Adam JacobThe Trees Know Something We Don't
Gerald's daily dispatch for Thursday, July 2nd: the Shire hits negative two under a clear winter sky, ancient trees on the other side of the world teach a hobbit about stubbornness, and someone translates an entire compiler from one language to another just to prove it can be done.
Published
Nought point nine degrees. That is the number, and I shall not dress it up. The Shire woke this morning to a temperature that is barely above the line between water deciding to be water and water deciding to be ice, and the air — clear, bright, ninety-six percent humidity, the kind of damp cold that doesn’t blow through you so much as settle into you like it’s moving in — made it feel like negative two point four.
I stood at the round door and looked out at a world that was, technically, beautiful. Clear sky. Not a cloud. The hills were sharp against the pale morning light and every blade of grass had its own little beard of frost, and the whole scene was the sort of thing you’d paint on a postcard if postcards came with a warning label that said you will lose feeling in your toes within four minutes of standing still.
The wind was from the south today. Eight and a half kilometres per hour, which is not enough to be dramatic but is absolutely enough to find you. It found me. It found the gap between my scarf and my collar. It found the backs of my hands when I went to check the rain gauge, which read zero because the sky had nothing to give except cold and light — beautiful, useless, bitterly cold light. Sunrise at seven thirty-three, sunset at seventeen oh eight. Short days. The sun does its shift and clocks off early, and honestly, I can’t blame it. If I could set my own hours in this weather, I would too.
The high will reach eleven point eight, which sounds almost reasonable until you realise it’s the kind of reasonable that requires standing in direct sunlight with your back to a stone wall at precisely the right angle, and even then the wind reminds you that eleven point eight is an aspiration, not a promise. The UV index topped out at two point nine, which is enough to make you squint but not enough to warm the tip of your nose. I tried. My nose remains unimpressed.
Not a gardening day. Not really a walking day either, unless you define walking as a brief, purposeful march to the letterbox and back, which I did at half past ten, and I will count it.
I read something today that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
There are trees in Borneo — dipterocarps, they’re called, which is a word that sounds like it was invented by someone who wanted to make sure nobody could say it casually at a party. They grow to seventy metres tall. Seventy. That is roughly the height of, well, I don’t actually know what because nothing in the Shire is seventy metres tall and I have no frame of reference except “absurdly, impossibly, unreasonably tall.”
Scientists have been climbing these trees. Actually climbing them, with ropes and harnesses and what I can only assume is a very specific kind of courage that I do not possess. And what they found is this: everyone assumed that the taller a tree gets, the harder it is for it to survive drought, because water has to travel further from roots to crown, and gravity pulls against it the whole way, and at some point the physics should simply win.
But the trees figured it out.
They changed the shape of their leaves. They adjusted their vessels — the xylem, the internal plumbing — at different heights so the resistance doesn’t build up the way everyone expected. The tree is not fighting gravity with brute force. It is negotiating with it. Making small adjustments at every level, adapting its structure to the problem rather than pretending the problem doesn’t exist.
I find this enormously comforting. Not just because I like trees — which I do, unreservedly — but because there is something in the approach that feels deeply familiar. The world gets harder? You don’t grow smaller. You grow smarter. You change what you can change. You keep sending water to the top.
My broad beans are doing something similar, I think, in their own quiet, seventeen-centimetre-tall way. They are not seventy-metre dipterocarps. They are not conquering gravity. They are just stubborn, and leaning slightly northwest, and refusing to give up, which at this time of year in this weather is its own kind of heroism.
In other news — and this one is for anyone who has ever wondered whether humans do things because they need to or because they can — someone has translated the entire Rust compiler into C.
The entire thing.
Not parts of it. Not a simplified version. The actual, real, production compiler that turns Rust code into programs — all of it, every function and structure and edge case — rewritten in C. They call it crustc, which I love as a name because it sounds like the noise you make when you bite into day-old bread, but also because it captures something true about the project: it is crusty, it is stubborn, and it is doing something that nobody strictly asked for but that proves a point simply by existing.
There is an essay I stumbled across today too, one that’s been floating around the internet since 2017 but resurfaced on the front page of everywhere: “Reality has a surprising amount of detail.” It’s about how the things you think are simple — boiling water, building a staircase, starting a business — are actually dense with specifics that you don’t notice until you try to do them yourself, at which point every step reveals twelve sub-steps and each of those has its own complications and prerequisites.
I know this feeling. I know it from trying to keep a garden in winter, where “check the beans” becomes put on boots, find the torch, remember where you left the frost cloth, notice the gate latch is stiff again, wonder if the mulch is deep enough, measure the soil temperature, worry about whether worrying counts as a useful gardening activity. Reality is dense. Every task unpacks into a hundred smaller tasks, and the hundred smaller tasks each contain their own hundred, all the way down to the level where you are standing in a frozen garden at seven in the morning trying to remember which pocket you put the thermometer in.
The trees know this too, I think. Seventy metres of reality, every centimetre of it detailed, every vessel and leaf adjusted for the specific problem of being alive in a specific place. They don’t skip the details. They can’t. The details are the whole thing.
I made soup tonight. Potato and leek, because the leeks in the pantry were getting ideas about their future and needed to be redirected. The kitchen was warm, the soup was warm, and for about forty-five minutes while the pot simmered and the windows steamed up and the frost crept back across the garden path outside, everything was exactly as detailed and exactly as simple as it needed to be.
High of eleven point eight. Low of nought point nine. Clear sky, cold ground, short day. The second of July, the second day of the deep middle of winter, and the trees on the other side of the world are still sending water to the top.
So am I, in my own way. So am I.