The warm southern sun of a June morning filtered down in green reflections through the cool forest. For several hours we had been climbing one of the richly wooded mountains of the Great Smokies. More than five miles back, on the other side of the mountain, lay the last road of civilization, an unused wagon trail; ahead, on this side, the primeval forest grew undisturbed for twenty miles and more.

We had been pleasantly observing plants and rocks as we hiked. Around us towered oaks of many varieties, together with hickories, maples, horse-chestnuts and tulip trees. In the valley ravines stood great cucumber trees and hemlocks. Beneath all these there was still enough light for dogwoods, witch hazels, laurels, azaleas and hydrangeas to thrive. The forest floor, too, was rich with herbs and ferns as well as lady slippers, trilliums, Indian cucumber root, Indian physic, galax, partridge berries, pipsissewa and rattlesnake plantain. Exposed rocks were covered with lichens; in other places, black humus had collected in deep pockets on the mountainside.

We were accustomed to silence, so we noticed the crunch of twigs and the rustle of leaves under foot as we walked. Not many birds were here, although we caught with undisturbed delight the occasional deep roll of a thrush, or the trill of a warbler. Earlier there had been a shower that wetted us; now the sky had cleared, and our clothes were dry. Our trail sloped easily upward, although below us the mountainside fell away rather steeply into a dark gorge.

Suddenly a sharp, piercing crack split the forest stillness. We reacted with the quick shock that lightning close at hand in the mountains produces automatically in the climber. But the sky was cloudless; not even a breeze stirred. The crack was quickly followed by others, growing in volume, a rending and smashing sound. The mountain ravine filled with reverberations, echoing and re-echoing up and down the valley. The rumble of falling rocks continued on down the gorge below.

Now sighting a narrow opening in the forest below us, we realized that we had been present at a great natural phenomenon—the fall of an aged, giant hemlock. On this bright morning, without rain or wind, it had lost its centuries-old grip on rocks and soil of the mountainside. As it had come to its catastrophic end, it had torn away masses of soil, rocks and roots, and cut a long swathe of branches, smaller trees, and shrubs in its downward path.

Then, complete silence in the forest. We were left alone to our startled thoughts.

· · ·

The natural fall of a tree. It must be a common occurrence. Every ancient, undisturbed forest has its huge rotting logs. Many must have fallen this way. It is the process of Nature. But who has ever been present at the exact moment of this drama? My companion, the park naturalist, who had daily hiked in the woods for years, confessed that he had never before had this experience, although an old woodsman he knew had claimed to have heard and seen the phenomenon. Not even Thoreau records such an episode in his two years at Walden.

The fall of a tree in a storm, or shortly after, or by weight of snow, or even when struck by lightning—these are impressive events, notable when we witness them. And no matter how often we have seen a tree cut down, the call of “Timber!” and the sight of a great tree, slowly swinging into space and then plummeting with increasing speed to the ground below, always has its emotional impact on us. We are conscious of man’s dominion over palm and pine. But, beyond this, the fall and death of an ancient thing, so long rearing itself in light, starts melancholy reflections. Yet all these incidents are artificial, slight, in comparison with the natural fall of a tree on a calm day. Then the slow conflict of Nature reveals itself in one of her supreme dramatic spurts.

Now, far below us, lay the long-dead hemlock, whose days of life, we estimated, may have endured for four centuries. As we resumed our climb, there was time for our thoughts to digest our experience. No other observation in natural history, not the sprouting of an acorn, not the study of an orchid in flower, had ever brought home to me so vividly the wonder of plant life and the process of Nature, as the fall of this dead hemlock that June day. While, centuries ago, the organizing principle of protoplasm that gives me my existence was scattered through many individuals on a far continent, the hemlock was already a living organism, a viable seed. Here on this very mountainside, so long ago, it nestled and grew.

Like all life, it began its unceasing struggle against the dead weight of inanimate matter. For the order, or controlled chaos, of physical nature is one thing. Life uses this order, but from it builds a new, a different order of its own, directly in opposition to the leveling influence, the tendency toward a stale equilibrium, which inheres in non-living matter. For help the plant draws on decomposed organic matter in the earth; but mostly it seizes directly on the energy of the sun, the force of wildly chaotic matter transmitted through light and heat. Steadily, as it lives and grows, building physical stuff into its life pattern by means of captured energy, the plant must struggle against the propensity of its own substance to return to the ordered chaos of cold matter.

A tree is never a static thing. Every hour, every day, through seasons and seasons, for years and centuries, this hemlock had been building its own structure, the order of life, against the pull of physical Nature. Cells of wood had risen higher and higher, flaunting the attraction of gravity. Roots had spread wider and deeper, gripping rocks and displacing soil, to hold in balance the towering bole. On and up this life had pushed, while in the outside world boys grew into men, generations came and departed, nations were born and died. The tree was life itself, the long-sustained, silent struggle of the forest.

“The tree was life itself, the long-sustained, silent struggle of the forest.”

But even this process was subject to time; it must have a stop. For with every pulsation of growth the tree was increasing its thermodynamic unbalance of the universe. Who knows what stops the growth of a tree; the precise manner, the exact moment, when death enters the heart? At some instant the drive of life flagged, the strength of inanimate forces, long successfully challenged, gained the upper hand. The hemlock had begun to lose its solitary battle. Was the reverse sudden, as in trees that seem to die over night? Or had this forest giant waged a long retreat, slowly dying by inches over many years, until the last mortal cell was extinguished? At this final moment, the tree had attained its full measure of reordering the universe, which is the historical record of life’s triumph over matter.

But then the process of decay, of return to the deadly equilibrium of inanimation, set in. No longer did the roots strengthen their hold on the earth; the task of holding the tree upright, against the pull of gravity, was left to the dead woody tissues. Little by little, irreversibly, the forms of the roots shrivelled, sand and rock shifted beneath the huge hulk. Perhaps the growing root of some other tree tilted the balance slightly. Finally, one more dead cell lost its hold; the ultimate grain of soil rolled away. And the whole giant crashed to earth. The fall of this skeleton revealed the mighty forces of inanimate Nature that the tree so long had held at bay.

It was fate that brought us, short-lived men, to the spot at that exact instant. All our earthly runnings to and fro had led to this concatenation; to be witnesses of the woodland drama. But we were part of the drama, too. The same forces were at work in us, building up the order of life, increasing the potential of decay. We, too, were disturbers of the universe.

And yet the drama was not over. The fallen trunk would lie for years there on the mountain slope, gradually filtering from its side the dead organic material that would some day be taken up again to build the living order of yet other organisms. The round would be ceaseless; physical Nature does not rest.

As we moved on up the mountain that shining, memorable day, away from the uprooted hemlock, the green forest closed around our view. We knew we had never before felt so much a part of the great process of undaunted life.

I do not expect to hear again in my lifetime the natural fall of a forest tree. But I shall not now pass a dead fallen trunk without a feeling of respect, and kinship, for the life struggle recorded there.