When Help Is Called For

          One of the many beautiful stories scientist Hope Jahren tells in her book, Lab Girl, is about a war between caterpillars and Sitka willow trees.  When first attacked, the trees fought back by loading their leaves with poison.  Next they produced the poison in airborne form that could travel up to a mile to warn other Sitkas of the danger.  Those trees loaded their leaves too, causing the entire caterpillar generation to die miserable, starving deaths due to the poison.  

Jahren writes, “By playing this long game, the trees ultimately turned the tide of the war. . . . . Trees aren’t people and they don’t have feelings.  For us.  They don’t care about us.  But maybe they care about each other.  Maybe during a crisis the trees take care of each other." *
            I like thinking the trees aren’t paying any mind to me.  The woods out my back window are having spring whether or not I go look and see.  The May Apples will tent open and the tiny ferns uncurl like baby fingers as faithfully as ducks waddle to the water.  No one need stand over them threatening a demerit.  They just do what they are designed to do by virtue of their genetic code.
            Only people defect from our own design and to our own demise.  We are terrible at each minding our own business before stirring up our neighbors’.  We want more than we need.  We go too far.  We take too much.  Then we leave too much damage in our wake.  Rather than warning one another of dangers on the way, we are the danger – but helpless to get out of one another’s way.
            A walk in the woods does a human good, gives perspective on how life might be if we each stayed in our own lane more often than not.  Minded the little business of the one little life we have been given, straying sideways now and then when help is called for, like the Sitka willow trees.  

*A.H.Jahren, Lab Girl, New York: Knopf, 2016, p.185
**Read about Sitka willow trees at http://web.pdx.edu/~maserj/ESR410/Salixsitchensis.html