Eastern White Pine Trees

Isolated giants salt our land, slender compared to their ancestors who once reached over 110 feet and lived over 300 years.  They are the remnants of a near plant genocide, the children of trees the lumbermen of the 1860’s-1910 called “green gold.” The lumber industry leveled the forest around my northern Michigan hometown, clogged the riverways with the bodies of their conquest, largely destroyed the soil, all to make Michigan the largest lumber producer in the United States. To this day, we are still recovering from the massive clear cutting. The trees they harvested are called the Eastern White Pine.

Between the ages of 8 and 20, these remarkable trees can leap up 4.5 feet during the growing season.  How do you identify one for sure?  Grasp a branch and you’ll see the long, slender needles radiate in a bunch from the main stem. If you have only two in each bunch, you’re looking at a Red Pine; if you have five needles, you’ve made the acquaintance of a white pine.

For five warring nations in the Eastern United States, the tree became a symbol of unity and was named the Tree of Peace.  A consummate and passionate diplomat named Dekanawida (the Peace Giver) united the Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Mohawk and Seneca tribes into the Five Nations Confederation.  Weapons were buried beneath these trees and new saplings were planted where later talks and councils would meet beneath its boughs. Dekanawida used the symbolic five-needle bundle to show how the tribes could work together and pointed to the roots of the tree that extended north, south, east and west, radiating peace.

Today, white pine is still heavily used by our construction industry, carving and boatbuilding.  (If you are a fan of Thoreau, he actually talked about a man using a white pine canoe on Walden Pond.) Medicinally, the inner bark of the tree can be dried and pounded into a nutritious flour, and its sap was used to dress wounds because it contains natural antibiotic elements. Native Peoples used the inner bark and resins to create medicine that eased coughs, bronchitis, laryngitis and chest infections.  The white pine is prized as a medicine that “draws out”; people were once sent to walk through groves of white pine to draw out an illness. The long, soft needles can be boiled and served as a tea that contains as much vitamin C as an orange.

As a child, I recall a school trip to the Hartwick Pines preserve in northern lower Michigan. At that time, an enormous tree called the Monarch used to hold court over the stand of pristine white pines. (155 feet high and 12 feet around, she lost her crown in 1992 and died about four years later at the age of 365.) I remember very little of the logging museum, but in the presence of the pines, I caught a faint tremble of a cathedral, the silence of sacred space crinkled with children’s laughter.

Later, as an adult, I would walk the redwood forests of Oregon and the memory of Hartwick returned.  No, the White Pines were nowhere near as awe-inspiring as the West Coast giants, but like the image of a country church called forth from a dim childhood memory, a kind of sacred hymn connected them.

My husband Mike is loath to cut them on our land—I suspect he intuitively feels the history that runs through their roots, anchored as he is to this place along the shoreline of Lake Huron. At middle age, perhaps we both have begun to appreciate life that counts its birthdays in centuries instead of years, writing its own history in circles within itself.

I don’t need usefulness;

I search instead for the way

light slides off needles,

drips between runnels of bark,

and courses over the braille of soil.

If I sip uselessness in,

I taste sky and snow and sunshine,

I swallow mist.

Awe, smiles, fury and boredom flit past,

lost in cloud and evergreen.