeding. Shocked, we patched it up, tended it like nurses for weeks, whispering reassurances until the wound closed over. I’d talk to that tree, promising it’d be okay, and it felt alive to me—still does, standing tall back in Flanders, far from this cabin in the mountains.
Here, though, there’s another tree. A holm oak, massive and solitary, the last of the great forests that once blanketed the Contraviesa. The rest were felled centuries ago—chopped down for the Spanish Armada or burned to melt lead in Almeria’s furnaces. It looms over this barren land, its roots sunk deep into a history of Moorish peasant girls and Christian knights clashing swords for gold and God. I walk to it often—with my wife, family, with friends, or alone. It’s a survivor, like the beech back home: one planted by some meticulous gardener, the other likely sprouted from a forgotten acorn, outlasting its kin. One cultivated, the other wild.
Two trees, split by cultures, battles and centuries. The beech, cradled in a landscaped park; the oak, braving wind and sun on a blasted barren hillside. Both will outlive us all—me, you, every soul alive today, and probably a slew of generations after that. I picture people gathering the oak’s acorns someday, replanting these wastelands until green spills over the horizon again. But then I catch myself bristling, imagining some fool with a chainsaw eyeing it for a pistachio plot in the name of progress. For now, it’s safe—its shade spares the farmer’s metal chain tractor from the summer sun. Small mercies.
“It’ll be alright,” I told the wounded beech once, and I tell myself the same now. Time heals, doesn’t it? The scars we leave—on trees, on the earth, on each other—fade eventually. One day, these two will stand in forests again, surrounded by life we can’t even imagine. We’ll be gone, forgotten, just whispers in the leaves. But not by them. Like Pé van Melle lives on, the gardener of Eden.
Het is een voorrecht de tweede van de door jou beschreven bomen te leren kennen hebben zoals het een privilege is je van in nostalgie en hoop gedrenkte woorden te lezen.