I don’t understand trees.

This is in spite of the fact that I grew up in the forest. My familial line has a long path through the Oregon woods: loggers, foresters, surveyors, all spending days under the canopy of giant Douglas fir carpeting the forest floor with cones and needles. I still feel pitch in my palms from pulling myself up to the lowest branch just above my 10-year-old head, finding the handholds and bravery to step on these thick limbs, rungs of a ladder that carried me up and out of reach. I reached an elevation best achieved out of sight of my mother but still a small fraction of the height of this tree.

Trees around my childhood home are storied and infused into my family narrative. When I was four or five, we picked out one tree below the house as the Christmas tree, perfectly suited for the living room. For whatever reason, it was spared and continued to grow so that the next year it was slightly, but clearly, too big for inside the house. Today that tree is easily more than 100 feet tall, yet still small compared to those around it. I still think of it as the Christmas tree.

As I write this, associations and childhood memories pile up. There’s logging roads built on old rail grades into legendary places in the Coast Range, like the company town of Valsetz, which no longer exists, and the nearby Valley of the Giants, which is still there. There’s the old oak at my family home that stood as a survey boundary for as long as surveyors mapped western Oregon. There were treks with my grandfather and uncle in an old red logging truck into the woods, and there were family trips into the forests for outings on weekends, often combined with a mission to cut and pile firewood for the wood stove. Now, here in Ogden, a trek into the north-facing slopes of canyons here reveal Douglas fir that nod back to their kin where I grew up. And a giant silver maple, though diseased and stressed, holds court over the backyard, its trunk so wide that the family can’t wrap our collective arms around it.

I’ve been surrounded by trees for most of my life, yet I’m still happily in awe of them. They pump water to the outer reaches of branches, using that system to create the energy and materials necessary to grow taller still. Humble seeds take root and reshape ecosystems, cooling, sheltering and reinventing environments. In the Uintas, where we see massive amounts of die-off from beetle infestations, we also see a miraculous but patient new growth, a resilience of youthful pines and expanding aspen systems. It could be that our planet’s hope leans on tree trunks.

There’s basic physics here that I can probably state, but the science doesn’t fully capture the audacity and wonder of it all. I know of no more well-engineered organism, reaching ridiculous heights from a trunk that may be 100 times as tall as it is wide. Recently, on Cape Blanco on the westernmost point of Oregon, I stared up at ancient treetops swaying in the perennial gale of Pacific winds, somehow rigid and flexible, rooted and mobile at the same time. And here on our Wasatch bench, the next time our canyon winds tear off roofs and tumble belongings across the valley, take a look at the gnarled Gambel oak on the hills, who will not have budged, as if they hadn’t even noticed.

Sure, astrophysics is cool. But it’s simple in comparison to understanding trees that dictate ecosystems, restructure atmospheres and communicate through networks underground. This hidden complexity is what I love about them, alongside nostalgia and in addition to an apt metaphor for strength and flexibility. As a kid, I never subscribed to mail-ordered engineering kits nor enrolled in science camps. Instead, my trajectory into physics was launched in the forest. I had woods to wander and trees to climb, and I’m confident my career and curiosity are indebted to that.

Adam Johnston is a professor of physics and director of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at Weber State University, where he helps to prepare future teachers and provides support for classroom educators throughout Utah.

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