“What’s it like, having hair growing out of your face?” Elzy asked as she watched her ecology professor shave in the shade of a hemlock grove. He paused and looked at her.
 
“You have hair growing out of your face,” he said. “You should know what it’s like.”
 
Elzy’s cheeks grew hot and she looked away. She was sensitive about her few chin-hairs. But Andy didn’t insult, and he rarely teased. He probably just meant her eyebrows. She turned back and watched him shave again. He let her watch, ignoring her gaze, as distant and professional as if they sat in his classroom back on campus. She felt safe with him. She didn’t know why. She never played the little kid except with him, but she couldn’t tell if he liked or merely tolerated the act.
 
Without his white stubble he looked younger, but Elzy could not guess his age. Personally, he remained a mysterious blank. 
 
Professionally, she knew he was impressive. 
 
Dr. Andrew Cote was one of the few scientists left from before the pandemic, and unlike a lot of survivors he hadn’t left his old career behind. Instead, he and a very few colleagues had fought to save data and scientific literature from failing computers and then spent years reweaving professional networks and academic systems. Twenty years later he was still at it, crisscrossing the country on foot every summer. She planned to be an environmental educator, not a researcher, but she’d asked him to sponsor her application to the professional guilds anyway—nobody knew more than he did about how science functioned as a human community, and nobody was better than him at explaining how to work with people. That, and she admired his simple, fearless doggedness. 
 
Everything else was a matter of rumor. People said he’d lost a wife and children in the pandemic, but of course a lot of people had—it was his refusal to discuss his family that lifted common tragedy to mythic status. Opinion split over whether he had remarried. Elzy had noticed, traveling with him, that he recorded video messages to someone every night on his little tablet computer. He didn’t know she knew. She had overheard him once, just the tone of his voice, soft and gentle, and she had resolved to never overhear again. She’d defend him from anyone, if necessary, even from her own curiosity. She never asked him if the rumors were true.
 
She did once ask him to explain what “ten percent survival rate” really meant in human terms.
 
Andy had knelt beside her and asked her to put out her hands. She had laid them, all ten fingers, on the cool, brown needles of the forest floor. The man drew his pocket-knife and brought it down—hard—on her left pinky. Of course he didn’t cut her, but it took all her will not to flinch. He repeated the motion with each of her other fingers and each time she felt a thrill of fear and the impression of the knife blade lingering on her skin. When he had mimed cutting off all her fingers but one, he folded away his knife and caught up that one surviving finger, her right pinky, in his own warm hand and gave it a friendly little shake.
 
“Now live the rest of your life like this,” he’d said.
 
Andy was shaving because, after four weeks’ backpacking up from Pennsylvania, they were drawing near the first of Elzy’s speaking engagements. Andy had a rule against coming into town dirty from the road, the way most travelers did. He said if you want to embody the professional, you have to look the part from the minute someone first sees you. You have to manage the impression you make on the world. 
 
“Why don’t you just grow your beard out?” she asked. Most men did.
 
“I don’t know,” he answered. “Habit.”
 
Elzy packed up the kitchen kit, getting ready for the day’s hike. When Andy was my age, she thought, he didn’t have to walk everywhere. He’d had his own car and flown to conferences on airplanes. But technically he didn’t have to walk now, either—even without fossil fuels, there were other options. She’d once asked why they didn’t ride horses or bicycles.
 
“Too much to keep track of,” he’d answered.
 
Many people of his generation said things like that. Elzy knew it was because they’d become timid about having anything they might lose. But she had come to doubt Andy could be timid about anything, and anyway, he had a point. The pack had quickly come to feel like part of her body. She could forget its weight, take its contents for granted, and if she wanted to bushwhack up an interesting-looking ridge, or hop into somebody’s horse cart at a road crossing, everything she needed simply came with her automatically. She and her teacher were free as turtles, needing nothing for shelter but their persons.
 
 “So, tell me about this place,” Andy said, quizzing her.
 
“This hill was once part sheep farm, part woodlot,” she began. “I think there were some forest fires—small ones, like sparks from a larger fire somewhere else? This hill became protected land, some kind of park or preserve, before the pandemic. A family lived here during the transition, but they didn’t stay long. Now it’s protected again—a game sanctuary, probably.”
 
