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Endlings and the Melancholy Beauty of Extinction
What cannot be replicated must die
A tree grows in a farmer’s field
Where I grew up in England, it was the spreading branches of oaks that towered like sentinels over otherwise cleared fields, the last remnants of forests cleared by invading Normans. But this is Western Canada, and even the trees are different. Here, it’s the deep-scored and fragrant Western Red Cedar, still standing ten centuries after the forest was cleared around it.
There’s an inherent pathos to anything that’s the last of its kind. A similar kind of nostalgia to the one that suffuses the early twentieth century writing I love. The sun setting forever on a vanished world. That melancholy glow that sweetens the flavor of everything. The astringent tannins that add depth to your wine.
In the endless forest surrounding these fields, there are plenty more cedars like this one. I watch them vanish one truckload after another, dragged down from the mountains and hauled across the world to be turned into wall studs or garden mulch or toilet paper.
The death of something that’s lived so long seems sad to us, but that’s the way things are organized. More correctly, it’s the way they grew. An intricate web of use and abuse that none of us can break free…
