Sometimes, when the anthropomorphism in this encyclopedia collides with the 1964 Audubon unified thesis that all plants and animals despise all other plants and animals, you get copy that reads like the first draft of Lord of the Rings.
At timberline on the highest mountains of North America, where the earthborn forest and the skyborn fury of the elements vie for control, every tree shows the violence of battle. Some crouch forward, hugging the rocks and the bleached trunks of their ancestors, others reel backward, their growing tips thrashing downward like corn tassels...Botanically these timberline trees differ in no way from the tall limber pine specimens of the valleys, in appearance they are a race apart - gnarled, dwarfed, and dedicated to fighting.
One might ask: why must our descriptions of nature be so burdened with notions of deliberate agency? Does this contrived narrative hinder, rather than enhance, the clarity of our understanding of the complex mechanisms that determine the form and function of our world?
Then, after you've finished giving your French poodle its latte enema, you might ask: what God-granted resolve must steel the hearts of those embattled old veterans the trees? If only we could hear the deep, thrumming metronome of their timeless battle hymn, perhaps Man, too, could take arms against that hoary old tyrant The Wind.
Trees have been successfully grown some distance north of the timberline, and evidence from pollen-preserving peat bogs there indicates that trees are marching northward into new terrain.
Where there are several types of trees in a front line, it is the spruces that are the advance scouts.
Pines...are the heavyweights of the fighting line.
The vertical depth of the timberline battlefield occasionally runs to 500 feet.
Normally the warfront is as jagged and toothed as the individual trees which maintain it.
When the battle rages, the thick, matted trees of timberline often give shelter to high-country birds, which seek their branches for protection.
In summer the mountain tops above timberline are gay with alpine flowers and bird notes. The wild, twisted trees, now in peaceful repose, show the ravages of a violence that has come and gone. But if you wish to visit them in winter when the wind is on the warpath, you may wonder how they have survived the wild tempests at timberline.
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