If you know me in Real Life then you’ve probably already seen my post on Facebook about it, but if you’re a stranger or a literary agent (!), then it’s my pleasure to let you know that I previously won my university’s environmental writing contest and have now officially been published in an environmental sustainability journal! My piece “Burn Zone,” which is a memoir about my time at Philmont (mind you, very different in style than my other Philmont memoirs posted here), is now published in Volume 3.2 of Q Magazine, an environmental writing publication hosted by the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (or ISEE), a part of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. And Q Magazine is now the only place you can read “Burn Zone,” since it isn’t posted on my blog at all. Which, I promise, is a good thing. Anyway, I entered and won the grand prize in Q’s Janelle Joseph Environmental Writing contest, and now I’m officially in print! This isn’t technically the first time I’ve been published, since I used to have some stories up hosted by NIU, nor is it the first time I’ve won an award for my writing, but this feels distinctly different. I’m very happy with how things turned out and I’m very proud of this accomplishment. Can I pat myself on the back or is that weird?
Anyway, I don’t really feel like writing an extensive post this week. It isn’t because I’m sad this time, unlike my last short review, but just because I’m a little stressed and tired and Tuesday kind of snuck up on me. So, hey, here’s another short review about something that I’ve been thinking about recently and something that I’ve been missing; pine trees. Actually, one specific pine tree. The ponderosa pine. Think of it as like, uh, a tree of the week post. I used to do bird of the week emails to a small email chain when I attempted to start a bird-themed club at UIUC called Friends of a Feather, but that’s mostly unrelated to this. Actually, it’s completely different, because this is a tree, and it’s only one week, and that was birds, and it was at least ten weeks. So, what do I know?
Well, I know that I’ve recently been missing seeing the color green in my life. All the deciduous trees in my area have dropped their leaves, and had them dropped for a while now, and as I write this post, it’s dumping snow all around outside. Like, I literally haven’t seen this much snow in years. There’s probably already six to eight inches of snow on the ground and it’s still snowing. That’s small potatoes for places up north, yeah, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw more snow than a light dusting. And while it’s really pretty, it’s very stark, and white. And I miss seeing trees. I don’t know why the snow made me think of that, but I miss green trees. I wish Illinois, or at least my area, had some good coniferous trees that kept their leaves all year round. There are some pines at the University arboretum, but not a ton else. But I know that ponderosa pines are cool and would tough out the cold and not drop their leaves, and I really wish I had some of that energy in my life.
I mean that longing could really fit for any pine tree, not just the ponderosa. But ponderosa pines are a bit nostalgic for me, too; they’re one of the primary trees at Philmont, and I know I talk about Philmont like all the damn time, but I miss it pretty often. I miss being out in the woods in a place where everything isn’t just flat and/or corn. But also these trees smell like butterscotch or vanilla, depending on your nose, and when I went to Philmont as a scout, the staffers back then would tell us that the female trees smelled like butterscotch and the male trees smell like vanilla, so I (and the rest of my crew) went around the entire camp smelling trees the entire way, trying to find the differences between them. As far as I can tell, the whole thing about them smelling different is a boldfaced lie, but if it got us excited and engaged with trees, then is it such a bad thing?
Plus they look so different from other pine trees, with their weird orange bark and constant production of sap. Actually, about that, here’s some fun facts about the ponderosa, going beyond just my own feelings; the ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) is really resistant to fire, kind of the opposite of those Christmas trees, and it provides foods for tons of birds and small mammals. It got its name from being “ponderous,” apparently, or because it’s really dense and heavy, and has a couple other random names. Apparently, you can eat the inner bark or make it into flour, and the bark is also edible in early spring. According to staff at Philmont (again), Native peoples supposedly would strip large parts of the bark off of these trees in order to create markers or pathways, or take huge swaths of bark off in times of famine. Is this true? I don’t know. There were some stripped trees at Philmont when I was there, but there were way too young to have been done by native peoples. So that much is kind of up in the air.
Oh, also, apparently a bunch of them were once pulled out of the ground and moved to some random desert for the purpose of testing a nuclear bomb on them? Like, they US Forest Service just straight up relocated 150 of these trees and then dropped a fucking nuke on them to see what a nuclear bomb would do to a forest. It, uh, burned the hell out of the trees and knocked them over, as expected? I don’t know what else they could possibly have expected. But hey, I guess these trees did their duty and made sacrifices against their will for the progress of thermonuclear annihilation. Hurray?
Hey, I hope you learned something about these incredibly common, incredibly widespread random-ass trees. As they stand, I give Ponderosa Pines five pinecones out of five. They are very nice trees. Thank you for attending my TED talk.
Hahahaha! Just funny. 🤣