The Ips
“Do you hear that?” Horace rasps one evening as we sit under the arms of a large pinyon. The dust of the evening was beginning to settle into the steel blue of an early autumn chill and I stop sifting sand through my fingers to look up. Horace leans towards the trunk, tilting an ear curiously between two large branches.
I watch his face trace the furrows of the stout body. “There is something in the tree.” he says in a low voice. I strain to listen, pulling my attention to a crouch.
A click-click-click, like a continuous dull creak of a deeply buried hinge. It was a delicate sound, a hint of activity that seemed to jump from one spot on the tree to another to another. A gnawing— the faint saw of teeth to wood.
“What is it?” I ask softly, as though my words would startle the unseen movement under the bark. Horace stares at me, eyes creased in knowing, “The beetles are here.”
Over the next month the Tree began to lose it’s green, sucked dry of chlorophyll, the needles clung brittle and ghostly, specks of dust sprinkling the ground beneath its snaking limbs. Wood dust accumulated from bleeding holes, dotting the brown-platted bark in reddened pitch tubes. Horace calls them bark beetles or ‘Ips’. He says they’ve come to collect the soul of the tree.
The Ips will eat away at the tree from the inside, Horace explains, feasting on the sugary-rich phloem, engraving elaborate galleries through the inner bark. They select weakened trees, stressed from prolonged drought or prior infestation. The Ips often follow the path of the black fungus, a soil inhabiting yeast that stains trees ready for reaping. I ask if there was anything we could do. Anyway to save the tree. But he shook his head sympathetically. “Death does not choose a time, place or year” His voice slowing, as though speaking to a child. “Death is destiny.”
I walk home that day, pooling in a well of grief, echoing a hopelessness that swelled from some darkened corner. I scoff, kicking aside a nearby pine cone but lodging it tightly in my throat. To think that I could keep forever the ones I love.
I thought of the hospital room. Of bruises forming around plastic tubes that dug into skin. I thought of the white lights and cold tiled floor, of the beep, hiss, beep, hiss, beep hiss of monitor to mechanically pulsed air. I thought of the red squiggled lines and green flash of numbers, unable to peel my eyes from them as if there were something it would all add up to. I thought of the motionless hand on a crisp white sheet and the immobilizing fear of not wanting to wake the man with a tube crawling down his throat. I thought of the swishing white coats that came in and out, in and out. Clinging to clipboards and nodding their heads and finally standing beside me to say “I am sorry, but there is nothing more that we can do.” I thought of the aching florescent emptiness and sterile flat silence of the line dragging parallel into the infinite horizon.
I hug myself tight against the approaching cold, watching the sky begin to darken with shadows growing ravenous in their ashen grey. The sun fading behind the distant mountain, winks a fiery-pink halo of the days last light. Something inside yearns to cry. But I only shutter. Rattling the husk of a body eaten of tears.
I started avoiding Horace and his allure with Death. I had enough. Wanting to be alone with the sand and the air and my emptiness. Yet it seemed that no matter where I traveled, the Ips where there. Sucking at the cambium of the forest. Chewing the green into a patchwork of brown and dying trees. I envisioned a great blackness beneath the surface, stretching it’s hyphal arms—feeding.
Frantically, I chip into the bark of an infested pinyon, crumbling it to pieces of a puzzle I would never be able to put back together. Peeling away the skin to finally see. The Ips, burrowing and feasting and oh how small. Their brown pill shaped bodies, scurrying in the frass of their now exposed forking chambers seemingly undeterred. Such benign looking creatures. No large mandibles, no pinchers, no saw or scythe. Just blunt faced things, slightly larger than a grain of rice.
Strange, how something so small could change a place. I brush the beetles into my hand and watched them tumble awkwardly around my open palm. I thought of Horace and all he had taught me about the forest. About the lives woven in tapestry. The pinyon jay, the woodrat, the pine nuts, the juniper, the mistletoe, the fungus, the Ips. A body greater than a single tree. All into One, an ecosystem, that stretches it’s branching arms and twisted roots across state lines, across deserts, across plateaus. Whose story lives even in the mouth of a tiny creature, like me. My Grandfather would have known this. That we go on living even after we are dead. The pulse of life swarming towards an unstoppable destiny.
“Do you hear that?” a whisper, that soft familiar voice rustling my attention like a fresh breeze. Tap-tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap-tap. I look up to see the black and white checkered wings of a red hatted bird. The woodpecker, flaking away the bark of the tree—tap-tap-tap-tap—eating the bitter bugs that will continue to transform this place, tree to creature, soil to sapwood, life to forever adapting life.