Twelve winters ago the personal challenge was to reshape the shadows on Heart Break Hill, North Carolina. You won’t find it on Google nor does anyone talk about it on Facebook or Twitter. It’s nearly straight up then a quick spin to the left, releasing enough natural energy to inspire water to float rather than sink, feeding the roots of wind damaged trees, honey bees, red tail hawks, white tail deer and one summer we had a beaver…his shadow seemed perfect sleeping next to wild white roses and giant grapevines several hundred years in age.
Walden had his pond, I have a forest…vowing never to plant professional leafy sticks that don’t belong in something so natural, nor do the sounds of roars and thunder from manmade engines that rip grass in half and limbs that have fallen during times when feeding the earth was more important than a prestine magazine cover living quarters.
Thousands of pieces of poetry have been written while staring into these woods. Billions of bugs have bitten into my skin waiting for the next sentence. Vibrant Cardinals stop to sneak a peak while butterflies glide by in ways that make them almost invisible to my writing instrument.
In 1997 a voice I couldn’t recognize spoke in ways no book can explain. The earth had suddenly shifted on Heart Break Hill shoving several trees face first into dried Georgia clay as if to say, “There’s a new song to sing…”
Erosion…
One neighbor called me insane, “There ain’t no way the earth is starting to move away!”
Exposing two giant boulders that appeared almost over night wasn’t proof enough in the way of explaining mans way of keeping house was no longer the way to play. He chose instead to look upward at the trees, “These have to come down. You need more lawn like the rest of us.”
Heart Break Hill patiently waited for the poet to somehow paste thought into word shapes so others of the same way could locate newer ways to save Mother Earth. A 93 foot drop from the street to the creek was growing daily…this truly couldn’t be my wild radio imagination. Swiftly jumping toward the poet with a pen was a single member of The United States Forest Service…he looked up, then down the trees, played with the poison ivy while studying the lay of the land then he got on his hands and knees and dug deeply as if to be searching for something.
“Heart Break Hill isn’t real. It’s manmade. Your trees are nothing more than branches fighting to keep a buried tree trunk alive. You have tremendous erosion because the trees are beginning to die and doing what’s natural…become part of the earth again which is creating enormous craters beneath what your eye recognizes are soil."
Holy cow I was living on Zombie Island! Each branch was nothing more than a single arm reaching to be recognized and once free to roam the planet…who knows what could be next! The poet’s forest on Heart Break Hill was quickly becoming an endangered species.
Fellow poets were physically saddened, Melody vowed to help by sending to me a giant Crab Apple tree, each blossom at spring represents the rebirth of many dreams. The Forest Service taught me how to utilize the fallen limbs in ways to protect the land. “Let the leaves collect, it’ll provide shelter for Mother Earth while giving snakes and turtles a place to hide on the hottest of spring days.”
Seventeen hundred trees arrived at my front door…it took me nearly three months to sink their music into every circle, corner and triangle of the manmade forest. Some stretched three inches while other maybe five or six. North Carolina Black Walnut seedlings that wouldn’t produce fruit for two hundred fifty years…I remember sitting next to one nearly in tears, “I will never know the poet who’ll come here and question…why are so many trees nearly planted in a row?”
The more natural the landscape, no professional trees and flowers allowed, soon the owl stopped by for a visit…I keep with me the picture of him dancing just three feet from me. To this day I can’t figure out what he truly wanted…except maybe to say, “I have a carload of family and friends in a forest south of town that need a poets place to play…do you mind if I bring them this way?”
And they did…including an extremely black squirrel to whom I’ve heard came from England. A former pet who got away and wow does he love to play! When the hawk steps in for a visit, most fuzzies quickly scamper ...not the British fella…his vow is to help out the chirp chirp chirp of the state bird by running toward the hawk. Seemingly shocked by such an introduction the bird of prey sits staring at the big tailed challenger and says, “Oh please…not the animal version of Simon Cowell…I’m so outta here.”
Heart Break Hill USA…the incline so steep few make it to the top on a snow covered day. “Manmade,” the forest man said to me. Tell me why the designer thought he could make a mountain out of a mole hill. Did he see something on the horizon where the water collects? Did he hear something in the wind that said, “One day a poet will sit in this very spot with a writing instrument?”
Seventeen hundred trees…one in twenty five have made it. They struggle each new sunrise to believe in the spirit of a lyric worth sharing…to send it to a place hidden away by the walls that keep time on time.
Amanda who is now nine or ten stopped the poet one day in the sun...this tree on its side in the forest you keep, you're not going to chop it?
"You tell me..." my only reply. "Is it keeping the deer from playing by having such tall branches with no leaves?"
"I walk across this fallen tree when I think..."she said to me. "I won't have any place to sing."
I turned and started to walk back home...only to notice the sound of two rock doves flying over, their wings sounded like clapping.
As much as I wanted to help the deer by removing the sharp limbs from a fallen tree...it occured to me, this trunk, this bark, these unvieled roots had truly danced with the stars...and Amanda understood the language.
Twelve springs later...three inche seedlings have become four feet. Others have joined the skyline in ways that catch the wind then send new words for me to write…not to have and to hold but rather place inside a once living tree so people I’ll never meet can see what it takes to convince a wandering vision that Earth Day isn’t just in April….Earth is every day.
Steal my art…
arroecollins@clearchannel.com
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