“But songs of love should not be sung where staying is not planned, and foolish I would climb once more a tree too weak to stand,” – Gordon Lightfoot

If you look at his posture, to see him stand, you’d know he either started out with difficulties or developed them somewhere along the way. At this point, his condition is too advanced and his age too old to unravel the true circumstances with any real hope of success or accuracy. I could ask him, but he doesn’t really say much, at least not to me.

I also wouldn’t want to be rude by delivering such bold inquiry, one that inherently contains concealed presumptions that his appearance has been a hardship, inconvenience or disadvantage. He primarily spends his days standing out there alongside the driveway, watching the cars and the people pass by. He mostly sees me running to and from the mailbox, but he also watches me cutting the grass in the summertime and shoveling snow in the winter.

I can certainly attest to his strength. If you punched him hard in his mid-section, you’d break the bones in your hand. Similarly, a head butt would knock you senseless, maybe even leave you punch drunk for life, wondering when the party ends. Those who have tried to take him down have failed. He’s not the heaviest, nor the tallest, but he’s scrappy and tough.

He bears the scars of vicious brawls, including an opponent’s ankle and calf bites that found him standing in a pile of his own sawdust. He’s loved and lost. That is clear. There’s a hollow left inside him that starts at the heart and extends who knows how far – maybe throughout his entire core.

I stood next to him today. It was a warm and sunny autumn day, with the wind gusting. I waited and listened in case he might whisper something to me, but he didn’t. Despite the pleasant weather, he was clearly sad. He cried red leafy tears, that fell like drops of blood to the ground.

I tilted my head and rolled my shoulder a couple of times to avoid their descent. And yet, even with his pain and wear, he stood open and exposed with the undersides of his arms turned upward and laid out, extended flat. He’s stands ready to feel the rain on the palms of his hands, should it fall.

Now into October days, that rain could present itself in the form of early snow. He doesn’t appear to mind. That notion wouldn’t change his stance or his resolve to wait, to experience, to learn, endure and grow. These are things he has always done – since the days when he was young and green. No lines then to wrinkle his face, no weathering pressed against his body from the wilds of the world and its storms.

The dreams he had in those early times were carefree, silly notions of only play throughout all his days in greater proportion and longer in length – play for its own sake. Nothing more. In these now much later times, those dreams of his childhood life faded into obscurity and lay discarded like toys in the attic of his mind. They are still dimly present, but dust-covered and relegated to obsolescence.

His todays are more about resilience – being and understanding what that means. Like me, he might have some aches and pain that act up when the weather changes or the wind blows cold and sharp, cutting. But he gets by just fine.

Like that yellow green, almost glowing, tree lichen, lines and spots of age cover his body from the tips of his fingers that brush the sky to the bottoms of his toes in the yellowing grass below. I walked over and wrapped my arms around him to give him a comforting hug. He didn’t flinch, but once we stood there together, I could feel him swaying back and forth. When I looked up, I could sense him looking back, sending energy in my direction.

I smiled and continued to hold on for a few more moments.

I then backed a few steps away again and stood listening.

I closed my eyes.

Within the breaths of the wind, there was a strange type of music that I could feel more than I could hear, though it contained the non-melodic chipping sounds of autumn birds, those like the junco and the warblers coming or going, respectively. This music was more of a general rushing sound, an indicator, I think, of life whizzing and whirring all around, even as the wind was tossing dead and dying leaves high into the air to be twirled and carried who knows where.

I could feel a pulling and a countering resisting force, along with sensing a grinding as though glaciers were moving, doing their work at unbelievable and frightening geologic speeds. I think we sometimes put aside the basic notion that life is happening at an incredible pace constantly, all around us – even as we are head-down, consumed in our daily activities, stuck in traffic, standing in line or fast asleep.

I think I notice this more often in the results rather than in the actual experience. Sometimes, I wake up after falling asleep watching television feeling as though I certainly must have been rusting or calcifying while lying there. There are days when I suddenly feel older than I did, even just a few minutes prior. That can happen after, or within, a single conversation. When traveling, it often feels like I went more than a hundred miles, maybe even sliding ahead or back in time depending on the surroundings. Some locations slow me down others speed me up.

Every year, we gain a new ring and a little tougher bark, like a tree. I’m certain my friend standing here has heard the life force music and sensed the changes taking place within his own lifetime – albeit on a different level of conscientiousness. He’s likely compiled a compendium of storms, an almanac of hardships endured and of afflictions overcome, maybe even branches broken, times of drought or flooding.

But just like aging, being resolute about your life’s story and your future resilience in the face of time, isn’t all about toughness and sadness, disappointment or injury. There have, of course, been times of true joy and happiness. We’ve both had the pleasure of seeing our children born and watching them grow and mature – grandchildren too.

We both love the warming time in the spring when the sweet and sugary sap starts to run, filling our insides with all kinds of goodness, as well as the warm days of an Indian summer or the clear and cold of a silent winter evening. We’re both shy and introverted – me probably more so than he.

I know he’s smarter than I am. I say that because he’s much older and with age, typically comes wisdom. That’s why I spend time hoping he’ll speak to me. He may have timeless truths or other revelations to pass on from the things he’s seen and learned. I don’t want to miss anything important. I sometimes wonder whether his silence is the lesson he is trying to teach me.

Perhaps the ability to retain your thoughts and restrict your speech leaves you the smarter of any two people gathered for an interaction. Maybe that’s what he is trying to teach me, by example. When I was a kid, I spent time with my back against the trunk of an aged weeping willow tree that stood just off a corner, across from the lake, a couple blocks from our house.

I would sit there to read. Time would slip past quickly. The tree always felt supportive, and it gave me a cool and shady place to sit, while feeling the warm summer breezes. I always felt there was more happening than I could explain during those reading sessions. I could have read my book anywhere, but I often returned to the tree. I still do today in my mind.

The day after I did these things, I returned to the place I stood the previous afternoon. Almost all the leaves had been blown from the top of my old friend, and he now appeared almost naked, stripped to the bare branches and perhaps shivering a bit against the wind, which had turned cold overnight.

I wish I had the resilience of my tall and twisted amigo, who was standing here before I was born and likely many years before our house was built. I wish I was as tough against the storms and cold.

I bet he envies my mobility, but I think there’s a lot of sameness in the things I see when I travel around these days and people don’t have too much to say now that’s good. But I understand that.

I might be happier in one comfortable place, like my friend – talking to the birds, soaking in the goodness of the world around me, letting the badness pass by.

But in the end, I know enough to know that the grass isn’t always greener, and neither are the trees.

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.