how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb

The nervous system. Man, woman, know thyself! 1908.

WHITE PINES In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England, the British Royal Navy claimed ownership of all the white pines over a hundred feet tall. English surveyors branded each trunk with three vertical hatchet marks, declaring it a crime for anyone but the king's representatives to cut these trees down. Broad and arrow straight, they became sailing ship masts, flexing in the wind as the Royal Navy sped around the world on its colonizing missions. By 1800, most of these big old trees were gone. Now, two centuries later, I camp among white pines in occupied Abenaki Territory--known for the time being as Vermont--my favorite tent site at Ricker Pond strewn with needles. Neither as broad nor as tall as the mast trees, they still tower above the maple, beech, birch, balsam fir; sing in the wind, a deep-throated hush. Cones thud to the ground. Morning sun on the pond throws rippling shadows onto their bark. Crowns break and curve. Trunks split into three, four, five; grow bent around and through each other. They would never have been the king's trees.

Alexandra Djokic