Autumn Tree, Spring Tree

It is warmer now. I hung clothes out to dry on the balcony for the first time in months. No more balancing a bamboo pole across the top of our closet doors and then blasting the heat – these clothes dried in real breeze and a genuinely warm sun. Of course, when I say “sun,” I mean that ultraviolet radiation penetrated the atmospheric haze and excited the air molecules enough to increase the air temperature to one above that of the surface of my skin. There was no evidence of any blazing hydrogen ball in the sky – just brighter gray: a whiter shade of pale.

This photograph was taken at around 1:00 in the afternoon. Although some of the haze is water vapor, most of it is pollution. This is about as sunny as it gets here.

Chengdu is a really, really big city. It has four million people living downtown, and if you include the sprawl, the population reaches eleven million. Eleven million – that’s like New York City plus (Portland and all its suburbs times three). On the surface, it doesn’t feel that big, mostly because we tend to hang out in the areas we can comfortably reach by bicycle, and don’t often travel far beyond the second ring of the urban bullseye. Also, it lacks the arty flair that one often expects from big cities in the West – there is only one real avant garde gallery, and the number of venues that showcase live touring music can be counted on two hands. These are Western conceits, though, and if urbanity can be judged by chaos, or concrete, or colored neon tubing chasing up and down enormous towering structures at night, then Chengdu has it all. I didn’t notice how massive the metropolis spirit was until I realized that, despite the radical slide from a sweaty, humid September into a damp, freezing winter, I had no way of telling the seasons. Warm or cold, wet or dry, the concrete remains the same, the sluggish grey film on the rivers just like any other day, the obstinate green of the trees and the harried, dusty foliage skirting this building and that just as alive in January as in August. I had no way to mark natural time. City time is grey time, shown only in increments of lateness and obligation; we know when we are by what is sold in the stores.

One afternoon in early November, I was walking through a maze of streets I had never explored before. Construction was going on as it always is, one wall being knocked down with hammers and arms, rebar bristling from shattered cement; another being hastily slung together with other hammers, other arms, newly mixed concrete slathered with buckets and trowels, the sounds of banging and the negotiation of wheelbarrows through street traffic adding to the busy feel all around me. I wandered through a painting district, where every store front sold cheap versions of “modern art,” mostly acrylic knock-offs of the sort that grace hotel rooms, some with spatter-paint flourishes, others with nods to traditional Chinese styles, thin twigs with birds, stampeding horses, waterfalls. Another turn took me to the framing district, presumably where one took one’s newly purchased painting to get a gaudy gilded edge slapped around it for hanging. Yet another turn led me to a long avenue along a concrete wall covered in characters in red spraypaint. I silently mouthed the ones I could read, sounds only, mostly senseless; a grim hospital stood across the street with darkened windows; the sidewalks were full of people walking quickly, women scowling, men spitting, bicycles veering in and out of the paths of cars and buses and tuktuks and men-drawn carts of vegetables and building materials. I strolled, ignoring the stares from passersby several inches below my shoulders. It was cold and bright, with a breeze cutting through my jacket and into the layers beneath. A gust of wind caught my hair and I paused.

Before me on the sidewalk lay a small drift of yellow gingko leaves, rustling in the breeze. The wind picked them up and tossed them toward me, and they lifted and fell like a shower of silent golden coins. I looked up. Above me, the branches of the tree cut zigzagging patterns, jagged and dark across the clean, straight lines of the buildings overhead. The curve and snarl of each twig shuddered in the wind, dropping leaves as if it had waited for just this moment, as if this breeze were the one it had been waiting for all this time, this small wind to come and take away the fruits of its summer labors. The shapes of the branches were shocking to the eye in their organic unruly zigzaggery, and pointed more clearly than any argument to the radical difference between the things people make and the things that are made by the earth, by bees or spiders or beavers or wrens. It was wild. It was a wild thing living in the middle of a repetitive, concrete city full of right angles and loud noises and smoke, and it was living just as it may have lived on a hillside or in a forest or a quietly tended temple garden.

An old couple had been walking together, slow and wrinkled and full of time. They stopped, too, and craned their necks to look up at the leaves falling, a golden storm of gingko raining down on the three of us in the middle of a filthy urban afternoon. The woman bent and picked up a handful of the leaves; they are often collected for their medicinal properties, I learned. Instead of pocketing them, she smiled at her husband and tossed them into the air with a gesture of playfulness rare for her generation, the one that lost its youth to the Cultural Revolution. I grinned and wished I had something to say; they walked on and I stood alone, watching the yellow curves of the shapes spin in a small eddy of wind. It was Autumn. I had had no sense of the passage of time – days had rolled by, work had been done, weather had grown cooler; but I realized that I needed more than the cold to tell me when I was. I had none of the cues I look for at home: the smell of leaves crushed under my bike tires, the riot of colors while riding through Ladd’s Addition, the scents of apples and woodsmoke, the bluster of furling umbrellas in the entry of Powell’s surrounded by the warm damp of readers and the smell of freshly booked ink, the schirr of busy espresso machines, pumpkins for sale outside of markets. My internal clock had had no place inside the cooling days until I saw that tree. And then, that was all I needed. It was Fall. I understood, and my body knew it, too. Time was held in place with a small piece of knowledge given in a way that only nature can provide.

I have been thinking about that tree as our days have thawed from the teeth-gritting cold into an easy cool and warm. There are layers to the air. When it is cold, it is cold straight through, and each layers cracks open to reveal another layer of chill beneath it and the whole thing yawns open, dark and blue and black and full of damp and sharp edges. Now, even when the mornings are chill, there is a layer beneath that is soft, and beneath that, warm like breath on your skin, moist and moving and not at all hostile, and full of promise. It is possible now to remember that it was hot here once, that it will be again, that instead of moaning about the cold I’ll be whining about the heat, the humidity, the stagnancy of the air, a thing I secretly look forward to.

The first morning I felt that soft layer, a week or two ago, I was on my way to teach an early morning class. I just happened to look up, and above me was another tree, a pair of them. Both had the wandering twigs of fractal growth, the beautiful messiness of branches and thickets and things that are alive. One was holding forth tiny white blossoms, almost invisible against the fierce grey of the sky. The other was damp and green and held pink blossoms, the color of haiku and women’s silk and all things delicate. Again I stopped and let myself see them through the haze of early morning sleep and worries and preoccupied mind, through cold and clenched shoulders. A bird chirped. And suddenly, without warning, it became Spring.

~ by knifemaker on March 17, 2008.