Understories. Tim Horvath

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      In the spring of 1930, he is honored with the venia legendi, followed swiftly by an appointment as Privatdozent on the faculty of Botanical Sciences at the university in Freiburg im Breisgau. He is twenty-four. He is euphoric upon learning of his position. Suddenly he is a peer of his own teachers. But more importantly, Freiburg abuts the Black Forest, the Schwarzwald, and yet it is a big city, too, so much more colorful and stately than the small village in which he was raised. He is further honored with an office in a building dating from the 1700s. Then again, in this university, which goes back to medieval times, this does not even qualify as the Alte Universität.

      But it would be more accurate to call the woods both his office and his classroom. Though he is expected to do research, and it is clear that he had better be seen hunched over his library carrel from time to time, the head of his department supports his idea to take the students out into the woods, their notebooks poised to sketch out the leaves, trunks. He makes them draw, damnit, makes them see. Some drop out, and that is precisely the way he wants it. For soon he makes them learn a good deal of Latin, insistent that they not only know everyday German terms. “That’s Fagus sylvatica. Over there, Picas abies,” he says. “You must be able to speak of the trees in a way that your mother will not always understand.” As he teases them, he prods them gently with the knotted end of the gnarled stick that he otherwise carries to point to signs of incipient disease, or lightning scars in the bark.

      The students want to carry him down the streets on their shoulders, chanting “Schöner! Schöner!” with steins in their free hands. He teases them about carving their initials in the trees. “If I ever see yours, I will carve the tree’s own initials in you,” he says, aiming the stick at Gunther, a promising student who everyone knows is lovesick. Gunther asks for a repetition and then he calls out, with moderate confidence, “AB.” The professor nods; a balsam fir. The students know that he adores them and the trees. They know that his family is days away, that he has no car, no wife, and that his life consists of them and arboreal species.

      Their ventures into the woods afford them more time to talk than they would have in an ordinary class or in a laboratory. When they are not bending down to examine an unusual fungus or char marks on the trunk of a tree, they fall into step with one another, and conversation unfurls. Over the semester, he learns whose fathers fought and died in the Great War, whose families’ businesses went belly-up, who studied their plant biology by candlelight after sweeping up the floor in the store beneath their parents’ cramped apartment. And so he gains an intimacy that only the rarest professors achieve so quickly and most never do. Meanwhile, they ask him why he doesn’t have a Fräulein of his own. At first he dodges the question, but they drop hints that some suspect he is a bit of a Fräulein himself, and so he feels perhaps it would be in his best interest to respond.

      “Hans, where can I find a woman who will put up with my long walks? She will wonder where I’ve been all day, whom I’ve been frolicking with. I smell like a peasant. And what will I bring her, a spruce cone for a ring?”

      But what really gets him famous is the way he makes them clamber up trees. It is what he did as a boy, whenever he could. He remembers his arms extending desperately toward the lowermost branches of a beech behind the cottage in which he was born, and then the day he woke up and could reach them, and then the sense years later that the branch he was perched on was about to snap under his own weight. “If you are not willing to climb, how else will you see what is truly in the canopy?” he asks them. Then he turns their stratagem against them. “If you want to be Fräulein, stay down here on the ground. If you want to be scientists, then up and away.”

      They call him ‘Schimmler’ because he has taught them the English word “shimmy,” which he learned at an international conference held in Paris. Paris! He is the first member of his family to travel out of the country, as far as he knows. It is just a play on words and a generic German name. No one has heard of Himmler yet.

      And so he teaches them about forest succession, not out of a textbook, but in the woods themselves, standing in a Lichtung, a clearing, calling upward to Rudolf, asking, “What do you see?” If Rudy fell out, would he lose his position and be forced to take up a broom of his own? Worse, would he be jailed? Possibly, but he doesn’t worry about such contingencies. He chooses trees that are sturdy and broad-branched, oaks of hundreds of years, and he has his dream job and he has hundreds of years himself, he thinks.

      When he says the word succession, he thinks of the royal families of England and France, the border of which is only a few kilometers away. He envisions trees vying for the throne of the canopy, Tudor Firs and Stuart Oaks, and the revolutions of fires and winds that could upend the existing lineages, bringing forth new pretenders and contenders alike. The top of a tree is called a crown. This cannot be coincidence. It signifies, rather, that no matter how rigorous the science, no matter how precisely calibrated one’s instruments, trees are, in the end, regal beings to whom we are obligated to bow.