Crossing the James River at 650 feet elevation, the lowest point on the trail thus far, vibrant new leaves after rain create a kaleidoscope of green. Atop the high peaks at 4000 feet, it still looks like winter. But the trees up high and those in between know what is coming, and they quickly prepare. When you knock on their trunks, you hear a resonant sound that I imagine is hollowness filled by water. Maybe trees make this sound year-round, but it feels especially full now. An echo of the water gushing up their trunks, carrying sugar from the roots up to the treetops to generate the multitude of leaves.
This river within a tree connects root to crown. Water is a sticky substance, self-adhering, and this is among its many properties that make it suitable to sustain life. There is a continuous chain of water through the tree from soil to sky. If the chain were broken or water not self-adhering, there would be no way to resist gravity, to pull water from the ground and lift it. But as water evaporates through the leaves and buds in the branches, it pulls the whole chain of water below upward. Sugars dissolved in the water comprise the building blocks of all the microscopic cells and structures that must be assembled by the gazillions to photosynthesize for another year, to generate sugar this year and store some in the roots for next spring. The chain hauls the sugars and building blocks of cells many stories high.
At a footbridge over the mighty James River, I noted another continuous chain of water molecules carried in the current, this time moving with gravity, connecting the water below me to Chesapeake Bay. Previously, each river I stopped my toe in linked me in an unbroken chain to the Mississippi Delta, to New Orleans. The James may look the same as these rivers, but its linkage is different, and that feels important to me even upstream.
In the trees, the chain of water travels up to the sky. In the river, the chain descends down to the sea. The two great fluid bodies of our planet, atmosphere and ocean, linked to us and to everything through great continuous chains of water.
