The Marker Tree

Here it is May, when high school seniors are being asked a dozen times a day where they are going to college. Some aren’t, of course, either by design or default, which is why I don’t ask—but their parents do, especially if they have funded several campus visits and the verdict is still out. Once they have had a hand in narrowing the field, these are the kind of parents who want their children to make the final decision, even when they cannot fathom the logic.

I know someone who travelled 849 miles from Atlanta to Manhattan with her daughter for a stealth visit to the New School in Greenwich Village. Standing outside on a sidewalk, the two of them looked through a plate glass window at what appeared to be a student lounge, with bulletin boards full of flyers, fluorescent lighting, and several young people eating lunch while studying at round Formica tables.

“No,” the daughter said.

“What do you mean, ‘No’?” her mother asked.

“I mean I’m not going in there,” she said. “I can tell from here that this is not my school.”

Another mother told me that her daughter was closing in on a decision. They had already visited a lot of colleges, so time was tight, but they still had a few left to go. “She says she’s looking for the right tree,” the mother said, “and when she sees it, she will know.”

How do we know these things? What points the way?

When my husband Ed and I walk in the woods, he likes to show me what he calls marker trees—also known as trail trees or pointer trees—widely believed to be part of a navigational system used by indigenous people in our area before the Cherokee Removal in the late 1830s. Two sharp bends in the trunk distinguish a marker tree from those around it. The first comes a couple of feet off the ground, when the trunk bends ninety degrees to grow horizontally for a stretch. When it is long enough to point in a discernible direction, the trunk heads skyward to become vertical again. These are old trees, as thick in the middle as a pony, making it hard to imagine a child who wouldn’t want to hop on the back of one and ride it for a while.

Tradition says the trees were bent to point toward things necessary for human life—a water source, safe river crossing, reliable hunting ground, or place where medicinal plants were known to grow. In a culture that had no word for “religion,” the trees also steered people toward things necessary for the life of the spirit—ceremonial sites, healing portals, individual graves, and common burial grounds. Some old-timers say that when you find a marker tree with more than one branch growing upward at the end, the number of branches tells you how many people are buried underneath.

Because these trees do not come with written histories or certificates of authenticity, experts are always trying to set the record straight. Plenty of bent trees result from natural accidents, they point out. Large trees fall on saplings all the time without uprooting them, leaving the young ones to bend any way they can to survive.

There is also an age requirement. No matter how impressively a tree is bent, the minimum age for a genuine marker tree is 190 years, when the Cherokee people were made to leave the land. A sweetgum tree that age would be twelve feet in circumference by now, a white oak about ten. You’d need two people to get your arms around either of those, so spindly trees need not apply.

These are all good points, but since I don’t have a rooster in this fight, I am more interested in what happens when people believe they are in the presence of a marker tree. They get deeper all of a sudden, as if they too have grown roots that go all the way down. They get quiet when they put their hands on the bark, seeking communion with those who stood there hundreds of years ago—or are buried beneath their feet right now—all within the lifetime of this one tree. Some start praying even if they hadn’t planned to; others start asking the tree questions. Are you the Mother Tree? Did you see my people come by here when they were running for their lives?

I may not be able to fathom the logic, but I have felt the same pull—tugging at me in the most unexpected places, often without another human in sight—the sense of being guided by a presence that does not speak my language but knows something I need to know. Is this where I belong? Am I headed in the right direction? Are you the tree I have been looking for?

Talk like that makes some religious people uncomfortable, I know, though I don’t always know why. Biblically speaking, God is a ventriloquist, able to communicate through promising rainbows, burning bushes, bright stars, fiery serpents, pillars of cloud, ravens with bread in their beaks, thunderclaps, and even a stubborn donkey with a gift for seeing angels. Where is the fine print that says the possibilities stop there? Or to put it another way, who is the person who will tell God to stop?

My guess is that even if the high school senior never finds her tree and has to make a decision without it, she’s the kind of person who will stay open to the signs no matter where she ends up. She may feel lost for weeks, even months. I’ve been there, haven’t you? Then one day she’ll notice a flaming maple in a courtyard she never noticed before, and she’ll walk close enough so only she can hear.

I knew you’d find me.