The Torrey Pine
Last night I swore I heard a steady dripping, like a faucet, or a child throwing pebbles on the roof. I got up while the room was dark even though it felt late enough to be light. Checking the clock I uttered a special curse for our elected legislative officials who have decided that it saves electricity to torment all the people who don’t work banker’s hours. I don’t know a single working person that isn’t getting up in the darkness because of the delayed return to standard time. I went outside full of hope to see if the dripping was the first rain of the season, but my patio was dry, the parched amalgamation of minerals that people call soil around here was dry, and the foliage of my potted plants was dry. So I was baffled as to where the drip, drip, drip was coming from. Then I remembered the Torrey Pine.
The Torrey Pine captures moisture out of the atmosphere with amazing efficiency. The long grooved needles dangle in the sky capturing tiny droplets of water which coalesce and run down the needles before drip, drip dripping on the ground beneath the tree, providing precious moisture during the lengthy dry season. We live beneath a truly majestic tree whose base is actually behind the building adjacent to us and whose canopy spreads to overhang the south side of our little cottage. Broad and stout the tree reaches its multiple massive trunks to the sky before they taper down to graceful jewel adorned fingers of foliage. As the sky turned pink I could see the dewdrops alight and glistening in the dawn. Coming out of my reverie I became aware of a drip drip dripping INSIDE the house and discovered a pair of soaked patches on our living room carpet beneath the skylight which is, of course beneath the Torrey Pine. Now as I sit writing on what looks to be a perfectly clear morning the only sounds in the house are of my fingertips on the keyboard and the drip drip dripping from the skylight into the bowls I placed in the living room.
The Torrey Pine has a very limited natural range, occurring only on a portion of Santa Rosa Island in the northern Channel Islands off the coast of Santa Barbara, and here in San Diego county, notably in Torrey Pines State Park, which was created to protect that habitat. The Torrey Pines State Park is a fantastically beautiful spot worth visiting if you have the opportunity. Both sites are in the coastal zone and are often bathed in fog, and this is where the fog capturing adaptation the Torrey Pine of proves its worth. Precipitation in San Diego is limited to an average 10 inches a year. Here on this dry day in October before any rain has fallen we’re feeling a good dose of moisture from this tree whose grooved needles coagulate and deposit the moisture at its roots to enable it to survive.
We live in a rather dense, spreading, overbuilt modern city so modified from its natural state as to be unrecognizable, and yet within that environment shreds of the progeny of the natural flora continue to thrive and provide us with small reminders of the broader context of time and nature beyond that which our short human lives expire in. So as my living room floor gradually gets wet I feel grateful for the reminder and think about what our site might have looked like a mere 200 years ago. Somehow it’s comforting.
