The Life that is Deeper than Disaster
The Life that is Deeper than Disaster
Kellie D. Brown
On the Wisdom and Witness of Survivor Trees
We inherit more from our families than just the coded strands of our genetic makeup. We acquire a place of being and knowing in the world. And some of us inherit generational trauma. Alongside the expression of hereditary genes, we embody our family's stories, a collective mythology with twining roots that date back for generations. Some of these kindred stories lodge firmly into the crevices of our minds, while others hover spectrally like vapor trails from the past. Some of the memories we inherit nurture us, and some harm. Regardless, they all shape our familial identity and persist within and through us.
As an only child, I spent a great deal of time with the adults in my family, whose abundance of stories I absorbed as they spilled over the edges. Their memories and anecdotes became part of my inheritance. I now realize how tricky, and elastic, and slippery memory can be, as my family’s retellings and then my own “rememberings” remold the story and the facts over time. But even through the slippage of details, the inherent truths remain paramount as my family’s stories tell of an overarching will to survive and even thrive in times of uncertainty, loss, and scarcity. One of these stories that I have heard told again and again, but that still keenly draws my attention even now, is The Day the Eastman Chemical Company Exploded.
*
The first week of October 1960 seemed full of potential for residents of East Tennessee. Connie Francis’s song, “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own,” sat at the number one slot on the U.S. charts. On Monday, October 3, a new sitcom, The Andy Griffith Show, premiered on CBS. Baseball fans listened on the radio as the New York Yankees beat their rivals the Boston Red Sox to end the season on a 15-game winning streak. Many looked forward to that Friday when the second debate between presidential candidates Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon was scheduled to take place.
The weather in Kingsport, Tennessee, on Tuesday, October 4, 1960, proved mild and partly cloudy with a bit of drizzle. Temperatures crept into the low 70s in the afternoon as schools dismissed and businesses noted by the clock that it would soon be closing time. Then at 4:45 p.m., the Aniline Division of the Eastman Chemical Company exploded, wiping out the equivalent of a city block. Searing hot debris shot up and out. Windows within a three-mile radius shattered. A black plume of smoke lifted up over the plant like a mourning shroud. A reporter for WKPT radio was one of the first on the scene. In a stunned state, he struggled to relay any information, before finally describing the scene as “a ‘holocaust,’ a scene of smoke and fire and intense heat, of people injured, and dying, and dead.”
My mother’s 19-year-old sister, Linda Stidham Strickler, was working at the company in an office close to the blast site. She had just made a typing error and bent down closely over the typewriter with a correction pencil. At that precise moment, the discharge of a powerful explosion sent glass and debris blasting over her head. If she had not made that mistake, if she had not bent down to apply a correction, she would have died instantly. On the occasion of a setback in his career, the 18th century American theologian and revivalist Jonathan Edwards spoke of a “failure blessed by God.” Felix culpa. Not every mistake, not every failure, is for our harm.
Not surprisingly, the city of Kingsport fell into chaos. Phone lines were overrun. My family had no way of knowing whether Linda had survived. Outside their farmhouse in Piney Flats, my grandmother stood wringing her hands next to a giant maple tree with her two younger children, my mother being one of them. After almost two hours of uncertainty, a car bearing my shaken but uninjured aunt pulled into the driveway.
Other members of my family were also at the plant that day. My great-uncle Sherwood Godsey had driven with my great-grandfather to the Eastman Credit Union. Dressed in his customary bib overalls, Grandaddy Godsey sat waiting in the vehicle when the blast detonated. Fortunately, he possessed the good sense to crawl underneath the pickup truck as debris rained down from the sky. Both he and his son suffered only minor injuries. In the final tallying, hundreds were injured and 16 dead.
I think one of the reasons this story has become so deeply rooted in my story is that the living memories of the explosion have been passed on by both sides of my family. In October 1960, my 18-year-old father, who would spend his entire career employed at the Eastman Chemical Company, was not yet working there. Nevertheless, he witnessed the explosion and frequently recounted his impressions and memories. While hunting in the woods, my father felt the ground shake, followed by a loud boom and a rising black plume of smoke. He hurried home to Blountville, the nearby town and county seat where he still lived with his parents. His neighbor, an electrician at Eastman, had left the plant before the explosion and knew nothing of what had happened as he arrived home. My father watched from the yard as Sherman Lilly pulled into his driveway, only to be met by his wife saying that he had “a phone call from a very excited man at Eastman.” When Sherman picked up the receiver, the voice on the other end said, “Get back to Eastman right now. There has been an explosion, and we need all the electricians we can get.”