“Do not say ‘I think.’” Andy corrected her. “You can be wrong, but do not be unsure. How do you know all this?”
 
“The rock walls mean sheep, but some of the trees look old enough to predate the sheep farm abandonment and they aren’t shaped like field-trees, so I don’t think the whole hill was ever cleared.  Multi-trunked trees and paired scars at the bases of some trees suggest logging, but that was also a long time ago, because those trunks are pretty big. The hemlock patches are younger than the trees around them, so they are growing in patches where the forest was cleared away. Even the leaf-litter had to be gone, because hemlocks need bare soil to sprout in. A fire could do that. Some of the hemlocks are long dead—adelgids, obviously, but no one cleaned up the snags, so this area was being managed as wildland at the time. There are stumps from trees cut with axes. No one felled trees with axes before the pandemic, but there’s no sign of recent logging, either. And the deer let us see them, at least briefly, so no one hunts here now, and no one has in the memory of the deer.”
 
“Good. What’s an adelgid?”
 
Andy knew perfectly well, of course. He was still quizzing her.
 
“A tiny bug, hard to see, introduced from…Asia? They eat hemlocks and the American trees had no resistance. Biocontrol—importing predator insects from the adelgid’s homeland—helped some, but not enough. Some people thought we were going to lose eastern hemlocks completely, but then a new disease wiped out most of the adelgids. Since then, the predators have been able to keep them in check. So we still have hemlock groves, like this one.”
 
“Are adelgids bugs?” This time Andy was probably not quizzing. He wasn’t an entomologist, and there were things he did not know.
 
“I don’t know. I meant bugs in the colloquial sense. I figured anyone around here who didn’t know what a hemlock woolly adelgid is probably calls all arthropods ‘bugs.’”
 
“Good thinking.”
 
Elzy looked around at the forest. Nothing could grow in the deep shade of a hemlock grove except more hemlocks, and she could see nothing beyond the furrowed, reddish trunks but a few giant white pines. The short, irregular needles above gave the foliage a feathery appearance, but they hung in shadow and created shadow, all muted red and black, and suggested a different metaphor. The forest was a palace, a ruined palace, and the ragged, hanging foliage was just so much spider-web, spider-feathers gracing the chandeliers and the balustrades, the great arching beams of ballrooms still echoing with the dances of long ago. The whole forest was close and still, a dark silence that persisted despite the occasional singing of spring birds. Though Elzy knew hemlock forests supported dozens of species of insects and birds and salamanders, the place felt abandoned, melancholy.
 
“It’s funny,” she said, at last. “All this could have been gone, if it weren’t for the disease that killed so many of the adelgids—and then the adelgids would have been gone too.  They would have killed off their own food supply. Now both insect and tree have a chance. So diseases can be good sometimes. But the same thing happened to us, and the pandemic certainly wasn’t good.”
 
“Diseases aren’t good or bad,” Andy replied. “They just are.” 
 
Elzy could think of no response, so she let the silence settle. 
 
Andy unpacked the charging kit for his tablet computer and glanced up.
 
“There’s no sun here,” he complained.
 
He followed a game trail out of camp, and Elzy followed him uphill, out of the hemlocks, to a hiking trail that led to a summit in a grove of red and sugar maple, red oak, and white pine. The April sunlight fell through the still-bare tree branches in lacy yellow patches, and the slope before them opened to a bright view of rolling hills and a wooded valley.
 
The overlook was artificial. Someone kept the rocky slope free of trees for several hundred feet. After a minute, Elzy realized why. Here among the remnants of last year’s bindweed and a few leafless wine-berry canes crouched a crumbling square of stone, like another sheep wall, but one that turned and met itself, enclosing perhaps four hundred square feet. It was the foundation of a long-vanished house. The current land manager must keep the view open for the sake of visitors to the historic site. 
 
Elzy sat nearby and considered the foundation. She was used to ruins, but this one was obviously older, predating the pandemic. There’s no one left who knows who lived here or why, she mused. But she was wrong. The history of the house was easy to look up, and Andy had done so years earlier. She just didn’t think to ask.
 
