Sunday, August 28, 2005

The Forest and the Trees

Across from my house is a forested park. It is a lovely watershed over 12 miles long, preserved. There are conifers that keep their somber green year round, hardwoods that will turn glorious shades of gold and red soon, ferns, wildflowers, rocks tumbling down to streams that feed into a large creek, a rocky gorge, a waterfall, an old mill restored and running.

I do not walk in it enough, though I drive through it almost every day to go to work. This summer I have had houseguests, so have been in it hiking up to the Mill, touring it, watching the great water wheel, and back more than once. It is a lovely 2 hour hike there, tour, and back on the opposite side.

Each tall tree has its roots in the soil. Tiny tubes made of cellulose run from root tip to the crowns of the tall trees. Cellulose is a polymer of sugar. The tiny sugar molecules linked together interact with water molecules in short lived electrical interactions lasting a millionth of a second. The water molecules bind to each other the same way. This causes the water to stick to itself, beading on leaves and spider webs, allowing water striders to skitter over the surface. It also causes the water to adhere to itself and the cellulose in an endlessly changing way. Water is used by the tissues of the tree, and evaporates from the leaves, constantly replaced through the tubes. These simple transitory, weak electrical forces are stronger than gravity, pulling water from roots to tree top with no pumping.

Each leaf has pigments that absorbed the energy from sunlight. Captured photons knock electrons from one place to another, powering the production of high energy molecules, splitting water to produce oxygen. The leaves have pores that release that oxygen. That is how our air has the oxygen that we need to breathe. Those pores also take in carbon dioxide, and with the high energy molecules form sugars. Those sugars make the cellulose, and also the sugars in sugar cane, and fruits, and grains, on which all animals, including us, depend.

The water of the creeks comes from rain, water precipitating out of moist warm air rising into colder air that cannot hold so much moisture. Running down into streams and creeks the force and chemical properties of the water cuts through layers of rock laid down in the distant geological past, scraped by glaciers, tilted by the motions of the great plates pushing against each other on the surface of the earth.

At the Mill the great water wheel turns in a dim cool interior. A small stream of water diverted from the top of the waterfall weights one side of the wheel, causing a steady motion in the massive wheel. Gears turn, transferring that power to a drive shaft that can be engaged to turn grind stones, power a sifter, clean energy from a waterfall.

I will not, now, discuss the biology behind the changing color of leaves in the fall, nor the little ecosystem of birds, mammals, insects and plants, or the gorgeous crystal symmetry of snowflakes in winter.

In the park, the angled layers of rock are cut and tumbled into a gorge, the water ripples and flows at the bottom, trees tower overhead, sunlight filters down from a blue sky with white puffy clouds, a great blue heron is poised by a pool, waiting in stillness.

All those amazing things together make such loveliness. It is so wonderful to stand in it surrounded by the beauty of the sight and sound and knowledge of it vibrating in one-ness.

A whole.

3 comments:

Emano said...

Science is beautiful.

La Tulipe said...

Science is an incomprehensilbe magical miracle.

Rian can only look at it sideways, for fear of being baffled.

Skywolf said...

It is amazing, and precise, and perfect. Humans cannot create anything that perfect... yet there it is, growing in Nature before us.

Fabulous.