cannot give. It’s a monthly exercise in noticing a thing worth no notice at all, a creature as steadfast and reticent as life.
The stack of photos hits the five-hundred mark during World War II. Frank Jr. stops one afternoon to flip through the pictures. He himself feels like the same boy who made an ill-advised promise to his father at the age of nine. But the time-lapse tree has changed beyond all recognition.
When all the mature trees in the chestnut’s native range are gone, the Hoel tree becomes a curiosity. A dendrologist in Iowa City comes out to confirm the rumor: a chestnut that escaped the holocaust. A journalist from the Register does a feature on one of the last of America’s perfect trees. More than twelve hundred places east of the Mississippi have the word “Chestnut” in them. But you have to come to a rural county in western Iowa to lay eyes on one. Ordinary people, driving between New York and San Francisco on the new interstate that cuts a channel alongside the Hoel farm, see only a fountain of shade in the lone and level expanses of corn and soy.
In the bitter cold of February 1965, the No. 2 Brownie cracks. Frank Jr. replaces it with an Instamatic. The stack grows thicker than any book he has ever tried to read. But each photo in the sheaf shows only that lone tree, shrugging off the staggering emptiness that the man knows so well. The farm is to Frank Jr.’s back, each time he opens the lens. The photos hide everything: the twenties that do not roar for the Hoels. The Depression that costs them two hundred acres and sends half the family to Chicago. The radio shows that ruin two of Frank Jr.’s sons for farming. The Hoel death in the South Pacific and the two Hoel guilty survivals. The Deeres and Caterpillars parading through the tractor shed. The barn that burns to the ground one night to the screams of helpless animals. The dozens of joyous weddings, christenings, and graduations. The half dozen adulteries. The two divorces sad enough to silence songbirds. One son’s unsuccessful campaign for the state legislature. The lawsuit between cousins. The three surprise pregnancies. The protracted Hoel guerrilla war against the local pastor and half the Lutheran parish. The handiwork of heroin and Agent Orange that comes home with nephews from ’Nam. The hushed-up incest, the lingering alcoholism, a daughter’s elopement with the high school English teacher. The cancers (breast, colon, lung), the heart disease, the degloving of a worker’s fist in a grain auger, the car death of a cousin’s child on prom night. The countless tons of chemicals with names like Rage, Roundup, and Firestorm, the patented seeds engineered to produce sterile plants. The fiftieth wedding anniversary in Hawaii and its disastrous aftermath. The dispersal of retirees to Arizona and Texas. The generations of grudge, courage, forbearance, and surprise generosity: everything a human being might call the story happens outside his photos’ frame. Inside the frame, through hundreds of revolving seasons, there is only that solo tree, its fissured bark spiraling upward into early middle age, growing at the speed of wood.
Extinction sneaks up on the Hoel farm—on all the family farms in western Iowa. The tractors grow too monstrous, the railroad cars full of nitrogen fertilizer too expensive, the competition too large and efficient, the margins too marginal, and the soil too worn by repeated row-cropping to make a profit. Each year, another neighbor is swallowed up into the massive, managed, relentlessly productive monocrop factories. Like humans everywhere in the face of catastrophe, Frank Hoel Jr. goes blinking into his fate. He takes on debt. He sells off acreage and rights. He signs deals with the seed companies he shouldn’t. Next year, he’s sure—next year, something will come along and save them, as it always has.
All told, Frank Jr. adds seven hundred and fifty-five photos of the solitary giant to the hundred and sixty that his father and grandfather shot. On the twenty-first day of the last April of his life, with Frank Jr. confined to bed, his son Eric travels out to the farm from his home forty minutes away and sets up on the rise to snap yet one more black-and-white, now filled to the frame with exuberant branches. Eric shows the print to the old man. It’s easier than trying to tell his father he loves him.
Frank Jr. grimaces at a taste like bitter almonds. “Listen.