Dead Trees Singing

This is written as part of a series called Music and Memories that Victoria at

Carer Mentor: Empathy & Inspiration

came up with. I was so happy she wanted to include my story! She is sharing them on her stack and my goodness, they are good.

This is Poppa Stu at the Rodeo last summer with my love:

Poppa Stu is 99 and in and out of being what we would call “with it”. Just started a few months ago. Dementia is a lot like many disabilities – it is our culture and the demands of capitalism that make it a big problem.  

My mother and father live together in the house where I grew up. A rambling, three-story mish-mash of additions done between 1910 and 1980. Mamanette, which is what everyone calls my mother, deals with the hardest parts of Poppa’s dementia. She is 89 and hardly ever gets any breaks, but they love each other and sometimes I cannot believe how lucky I am. After Mamanette, I am the next line of defense, and I’ve noticed something - my frustration with his dementia is 100% related to capitalism.  To time it is taking away from my work. For example: I don’t have time to describe to him over the phone, again, where the power button is on his computer so he can keep working on his book.  Because I need to work on my book, I have a deadline.

Poppa has a deadline too. His nearing death is one of the things that hasn’t escaped him during the inevitable shrinkage of his elderly brain.

One of the things that makes a big difference in Poppa’s ability to communicate, share, and engage is music and any talk about trees. His grandfather, Earl Bernando Smith, provided for his family in the mid to late 1800s entirely as a coronet player. Not in a symphony, but playing tunes for parties, special events, and parades. Poppa played the trumpet too and by the time he hit the jackpot with his third marriage to my mom, they were on their way to having a family band.

Our family used to sing Drifting Along with the Tumbling Tumbleweeds or I’ve Been Workin’ on the Railroad with layers of harmony on car drives, around the campfire or home at the upright piano. My kid brother was on the spoons, Mamanette and I took turns playing piano and singing, and Poppa played his old 1925 Martin Guitar. He always sang out too, grinning like he was 9 years old. By the 90s I was a professional musician.

Our other family hobby was camping and fishing, interspersed with almost constant quizzing about the names of the trees around us in the Colorado forest.

Poppa was a real cowboy. He survived being a POW during the last 6 months of World War II and then went to medical school. After that, he followed his dream of settling down in a small town, in the Wild West. Meeker Colorado set him up right away with a horse named Applejack, a little house/office, and a big hat. He was the only doctor for a hundred miles. It was 1952.

In 2018 when I was 47, I was nearly knocked off my saddle (metaphorically) outside Meeker on a horseback ride with my daughter. We rode out of our camp on gentle mares, just Chloe and I and a cowboy guide. She was 11, and super confident on her horse from years of riding with the neighbors. Her cowboy boots were tucked into her stirrups toe up, heel down. I was wearing Nikes from a thrift store, but the horses were so tame it hardly mattered. The thing that nearly took me out was something completely new – so foreign and unknown that I lost my balance in the world.

I wasn’t searching for novelty. I was curating experiences for my children. Confidently showing them around a remote mountain range I had explored since I was small, with Mamanette and Poppa. A place my family treasured and returned to year after year. On this trip, I was deep in the throes of single-parenting my kids - getting by but not exactly gloriously happy.

What could be new?

We followed the aging cowboy into the woods, just inside the Flat Tops Wilderness. But the woods had burned, and the forest was reborn as waves of colorful flowers, washing up on tall, blackened needles pointing toward the Colorado blue-bird sky with a vengeance.  The artists formerly known as trees. Thousands of lodgepole pines. Good for building barns and lodges, they had instead become roasted wooden spikes. This, I had seen before. But the day turned into much more than a visit to a strangely beautiful forest.

At Trapper’s Lake, the horses waded us around a long curve on the eastern edge, under storm-gored walls of granite that loomed above us. At the top, there was nothing but clouds and sky. I gestured up the rock wall of the mountain, one of the Flat Tops, and told Chloe about how Mamanette and Poppa had gone up there on horseback once and stayed for two weeks near the Marvine Lakes. They either hunted, fished, or packed in all their food. Boiled their water. Chloe was rightly impressed with her grandparents.

It started to rain, but we had gear in our saddlebags. The Cowboy had a good hat and donned a yellow slicker that made a wide triangle over his burly figure. Chloe was also in yellow, bright as a Lego, on a wide-backed mare. I took up the rear in a hooded raincoat that came down to my ankles, thanks to Poppa who had worn it up there in storms decades before.

The rain was getting heavier when we started up toward the great shoulders of rock that seemed to be shaking water off down toward the lake. Our horses were steaming, the lake a blur of water hitting water. The trail went up, up, up.

Like Poppa used to say, “Up where you can see blue sky under your left stirrup.”

Only there was no blue sky, anywhere. My tummy was starting some acrobatics watching my daughter up ahead of me, on her lumbering horse, along the trail’s edge. I could see it all – a slow-motion fall of screaming horses, my Chloe with wisps of blue hair sticking out from her yellow hood, disappearing forever down the cliff.

