The Walnut Tree

On power lines, prison offices, and learning to be the tree instead of the boy who takes

Some mornings I get to sit in a plastic Adirondack chair on the lanai, and when I do, there's a black walnut tree about ten feet away. Lush, a little wild, growing over the fence line into a parking lot on the other side, just a corner where people empty a bottle before they get in the car. Power lines run right through the branches. It shouldn't be thriving there. It is anyway.

I didn't always know to pay attention to trees.

In Auburn Prison, touching a tree was a privilege, and there was a beautiful one there, until they cut it down right before I arrived. Attica Prison didn't have any trees to see. There was a guard who killed an immense lilac bush, stripped the bark, drove a copper nail through it, and watched it die, because he thought it was in his way, or it offended him, or something. I still don't know what was in his head. I just know he killed it on purpose.

Fishkill Prison was different. In the puppy yard I had access to trees, real access, and I learned about forest bathing and tree hugging from my friend Mary. I'd sit at the base of a tree with a towel, sometimes with a dog laying against me, sometimes alone, and just read or draw or feel the energy. Each tree had its own.

There were three I loved in that yard. The first was my thinking tree, a mulberry growing through a pine, with exposed roots I had to hop over. I'd walk that long circle around it, dogs following, and ideas would come. Ideas for comics, but also about the parole board, about dogs in my life, about pieces of writing. For three weeks a year it produced these amazing mulberries. Sweet. The dogs loved eating them off the ground. I let them. Some guys didn't. They'd go at it like Hungry Hungry Hippos, just inhaling those berries. I ate them off the branch. The canopy felt medieval, like a little castle. It was a small magical world under there. That tree felt wise because it was two things at once, growing together. Lieutenant Cabron, who ran the building, kept trying to have that tree cut down. Thankfully cooler heads prevailed. At the other end of the yard was the climbing tree. I scraped my legs coming down from it something fierce. That was also the tree that supported a celebratory hammock I made of bed sheets and dog leashes after I learned I’d been granted parole. And in the middle was the silver maple, I think it was, quiet and still. The base was rocky but I'd get comfortable anyway. That was the tree I found myself at most. I felt grounded there.

Fishkill prison puppy yard (thinking tree in bk, sitting tree in middle, climbing tree out of view), courtesy of the author

Each tree held something different. I could feel it.

I read Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree as a child and it made me sad. I couldn't say why then. In prison, I read it again and I knew. I saw myself in that boy, taking and taking, not adding value, just consuming. The sadness was recognition. For years I felt like the boy in that book.

But there was a specific moment. It was the early aughts. I was at Attica Prison, about a year in, working as an inmate clerk in the maintenance department. I worked there for years, but I knew at any moment it could be taken. Guys were getting in trouble and losing everything. The previous clerk had been caught with a huge sword hidden in that very office. It be like that sometimes. The office itself: faux wood paneling from the seventies, neon lighting, shitty linoleum tile, hand-me-down furniture. But I was grateful for it. It allowed me to work on computer stuff, digital stuff. I kept my overflow books there because we were limited to twenty in our cells. The writing came later, in a different office with a better boss.

I sat alone in that office with The Giving Tree. The book jacket was shiny green with a bright red apple. Everything around me was grey and institutional and worn. But that book was bright, clean, new, all mine. I read it there and the sadness took on new meaning. I wasn't just reading about a boy anymore. I was looking at myself. Twenty-five, twenty-six years old, in a prison maintenance office under neon lights, understanding for the first time that I'd been taking. That I had to change everything. That the tree in that book was showing me what I wasn't yet.

But I'm reading it different now. Nine months out and I'm becoming the tree. Not the boy anymore. Rooted. Giving through my work, my writing, my art, the people I'm building things with. There's a power line running through the walnut tree in my yard. There's a monitor around my ankle. There's a stent in my heart. Things that shouldn't be there, running through me, but I'm still growing. Still lush. Still rooted and giving.

This walnut has a special energy. I see myself in it completely now. Shaggy, a bit out there, growing wild in a place not built for what I'm becoming. Stripped down in places but still offering. The tree's been doing it longer. I watch it from my chair and think: yeah. That's how.