tree and see what the thing looks like, sped up to the rate of human desire.
He builds a tripod in the equipment shop. Then he sets a broken grinding stone on a rise near the house. And on the first day of spring, 1903, John Hoel positions the No. 2 Brownie and takes a full-length portrait of the sentinel chestnut leafing out. One month later to the day, from the same spot and the same hour, he takes another. The twenty-first of every month finds him up on his rise. It becomes a ritual devotion, even in rain and snow and killing heat, his own private liturgy of the Church of the Spreading Vegetative God. His wife teases him without mercy, as do his children. “He’s waiting for it to do something interesting.”
When he assembles the first year’s twelve black-and-white prints and riffles them with his thumb, they show precious little for his enterprise. In one instant, the tree makes leaves from nothing. In the next, it offers up everything to the thickening light. Otherwise, the branches merely endure. But farmers are patient men tried by brutal seasons, and if they weren’t plagued by dreams of generation, few would keep plowing, spring after spring. John Hoel is out on his rise again on March 21, 1904, as if he, too, might have another hundred years or two to document what time hides forever in plain sight.
TWELVE HUNDRED MILES EAST, in the city where John Hoel’s mother sewed dresses and his father built ships, disaster hits before anyone knows it. The killer slips into the country from Asia, in the wood of Chinese chestnuts destined for fancy gardens. A tree in the Bronx Zoological Park turns October colors in July. Leaves curl and scorch to the hue of cinnamon. Rings of orange spots spread across the swollen bark. At the slightest press, the wood caves in.
Within a year, orange spots fleck chestnuts throughout the Bronx—the fruiting bodies of a parasite that has already killed its host. Every infection releases a horde of spores on the rain and wind. City gardeners mobilize a counterattack. They lop off infected branches and burn them. They spray trees with a lime and copper sulfate from horse-drawn wagons. All they do is spread the spores on the axes they use to cut the victims down. A researcher at the New York Botanical Garden identifies the killer as a fungus new to man. He publishes the results and leaves town to beat the summer heat. When he returns a few weeks later, not a chestnut in the city is worth saving.
Death races across Connecticut and Massachusetts, jumping dozens of miles a year. Trees succumb by the hundreds of thousands. A country watches dumbstruck as New England’s priceless chestnuts melt away. The tree of the tanning industry, of railroad ties, train cars, telegraph poles, fuel, fences, houses, barns, fine desks, tables, pianos, crates, paper pulp, and endless free shade and food—the most harvested tree in the country—is vanishing.
Pennsylvania tries to cut a buffer hundreds of miles wide across the state. In Virginia, on the northern edge of the country’s richest chestnut forests, people call for a religious revival to purge the sin behind the plague. America’s perfect tree, backbone of entire rural economies, the limber, durable redwood of the East with three dozen industrial uses—every fourth tree of a forest stretching two hundred million acres from Maine down to the Gulf—is doomed.
NEWS OF THE BLIGHT doesn’t reach western Iowa. John Hoel returns to his rise on the twenty-first of each month, in all weather. The Hoel Chestnut keeps lifting the high-water mark of its leaves. It’s after something, the farmer thinks, his lone venture into philosophy. It has a plan.
On the night before his fifty-sixth birthday, John wakes up at two a.m. and feels around on the bed as if looking for something. His wife asks what’s wrong. Through clenched teeth he answers, “It’ll pass.” Eight minutes later, he’s dead.
The farm descends upon his first two sons. The elder, Carl, wants to write off the sunk costs of the photo ritual. Frank, the younger, needs to redeem his father’s decade of obscure research by carrying it forward as stubbornly as the tree spreads its crown. More than a hundred frames along, the oldest, shortest, slowest, most ambitious silent movie ever shot in Iowa begins to reveal the tree’s goal. A flip through the shots shows the subject stretching and patting about for something in the sky. A mate,