Old growth.

It’s a suggestive phrase. One of those conversation openers.

PRETTY GIRL: “So what do you think of when you hear ‘old growth’?”

HAPLESS DATE: [proudly removes his left shoe and sock] “Did I ever show you this genuine toe fungus?”

Fortunately, my mind has a more appetizing association, thanks to Cathedral State Park. Cheesy website, gorgeous forest. The trees there are “old growth”, meaning they’ve been there since before Columbus. Not as big as the California redwoods, but huger than any trees I’ve ever seen. You’d need three or four people to hold hands around some of those trunks, if you were into that.

Trying to describe them is difficult, especially with a fussy 11-month old daugher on my lap. I let her grab a roll of masking tape as an unspoken consolation prize for denying her the delights of this keyboard. It seems a poor substitute. I won’t even waste time giving her a ‘toy’. Apparently, children’s toys are carefully designed to interest them about 300 times less than the nearest mundane, drably coloured, fragile/dangerous adult object.

This feat of modern engineering and psychology gets far less attention than it deserves. I can surround her with a cornucopia of toys, and they will inexorably guide her to a square little book with no pictures (preferably from the library) that she absolutely must tear to pieces. What other field can claim that level of suggestive power?

All right, I just put her on the floor. She grabbed a little wooden toy, and is now playing with a toy castle. Of course. Just because I wrote about it. Wait…the castle lasted about 4.8 seconds. Now she’s on the prowl…

Anyhow, if you ever really want to look up at a maple tree, stop by that park. It’s famous for its hemlocks (the tree, not the plant that killed Socrates), but I liked the interspersed maples. Full-grown trees are generally majestic, but these are (as someone else said) primeval. The high branches arch like Gothic windows of green. The wide spaces between the trees are still and quiet.

Cathedral is a peculiarly apt name, for the giant trees are as pillars holding the windows that glow above the spacious silence and color the sun. Whoever named this stand of old growth must have loved a great church in an old country. Today this patch of forest reminds us of an old cathedral; I wonder if the first Gothic cathedrals reminded the builders of an old forest? Now neither forest nor cathedral is common here.

Of course we have plenty of trees and churches. But not that kind, not that beautiful. Not that often, anyway. America is peppered with cathedrals and cathedral forests, but few have seen them and fewer still know what it is to breathe such beauty every day.

Sure, we’ll get by. But a tree farm is not a cathedral forest, and a church that could moonlight as a conference center/waiting room/warehouse is not a cathedral. One of the truths most glaringly absent from our modern little minds is that two things can fulfill some of the same functions and still be different.

Both a tree farm and Cathedral State Park will yield paper. But you don’t stroll down the eerie aisles of a tree farm with awe. It may be fun. So is a cornfield. You could make a maze. But you’ve lost the chance for awe, and awe is something.

Similarly, you can pray in a warehouse, or a conference room, or even in a contemporary church. If ‘church’ is just ‘place to pray without getting run over or someone trying to sell you something’, than most of our churches fit the bill. They deserve some credit as havens from billboards. But anyone who’s seen the joyous churches built in the furious flowering of Catholicism knows that a ‘church’ there is far more than a sterile pray-space. Even our lovely old ethnic churches don’t have that energy and awe. Awe is something. Something we can lose.

And so is health: soil health, animal health, plant health, and our health. One more reason I’m glad to be out in the fields with plants that aren’t doused with poision. Every day there are things on this farm that simply don’t exist on conventional farms. The horses alone are a whole world of beauty and companionship and excitement that would be mowed down by a world of only tractors. Then there is the air, clean of pesticides. There is the movement of muscle that wouldn’t exist from the seat of a tractor. Maybe even a gut that’s slowly diminishing.

Not that tractors are evil. Their power is something too. But this is a place where a tractor is used side by side with horses and hands; it hasn’t taken over as if speed were the only good thing that existed. I want to keep my eyes open, I want to see many good things. I don’t want to live in a cramped cosmos of efficiency. And hey, look, I don’t have to.