All The Wood He Could

My son sat in the large chair at the eye doctor, and squinted to read the tiny lines of letters on the lower end of the chart in front of him.

The tone of his voice was clear and efficient, reflecting a teenager who is used to speaking to a teacher in a high school classroom. He apologized when he reached a microscopic letter on the bottom line that may or may not have been a "C" or a "G", as if this was somehow failing the test.

After the test was over, we received a final diagnosis from the doctor. Nothing serious, quite common now; just strain from "Zoom eyes".

In this 2020 Coronapocalypse world of home isolation, where school lessons are now attended from bedrooms and kitchen counters via "Zoom" video links, computer screens are being stared at for even more hours in the day than usual. This is having a huge impact on teenage eyes this year. The recommendation from our doctor was not to prescribe glasses, but to exercise the weak muscles in my son’s eyes, to strengthen tone and improve blood circulation.

My son was given instructions to look up and away from his school computer screen every 20 minutes or so, to focus on something in the distance. His face lit up at this news, since it gave him official medical permission, to stare out of the window during class.

At his age in the 1980s, I was also staring out of the window, and straining to see clearly. My classroom was located about 3,500 miles away from my son's school, on the East Coast of England. At that time, the antiquated "Hogwarts-esque" school building was a few years away from installing a computer, but I was having trouble seeing what the teacher scrawled on the blackboard. Even with a close up inspection, the squiggly chalk handwriting was not always legible, but the lines should not have been out of focus.

My parents took me to get my eyes tested, but the doctor sent me away saying that I didn't need glasses. This went on for a number of annual checkups, before we changed eye doctors and discovered that I had needed glasses for years.

My son was a little disappointed not to be prescribed glasses. Whenever he tries mine on, he looks extremely stylish; certainly better than I did at his age. One advantage to wearing glasses, was that my English teacher told me that I somehow looked more studious, making him more inclined to give me better grades.

The downside to the glasses, was that they made an already nerdy kid with freckles, seem even more, well… let’s be kind and call this new appearance: “quirky-looking”.

However, in spite of my goofy goggle-eyed image, the moment I put on glasses, the world around me became astounding. For the first time in forever, I looked up at a tree, and was able to see individual leaves rather than a blended mass of green. Street signs looked crisp and clear, and the smallest details became a fascination.

As my son and I left the eye doctor’s office, we disturbed an animal that had been happily foraging next to the parking lot. It looked a bit like a squirrel, but its dark brown body was chunkier, with shorter legs. Its tail was definitely stubbier than a squirrel's, and its face was blunt and round. My son identified it before I did:

"It's a woodchuck!"

The creature looked up at us, with a shocked face like a nerdy teenager caught staring out of the window by his teacher. When the woodchuck eats, it frequently stops to look around and check for predators. This one obviously saw my son and I as a danger, so it suddenly scurried back to the safety of its nearby burrow, leaving smiles on our faces, at the rare sight of this animal.

Our woodchuck was probably eating to prepare for hibernation, which they do from late winter to early spring. They often build a separate "winter burrow" for this purpose, and survive the extreme weather by slowing down their body temperature, heart rate and breathing. Our guy was still full of energy, and it ran so fast, we couldn't even tell where it vanished to.

Hungry for another encounter with nature, I looked at the surrounding wooded area, but everything was remarkably quiet.

Similarly back at home, the usual range of wildlife has been strangely absent from my backyard this week. Normally, my bird feeder empties within a few hours, but right now it's been three days, and it still remains half full. A couple of cardinals ate well yesterday, but the other birds seem to have vanished along with the rest of the natural world. The chirps, barks, tweets, croaks and squawks that filled the air for so long this year, have now been replaced by the human sounds of leaf blowers, cars and the occasional airplane flying overhead.

The past few weeks have seen a lot of lawn clearing, as competing landscape companies have blown leaves around the neighborhood, herding them into large piles in the streets. Then just as the lawns started to look clear, the wind blew more leaves off trees, and onto the grass where they waited for their turn to be rounded up into the street.

Right now, there is no foliage left to fall. The trees are bare, and the branches look like spindly twisted fingers reaching toward the white sky. In past essays I've always tried to convey a positive view, and as I looked at the stillness around me this week, I was reminded of an amazingly encouraging speaker I once heard, on the subject of dead trees.

Lifeless trees that are still standing are called "snags", and they actually provide some very important habitats for wildlife. Hundreds of species of birds, mammals, amphibians, reptiles and insects benefit from snags for food, nesting or shelter. Snags occurring along streams and shorelines may sometimes fall into the water, creating opportunities for fish and other aquatic life to move in.

For live trees, their height and sprawling leaves are beneficial in the summer to turn sunlight into sugar energy. The leaves are also an important source of water for the tree. And as liquid evaporates through the leaves, more water is pulled up from the roots (which is why water can flow upward in a tall tree!)

This is all very useful when the sun is shining. However, when the winter weather arrives, it’s the bark that provides a good first line of insulation against the cold, before the leaves are jettisoned into our yards.

This gives trees the appearance of death, but a closer look reveals that they are actually going into their own form of hibernation, known as dormancy. Inside the tree, just like the woodchuck, their metabolism slows, and growth is suspended, but the potential for new life is being lined up.

In some ways, the tree is more alive than ever in the winter, as it silently prepares for the incredible potential of renewal, that miraculously arrives with spring.

This is a lesson I would have learned back in school, if I hadn't been staring dormantly at my blurry world outside the window.