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Authors: Peter Handke
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hurricane, most of them massive old oaks: now one could see, layer upon layer, the material deposited by previous millennia. The snail shells at the bottom of the craters had not rolled into them recently, but seemed
to have been there from time immemorial. And similarly the oyster shells were not left over from a picnic in the woods, were not trash tossed into the root cavities after a tour of the damage, but were stuck there, removable only with hammer and chisel, as if baked, a thousand years earlier, to their prehistoric oyster bed, lifted by the catastrophe from what had once been the sea. And the black basalt there in the next soil layer down came from a vulcanic vein. Where am I? When did that take place? And was that now? And when is ânowâ?
None of the other trees had such spreading crowns as the giant oaks, or oak giants. At the same time, the branches in the crowns were interwoven, forming a dense mass. And nothing made a more powerful impression of devastation than all the oak crowns lying smashed on the forest floor. Yet even these almost countless heaps of broken limbs offered something to observe. On its way down, one of these giant trees had fallen on its equally large, equally broad, giant neighbor, which in turn had fallen on the oak in front of it, and now they lay there as a single trunk, forming a sort of transcontinental line, all pointing toward a common vanishing point at the very end of the continent.
This line was rhythmically punctuated by the ruined crowns, or crown ruins, which had the appearance, lying on the ground, of enormous cages, cages intended for games, for they were wide open in all directions, with remains of tangled branches. And never, in fact, had so many birds cavorted way up in the crowns while the trees were alive as did now down there amid the deadwood. Behind and between the bars of the pseudo-cages, birds eyed each other and whirred about, especially the smallest birds, the titmice, the sparrows, the robins, eating their fill of food that was otherwise out of range of their usual low flight orbit. They pecked and swallowed, and to the outsider seemed to be playing jailbird.
Now and then there were also fallen trees in parallel lines, and inside the parallel zones almost inaccessible patches of forest had formed, which, in the meantime, had begun to serve as new habitats (and not merely refuges) for a number of species that in recent years had almost disappeared from the forests, driven away or seemingly extinct: although they did not show themselves this morning, foxes had obviously recently dug themselves new lairs in these enclaves, and all the uprooted moss, scattered around in clumps, was their doing; wild hares openly darted back and forth between their holes, without fear, now returned to daylight after a period of keeping hidden (where?), and merely hidden, so not
killed off; and squirrels now zigzagged horizontally through the protected area, as before up and down the trunks, while among them peacocks stalked majestically in purple and blue.
Only the flocks of wild pigeons had become homeless as a result of the shattering of the forest, and even now, weeks after the night of the hurricane, they kept fluttering (a great rattling from hundreds of pairs of wings) away from one of the few treetops still standing and described their usual one-quarter or one-half loop to the next treetopâbut it was no longer there, so they were left treading the empty air like figures in an animated cartoon, before they circled on to the next tree of refugeâbut it, too, was missing, and so on and so on, day in, day out.
Here and there creatures new to the forest had moved into the small ponds formed by groundwater that had pooled in the many root craters: tiny fish and frogs now beginning to stir under the visibly melting iceâhow ever had they got in there? For instance the osprey, missing the part of a wing that she saw lying next to one of the craters, it having
to have been there from time immemorial. And similarly the oyster shells were not left over from a picnic in the woods, were not trash tossed into the root cavities after a tour of the damage, but were stuck there, removable only with hammer and chisel, as if baked, a thousand years earlier, to their prehistoric oyster bed, lifted by the catastrophe from what had once been the sea. And the black basalt there in the next soil layer down came from a vulcanic vein. Where am I? When did that take place? And was that now? And when is ânowâ?
None of the other trees had such spreading crowns as the giant oaks, or oak giants. At the same time, the branches in the crowns were interwoven, forming a dense mass. And nothing made a more powerful impression of devastation than all the oak crowns lying smashed on the forest floor. Yet even these almost countless heaps of broken limbs offered something to observe. On its way down, one of these giant trees had fallen on its equally large, equally broad, giant neighbor, which in turn had fallen on the oak in front of it, and now they lay there as a single trunk, forming a sort of transcontinental line, all pointing toward a common vanishing point at the very end of the continent.
This line was rhythmically punctuated by the ruined crowns, or crown ruins, which had the appearance, lying on the ground, of enormous cages, cages intended for games, for they were wide open in all directions, with remains of tangled branches. And never, in fact, had so many birds cavorted way up in the crowns while the trees were alive as did now down there amid the deadwood. Behind and between the bars of the pseudo-cages, birds eyed each other and whirred about, especially the smallest birds, the titmice, the sparrows, the robins, eating their fill of food that was otherwise out of range of their usual low flight orbit. They pecked and swallowed, and to the outsider seemed to be playing jailbird.
Now and then there were also fallen trees in parallel lines, and inside the parallel zones almost inaccessible patches of forest had formed, which, in the meantime, had begun to serve as new habitats (and not merely refuges) for a number of species that in recent years had almost disappeared from the forests, driven away or seemingly extinct: although they did not show themselves this morning, foxes had obviously recently dug themselves new lairs in these enclaves, and all the uprooted moss, scattered around in clumps, was their doing; wild hares openly darted back and forth between their holes, without fear, now returned to daylight after a period of keeping hidden (where?), and merely hidden, so not
killed off; and squirrels now zigzagged horizontally through the protected area, as before up and down the trunks, while among them peacocks stalked majestically in purple and blue.
Only the flocks of wild pigeons had become homeless as a result of the shattering of the forest, and even now, weeks after the night of the hurricane, they kept fluttering (a great rattling from hundreds of pairs of wings) away from one of the few treetops still standing and described their usual one-quarter or one-half loop to the next treetopâbut it was no longer there, so they were left treading the empty air like figures in an animated cartoon, before they circled on to the next tree of refugeâbut it, too, was missing, and so on and so on, day in, day out.
Here and there creatures new to the forest had moved into the small ponds formed by groundwater that had pooled in the many root craters: tiny fish and frogs now beginning to stir under the visibly melting iceâhow ever had they got in there? For instance the osprey, missing the part of a wing that she saw lying next to one of the craters, it having
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