And Also The Trees

The ancient forests of the millennia-worn Appalachian mountain range are a persistent kind of wilderness that obscures human presence. This is where I first heard the music of the British band And Also the Trees.

Deep in the English countryside, rolling grasses shimmering with the shadows of racing clouds, human stories dissolve into the ground. There are ghosts that live in these spaces. The album (Listen For) The Rag and Bone Man resurrects some of these specters in a sparkling landscape of memories and visions.

In my neighborhood I see an unusual sight across one of the few open spaces in my city: a horizon of trees and a pocket of sky unobscured by buildings and lights. During the warm half of the year Venus hangs brightly at dusk, and the sun disappears into an ocean of color that reminds me of Appalachia. When I walk home some nights I often listen to the last song on this album, watch the constellations peer out of complex cloud formations, ponder every person who chances by as though they were another character witnessed in this sweeping dreamscape.

When I lived in the wilderness I often saw lightning bugs hang in the darkened forest that surrounded our yard, blinking in and out of existence like a time lapse of the universe. I sometimes wish I could still sit at the antique writing desk and look out at those woods through the aged, rippled window panes.

I recently took a detour in order to see if an apartment I lived in during my early adulthood was still standing. It was a stone two story tenement, and during a long-ago college architecture field trip our professor told us my apartment was one of the oldest surviving structures in the city. The inside was in terrible condition, every hasty change that had ever been made over the centuries left a visible scar. I touched the stone exterior to remember the texture. When I am old, where will I most wish to return, and will it be as I remembered?

The view from my house