While many of those neighbors and family members in this story are no longer living, their presence becomes renewed with each retelling of that day. Mary Kiss, a Kingsport Times-News staff writer, reflected on the disaster 15 years later in her October 1975 article: “Earth shattering events have a way of burning themselves into the consciousness. Most people, if they’re old enough can recall exactly what they were doing when they learned that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and that President Kennedy had been shot. For Kingsport, it’s that way with the Eastman Explosion.” Many of us have added the 1986 Challenger explosion and the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to that list. I suppose each generation carves out its own dates as a totem to the fragility of human life and the sacredness of our days. The Psalmist wisely prayed to God, “Teach us to number our days, that we may present a heart of wisdom.”
*
The Overstory by Richard Powers seems to be a book trying to do just that—tracking time in the pursuit of wisdom. Winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, The Overstory is a complex and layered novel in which trees and their tree-ish ways appear as the main characters, with the supporting roles filled by nine humans in various times and locations whose life stories intersect with trees in some defining way. The survival of many of the novel’s people becomes enmeshed with the survival of the trees. This work of environmental literature is not only meant to draw attention to the climate disaster and our interrelatedness with nature but also to speak truth about human arrogance. As Powers writes, “People aren’t the apex species they think they are. Other creatures—bigger, smaller, slower, faster, older, younger, more powerful—call the shots, make the air, and eat sunlight. Without them, nothing.”
In spiritual thinking about human mortality, agency, and precarity, trees can be profoundly helpful guides. All we have to do is visit the beginning, the creation story in Genesis, to find trees playing a vital role. Trees appear in the Garden of Eden as repositories of knowledge and storehouses of life-giving sustenance. They create a dynamic relationship with Adam and Eve, but ultimately the frailties of the human condition interfere and stymie. I guess this should not surprise us since, as ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer confirms in Braiding Sweetgrass, “Tree conversations are still far above our heads.”
What might be the most instructive to us from the trees in the Garden is their persistence in the divine plan despite this initial failed experiment. In Refugia Faith, writer and environmental activist Debra Rienstra explains how Eden’s Tree of Life “goes underground” for the rest of Scripture, and yet, is not gone. It resurfaces in dramatic, eschatological fashion in the final chapter of Revelation, and therefore has been appointed to frame God’s story from beginning to end. Most importantly, in its reappearance, this tree functions as an ambassador of God’s restorative grace to humankind. The Tree of Life is no longer off limits nor guarded by an angel with a fiery sword, but stands as the centerpiece of this vision of a renewed Jerusalem, producing a continuous supply of fruit and offering its leaves “for the healing of the nations.”
Trees can also take on the role of theologian. In 1920, the German-Swiss writer and Nobel Laureate Hermann Hesse published a collection of vignettes that depicted a fictional narrator walking from southern Germany to northern Italy. Highly autobiographical, Wandering: Notes and Sketches offers insights into the human relationship with nature and the restorative draw of solitude. Within this intimate and at times pithy travelogue, readers find a reverent love letter to trees. The wanderer declares, “For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers… Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.” In turn, Hesse shares the personified voice and wisdom of these trees saying, “I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.”
More recently, German forester Peter Wohlleben has worked to amplify the wise and generous voice of the tree. Part meditative ode and part naturalist guidebook, Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees explains that trees feel, communicate, and establish social orders as humans do. In Finding the Mother Tree, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard also unravels the mysterious relational nature of trees by highlighting how they pass on nutrients and resilience through what has become known as the “wood-wide web.” Simard’s research demonstrates that trees know which other trees in the forest are their offspring, and as a result, these “Mother Trees” remain specifically attuned to supplying their progeny with what they need to survive and flourish. In fact, forests house countless networks of family trees through which genetic material and even stories pass. If any further evidence is needed of the communal persistence of trees, nothing remains more convincing than the discovery that a dying tree, aware of its own impending demise, funnels nutrients away from itself to nearby trees in an act of “extraordinary generosity.”
