Taking a roundabout walk to the beach through the National Seashore, I start noticing all the trees out here by themselves in the middle of nowhere. The Seashore has its celebrated features, the ocean beaches, the bay, the kettle ponds. But then there’s the rest of it, all this stuff in between.
There’s no entertainment value here, no recreational use in the usual sense. This forest of scraggly, undersized oaks and pines, their growth stunted by the thin topsoil, contains nary a destination redwood, the giant California trees which people flock to, exclaim over, take pictures of, carve tunnels through. Nothing like that. Not a photo-worthy tree in all these thousands (or millions?). This wilderness hides no elephants or lions or other such wildlife entertainment, as in parks in Kenya. Just these boring trees. (Even what local wildlife there is, coyotes and foxes and wild turkeys, seems to prefer the comfort of yards.)
With the summer crowds concentrated at beaches, these trees are just out here, unto themselves, being stirred and ruffled by whatever breeze, bent and broken by the storms of other seasons. Toppling when their time has come, they are left to lean on a neighbor or to collapse to the ground and rot in peace.
Following old sand road and paths, I see only the edges of the forest. 99% of it is away from even these unobtrusive ways, thousands of acres with no paths, not experienced by or known to anyone. Mostly it’s middle, like the white spaces on old maps, places noone sees, maybe where no one has stood—ever.
When these trees fall, far from human ears, do they make a noise? We’ll never know (though I have a hunch). I’m tempted to say that they exist completely unrelated to our species. But that’s not quite right, is it? Manmade acid rain was a concern some time back, although we don’t hear much about it any more. And of course these trees , most of them, are here (and not bulldozed for development) only because of a federal law and are in a sense overseen, if most of them never seen, by the Park Service. Though unseen, their fate was fussed and fought over in the contentious local hearings after the Park was proposed in the 1950s.
What the legislation did when passed in 1961 was lasso large parts of our towns and declare them no longer for sale, no longer available for exploitation. We declare this territory to be a national treasure for the benefit of all Americans, for its recreational value. But more radically, we declare that all this territory be allowed to exist though of no value at all in the usual sense to human beings, not even recreational.
We declare that they are hereby officially useless. And that we’ll all be better off for that uselessness.
The trees in our own acre not far from the Seashore boundary are the same homely scrub pines and oaks as their cousins in the Park, but different somehow. They are “our” trees, and those spared by building over the decades are still our possessions to do with what we will. If we ever sell, they will all be part of the deal.
The Seashore made possible that rare experience in our contemporary lives of something outside the marketplace. So much of what gives stuff a value in our world is the market, what you can sell it for. And thousands do come in season to actively treasure and recreationally exploit the more obvious targets within the Park. But most of it just sits here, useless.
I walk on to the beach, leaving the trees to talk amongst themselves.
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