Andy hunted around on the open slope until he found a good, flat, sunny patch, and set up his tablet to charge. Then he joined her and they looked out over the valley together.
 
“Why is it important that the hemlock woolly adelgid came from Asia?” he asked, continuing the quiz.
 
“Because it’s exotic,” began Elzy, then realized that explained nothing. She started over. “Species with no evolutionary history in a place seldom do well. Either they don’t survive at all, or they multiply out of control because nothing has evolved to eat them or to make them sick.”
 
“Always?”
 
“I don’t know. Often. Some plants naturalize without taking over, but they just sit there, ecologically. Nothing eats them. Or hardly anything, anyway. The exotics might as well be made of plastic. They take up space. They don’t belong.”
 
“What about us? Do we belong?” Andy asked, eyes suddenly shining. The rest of his face remained neutral, except for a hint of smile. His face was usually quiet, like that of one who through blindness or other circumstance had never known another’s gaze, but his non-expressions varied. This one was quick, excited. Ideas were a game to Andy, and he wanted to see how well Elzy could handle a curve-ball.
 
Elzy smiled at him nervously, for just a moment. By defining nativity in evolutionary terms, she’d implied that people like the Abenaki or the Miq Maq were evolutionarily distinct from other New Englanders, a frankly racist idea. On the other hand, to deny that some people are native and others aren’t seemed just as bad.
 
“Biological evolution isn’t the issue for humans,” she clarified. “We can learn how to form the relationships that make us native—how to find and use the resources we need and how to recognize and honor our limitations before we destroy so much. But it doesn’t happen quickly. You have to get familiar with a place, everything that lives there and how it lives and how it affects you and you affect it. Maybe you have to grow up with the place, so it becomes part of you. 
 
“I think—I mean—it probably takes multiple generations to develop a native culture. Maybe Yankees are native now. Or, maybe they’re still…homeless, but they can start becoming native and get there in a hundred years or a thousand years.” By Yankees she meant the cultural descendants of European colonists. It was an ethnic, not a racial term. “But I’m not a Yankee. I don’t belong particularly anywhere.” As she spoke, she dug her fingers into the soil, as though her hands were trying to grow roots. Trying and failing.
 
Andy glanced at her sharply for a moment. Elzy didn’t notice. She was looking down the bare slope to where a fisher, a clot of animate shadow, hopped here and there under the trees at the far end of the clearing.
 
“I used to live there,” Andy said at last, a gesture of his hand taking in the whole valley, even beyond where they could see. “There was a good-sized town.”
 
“It looks like there is still a good-sized town,” ventured Elzy, noting a few buildings and farm-fields in among the trees.
 
“No, I mean something bigger. You couldn’t see it from here, but you could hear the traffic....”
 
“Oh. You mean Before.” Elzy meant before the pandemic. If Andy minded his life being divided thus into two different eras, he gave no sign. He simply said yes.
 
“What was it like, Before?” she asked in a dreamy voice.
 
“Don’t you remember?” replied Andy. “I’m not that old.”
 
“No, I don’t. I was alive, but I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything before I was around ten, a few years After the pandemic.”
 
“That means you don’t remember the transition period, either? This world is the only one you know?”
 
“Yes. I don’t even know stories. My mother and her friends won’t talk about it, and I don’t want to ask anyone else.” Her hands still worked the soil.
 
Andy looked puzzled.
 
“I’m a cop,” she explained. “Was a cop, anyway. I didn’t want it to get out that I have memory problems.”
 
Andy nodded.
 
“Will you tell me?” she asked.
 
“Yes,” he answered, but then the silence stretched on so long that he obviously wasn’t going to tell her just then.
 
“Can we explore down there? The town?” she said.
 
“Sure. We’re not due at Homestead till tomorrow. But we should get going, if you want to have time to look around today.”
 
 
© 2019 Caroline Ailanthus
 
This is an excerpt from the novel Ecological Memory by Caroline Ailanthus, Salt Water Media, LLC, 2019