Likely drawn from a composite of Peter Wohlleben and Suzanne Simard, Dr. Patricia Westerford, one of the fictional human characters in The Overstory, specializes in botany and forestry. Her research focuses on documenting the advanced nature of trees through their communal behavior and sophisticated communication. In the novel, her work is not well received, and she struggles to remain hopeful amid the escalating environmental crisis. Rather than succumb to fatalism, Patricia commits herself to survival work. She begins to collect seeds from trees around the world. Each seed that she stores in her vault represents an act of faith in their resilience and a priceless investment in the future.
Though these references are modern, reverential regard for trees is ancient. Hildegard of Bingen, the intellectually brilliant and spiritually profound 12th century Christian theologian, mystic, composer, and healer, compared human bodies to a tree. She likened the infilling of our souls by God’s Spirit to the way that life-giving sap flows through a tree, eventually producing fruit and sustaining life. She wrote to the Bishop of Bamber that “Life is in life. A tree flourishes from nothing else but viriditas…For eternity itself is alive…” Speaking of the eco-theological impact of Hildegard’s life and words, philosopher Michael Marder writes in Green Mass, “Her figure is not that of a towering rock that overshadows the subsequent history of thought…It is, rather, that of a tree, of plantness or vegetality, of greenness and greening (viriditas), perpetually on the verge of renewal, of rejuvenation, reaffirming a promise instilled in creation.”
Fortunately, we do not have to be scholars of the ancient mystics or trained arborists to recognize our scientific and spiritual kinship with trees. Sometimes the practice of Eco Divina, seeing the divine in nature, requires only the simplest of prompts, such as gazing out the window. Observing how deciduous trees respond to the turning of the seasons provides all the evidence we need of their aliveness, their timeliness, and their ability to weather what comes along. Part of what the reader discovers in The Overstory is that trees operate from a longer view of time than humans, whose comparative lifespan passes in a single moment. From their enduring perspective, trees have amassed a storehouse of spiritual and relational wisdom from which we can draw.
In recognizing trees as spiritual storytellers and interlocutors, we can invoke their structure and function to understand more rightly our own families and their stories. The botanical term “ecological succession” describes the process by which a given community of diverse species, such as a forest, evolves and supplants over time. In similar fashion, our familial generations proceed one after the other, and the way they grow, extend, and fork lends easily to the treelike depiction of a solitary trunk with divergent branches. Studying our family tree causes us to consider how our root systems ground us amid constant flux and to acknowledge how dependent we, as offshoots, remain on the knowledge and sustenance of those from which we sprouted, even if we suspect that not all branches are healthy. When a tree falls, its inner formation shares an unbiased recounting of its story. The rings reveal years of plenty and times of scarcity, of healthy days and seasons of suffering. Its concentric diary bears witness to how it has numbered its days. Death can also be the great revealer with humans and families. So can survival.
*
I find particular revelation in one of nature's most highly regarded symbols of longevity and endurance— the gingko tree. Considered a living fossil that has existed for two hundred million years, the gingko, with its fan-shaped leaves that turn vibrant yellow before dropping all at once, can serve as a fitting tutor as we learn to account for our days. The gingko can also teach us about hope and resilience through its relationship to survivor trees.
On the morning of August 6, 1945, a person was sitting on the steps of the Sumitomo Bank in Hiroshima, Japan, about 80 feet from where an atomic bomb was about to be dropped. The catastrophic power of that explosion vaporized or incinerated all that was living in a two-kilometer radius. The blast force discharged with such strength that a dark shadow in the outline of that person remained on those bank steps for many years after that day. Nearby, there stood an abundance of gingko trees, some of them over a thousand years old. Four of these trees, defying all scientific explanation, withstood the unbearable and remain standing today. They are known in Japanese as hibakujumoku or “survivor trees.” Although they did not emerge unscathed, but adorned with visible scars and charring, these gingko trees survived and bred new life through their seeds that have been planted in the name of peace all over the world.