Then I heard the thunder. Normally I adore a good mountain thunderstorm. Poppa delighted in them, and together we would count down seconds between lightning and thunder, hoping the number would get smaller and smaller.

“CRACK! BOOOOM!” Poppa would always say. Again, with that grin.

I had enjoyed one storm as a teenager at the base of the cliff we rode underneath, hovering in delight inside my tent, and another decades ago when I was twenty-something and reckless, laughing into beers down at Trappers Lake Lodge with the old-timers. We took a shot of Jim Beam every time the lightning struck where we could see it. Those granite mountains boomed at each other - threatening in rolling bellows pushed back and forth between them.

We went on riding in the storm for a good twenty minutes, and I calmed myself down since both Chloe and the cowboy were relaxed in their saddles and the trail was hard rock, dug into the side of the mountain. Then we came up on a wide shelf, like a steppingstone for a giant, halfway up to the top of the Flat Tops. It looked to be at least a quarter mile wide, and the trail turned inward, toward a forest of burnt-out trees. I sighed in relief.

Up close, the trees had eyes. Where the branches used to be. Speckled in uneven shapes up and down the trunks, like Picasso had painted them without his usual splash of color. Eyes that were looking at us with a depth of scorched beauty. Spirals of black tinged with blue, silver, and cream. I remembered something else Poppa always said.

“Trees never die.”

His smile when he regaled us with tree details was all toothy enthusiasm. There was nothing he loved more than having us out in the mountains of Colorado, together. He said after the dead trees have aged and lost their green, they are habitat for warbling birds, stealthy spiders, hidden snakes, buzzing bees, and my favorite - mushrooms. I vowed to ask Poppa if he had ever seen a forest full of dead trees with eyes.

Our horses came up to a much gentler incline and entered another burnt forest of dead trees crowded together, wild-eyed and trembling in the wind. The rain got herself worked up again. The horses weren’t bothered, but I was.

I put on a brave face and ‘yee-hawed’ at Chloe.  She turned in her saddle and grinned at me like she had been eating marshmallows. Her smile was pure Poppa Stu.

We came up on another narrow trail cut into the granite and started our descent. The rain slowed but then here came the wind. Rattling the yellow plastic riders in front of me, forcing their slickers up around their heads in a rush of floral motion. Rivulets of rain gushed from the top of the mountain over our trail toward the lake, adding to the cacophony of weather.

There was another sound too, something keening and eerie, I couldn’t place. The noise was coming towards us in a slow crescendo that built for ten minutes while we returned to the valley. My imagination got the best of me again and I was sure some monstrous weather was headed our way – something deathly and rare that I had never heard of. But no monster ever came, we got near the bottom and the sound surrounded us.

It was the trees.

All those ghostly trees with eyes instead of branches – white at the bottom and thinning to ends in narrow points of black. The trees were moaning in the wind. A dissonant chorus of wailing women’s voices rose and fell in time with the gusts, with imperfect harmony. The notes were sung in intervals that my music professors would have slashed across the staff paper with red pens if I had turned it in as a composition assignment. Like Bernstein and Schoenberg had rearranged Verdi’s “Dies Irae” with only sopranos - and given them LSD.

Burned trees, it turns out, are wind instruments. No bass. Only the high notes.

The strange voices welcomed us to the valley floor. I was nearly lifted off my saddle into the ether by the joy and mystery of it – surely I would float up, over the song, into the mist among the keening women.

My awe doubled because I had been sleepwalking through life, as we do. Survival mode. I had forgotten about the wild things, the unexpected and new - that inexplicable wonder we all yearn for, and narrowly miss, pulling our phones out to capture the memory instead of living it. We don’t remember so much as capture these days.

I was carried right into the song, holding the reins with my jaw dropped to the saddle. New beauty. Halfway through my life, I was immersed in the mysterious unknown. Nothing I had ever seen, or imagined, or dreamed, or desired. Or heard. Something so novel and luminous and strange, it was like divine communications. Revelations.

“Trees never die!”

I wanted Poppa with me. I wanted him to know I understood.

The sun came out and the lake lifted her spirit up, sending hundreds of steamy ghosts to disappear into the chilly air. Chloe turned around to me with owl eyes and said, “Mama that was so crazy!” Still beaming that Poppa Stu grin. So much sunshine!

We stopped and pulled our horses up nose to nose to laugh about it and have an in-the-saddle snack. We couldn’t believe we were thirsty after all that rain. Heading back through clumps of new aspen and willow we returned to the lake and sloshed into the opposite side we had ridden before. We crossed the river that fed the lake, a burbly shallow thing wider than the road home. Trout were rising since the bugs had come flying out of the burnt tree trunks into the warming air. Starry white flowers moved gently on the shore and in the water’s rippling mirror.

I sang some of the songs Poppa had always sung to me, over the lake. The ones he still remembers clearly, even on his worst days of dementia.

Home home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play

Chloe shook her head at me, mortified.

Where seldom is heard, a discouraging word

The cowboy began to sing along.

And the skies are not cloudy all day.

Poppa was with me, of course. Right there in the saddle.

THE GRIN: