The Oak Grove
Lungs burning, I double over with giddy exhaustion. Worn by years of heavy footsteps and framed on either side by a sea of Gambel’s oak, the trail was far more grueling than it had seemed from our cursory glance at the bottom. The fluttering five-lobed leaves swallowing this hill on every side create the illusion of shallow breathing, like we might be perched upon the hump of a dormant monster, obscured in antiquity and set ablaze by a chilling autumnal tickle. As I bask in the glory of this scene, I notice the oaks on the side of the hill we’ve just summited are all a golden yellow, but the opposing slope is bathed entirely in red. It seems odd that two groves of the same species in such close proximity would flaunt an entirely different carotenoid display, but my later investigation into the phenomenon revealed that carotenoids are only half the story. The reds are not derived from carotenoids at all, but from anthocyanins—compounds that protect the leaves from harsh sunlight and do not appear in leaves that are more resistant to UV damage.
I feel his hand in mine and I inhale sharply. The touch makes me smart, not out of the harshness of his grip or the coolness of his skin against mine, but a deeply entrenched fear of myself. I wish I could remain on the yellow side of the hill, basking in the light of God with no risk of lasting hurt, but after years of painful words and festering wounds I, too, have cloaked myself in anthocyanins and retreated to hide among the leaves of red. His touch tingles with forbidden pleasure because if the wrong eyes catch sight of us, my education, my friendships, and even my familial relationships will be thrown into jeopardy.
I wonder if these trees, like me, feel so afraid of God that they must block out His light just to survive another season in the sun. Perhaps they find it easier than I, planted in the midst of others who likewise shield themselves and, for a moment, I envy these red oaks. After all, I am hopelessly lost in a yellow grove, surrounded by people who welcome God’s light—it nourishes them with no signs of damage and no need for the doubt and hate and denial that serve as my anthocyanins. At the close of this summer season, each of them will playfully shed their chlorophyll and God will smile at the presence of their fiery carotenoids. But when winter wraps its icy grip around me, those key carotenoids seemingly present in everyone else are nowhere to be found. I’ve clawed at the face of this God, trying to grasp any ounce of the deity that everyone seems to know, until His only presence in my life is the blood caked beneath my fingernails, red like the leaves that swirl around me.
Fagaceae quercus gambelii—the very name of these trees seems to contain a pair of labels for people like me. These are names I’ve been called by the same people who God unabashedly channels His light towards. I scan these two disparate groups of trees, stuffed into the same scientific classification, and wonder if God is no better than man at understanding his creations. It feels that God is just another Goethe—simply lumping his children together by lineage, absolving our individuality in the name of efficiency, and designing a plan suited only to His human Urpflanze*. For each of his 350,000 species of beetle, 600 species of oak, and nearly eight billion human beings, is the only prospect at finding favor with the Father to fit into the perfect mold he superimposes onto us?
Then what? After His mold is forced onto me and leaves me broken in pieces, where am I to turn? Perhaps that is what hell is—a place for all the three- and four-lobed leaves God rakes together and can’t fit a mold to. There is a strange comfort in this. If Hell is just a haven for people torn between honoring the lazy poet who peers down, failing to articulate a name for them, and the restless poet, hurriedly and unsuccessfully trying to cram God into a prescribed category, then God and I are playing the same game. For now, we crouch on opposite sides of this hill, locked in a checkmate. He, bathed in light, strolls among the flawlessly formed yellow gold oaks who greedily lick ambrosia from His fingers. I, cloaked in shade, draw circles in my shame. We can’t see each other yet—maybe someday. But for now, I slide faster and faster down this slope until the red streaks past and my vision stings with cold.
*In German, “Urpflanze” translates to “primordial plant.” Goethe theorized that there might be a plant that could serve as the perfect universal pattern for how plants grow and develop which he called the “Urpflanze.”