The miraculous phenomenon of the survivor tree is not unique to Hiroshima. A lone survivor tree, an American elm, still stands from the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City. Its resiliency shines through the physical wounds that still bear witness to what has had to be endured. Amid the rubble of the Twin Towers in Manhattan on 9/11, one pear tree remained alive, but so injured and disfigured that experts doubted whether it could be saved. Despite the odds, they undertook the task of revitalizing and preserving this sign of hope and resilience. As the last living thing pulled from the debris, this pear tree was transported outside of the city. It indeed survived and even thrived. After the completion of the 9/11 Memorial at the site of the terrorist attack, those who had cared for it so lovingly brought this survivor tree back home. This replanted tree remains there for all to see.
Adam Appich in The Overstory takes notice of the Ground Zero survivor tree, as the arc of his story has bent from respected psychologist and professor to wanted eco-terrorist. Adam wanders around lower Manhattan during the Occupy Wall Street protests and frames the decade-old wound of the 9/11 attacks from the tree’s point of view “Just beyond the square's far corner is the wound that won't heal. The hole in the canopy has long since filled in, but it still oozes.” Then even as he suggests the inconceivability of healing, his eyes fall on the pear tree, the survivor tree.
The FBI eventually catches up to Adam, and he again thinks about survivor trees as he sits with his hands chained in the back of an agent’s black SUV. He glances out the tinted window and notices a tree whose fluttering leaves look to him “like the yellow crayon in a child's eight-pack.” Even as his mind reels with hatred for how trees have ruined his life, Adam hears the yellow leaves speak, “Look. Now. Here.” Then, the leaves let go in their curious synchronized dance, and Adam watches a yellow blanket cover the ground. Despite his circumstance, he cannot help but reflect on the noble history of the gingko tree, its longevity and resilience. He remembers its survival at Hiroshima. In a startling revelation, Adam realizes that he has walked by this gingko tree three times a week for the past seven years and has only just noticed it for the first time.
The person who ordered the bombing at Hiroshima, President Harry Truman, also walked routinely by a gingko tree. After his presidency, Truman returned to his hometown of Independence, Missouri and became known for his daily walks. Along his route down West Maple Street stood a gingko tree. The former Commander in Chief would pause, give the tree an admiring pat, and tell the gingko that it was doing a good job. Still standing, this tree now bears a plaque to designate its status as an official historic site and destination on the Truman Historic Walking Tour.
*
The maple tree where my grandmother stood in 1960 waiting for news of her daughter’s fate persists as a survivor tree, though there is no plaque to mark its significance. My own memories of that tree assume a hazy quality, flickering through the mind as if watching deleted scenes rescued from the cutting floor. My not-yet-school-age self recalls the coolness of the tree’s shade, the protectiveness of its draping branches, along with the occasional waft of pungent smell from the hogs in the barn. My clearest memory is of an Easter Sunday when my cousin and I stole a peek of the tree from the window of the farmhouse’s back room as the adults hid colored eggs among its roots. Soon after, my grandmother grew weary of the isolation of country living and, without consulting my grandfather, nailed a cardboard “For Sale” sign to the trunk of that tree.
My aunt who survived the explosion continued to work at Eastman Chemical Company until her retirement. As survivor trees persevere with scars etched in their bark and also with deeper wounds not visible to the human eye, hers was a life marked by injuries and resilience. My branch on the family tree lies close to hers. Her story has become part of my story. Though she now resides in heaven, Aunt Linda’s presence endures.
Only God knows the number of days allotted for each of our stories. The Book of Job speaks bluntly about the human lifespan, that it is “few of days and full of trouble,” and “comes up like a flower and withers, flees like a shadow and does not last.” But the same chapter also provides us with the hope of longevity beyond the mortal: “there is hope for a tree, if it is cut down, that it will sprout again and that its shoots will not cease.”
Kellie D. Brown
Writer & Violinist
Dr. Kellie Brown serves as Chair of the Music Department and Professor of Music at Milligan University. She is a violinist, conductor, and award-winning writer whose book, The Sound of Hope: Music as Solace, Resistance and Salvation during the Holocaust and World War II (McFarland Publishing, 2020), received one of the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles award. Her words have appeared in Earth & Altar, Calla Press, Psaltery & Lyre, The Primer, Agape Review, Writerly Magazine, and Musing as well as in numerous academic journals such as the American String Teacher. In addition to over 30 years of music ministry, she is a certified lay minister in the United Methodist Church and currently serves at First Broad Street United Methodist Church in Kingsport, TN. More information about her and her writing can be found at kelliedbrown.com.
Photography by Khumais Idrees
