Demon Tree

Sal noticed the face formed by the branches and leaves in the giant sequoia redwood tree about two weeks into her winter depression. The face that appeared in the tree was steadfast—once noticed it was always there, waiting, every time she lay down to scroll YouTube clips about depression, or to watch ancient videos of the Southern Gospel singers that comforted her. In happier times, she loved looking out her sliding glass door at the tree, which rose over the back fence. Her preferred place on the couch, while reading or watching television, offered a perfect vantage of the evergreen that lorded over three backyards.

It was a face of pure malevolence, no trace of devilish humor. Eyelashes that winked like spiders in the February winds; a down-drawn mouth with horrid teeth, implacable in the early dusk. It was a face that conveyed that life wasn’t worth living.

As any arborist knows, the branches and foliage of a redwood that dates back over a century don’t change much over the winter months. The face became a companion, darkly fascinating, clearly defined in a collection of boughs that swung out from the soaring trunk. And yet she felt that if she tried to show it to another person—to have them lay on the couch and see it—they’d squint and fail to make out her Rorschach face. And they’d know that whatever was going on with her had landed her in a place of concern.

Winter hung on. Sal’s concentration was shot, she struggled to keep up with the workload from her part-time home-based corporate insurance job. She couldn’t sustain interest in streaming movies—comedies reached her from the well of an alternative universe. Evocative cards and notes from friends and family often made things worse, although she understood the motivation behind them, to convey that life was worth living.

Books and evenings were the last solace of gray days that stretched into May. She’d grabbed Hubert’s Freaks by Gregory Gibson off her mother’s bookcase, a mother who’d experienced plenty of challenges over her 96 years, but who got through hard times with stability and resilience. It was a light non-fiction read about a rare book dealer who stumbles upon a trove of lost Diane Arbus photographs. Reading disinterestedly, Sal perked up when she learned that Arbus had suffered from severe depressions, and in October 1971 had, as Gibson writes, “climbed into a bathtub, overdosed on barbiturates, and slit her wrists.” She was 48. Gibson included this quote, Arbus writing to a friend, “I am literally scared of getting depressed… And it’s so godamned chemical.”

Sal’s father was among her mother’s challenges. Periods of time when he wouldn’t talk, would go straight down to his basement lair after arriving home from work. Weeks would pass, and then one day he’d surface and start complaining about his job, their budget, their children. That’s when Mom knew he was morphing back into the industrious, upbeat man she’d married.

Sal’s depression came every five years or so, regardless of what was happening in her life. She’d come through her share of hard times—a divorce, and a skiing injury hobbled her for weeks—without depression. Other times, when things were going fine, she inexplicably succumbed to what her father called the “black dog.” She’d researched medications, and resolved that if the depressions began to occur more regularly, she might take them.

In June, the redwood began to grow again—if growth can describe changes in a tree that has lasted more than a generation. Sal was feeling better. The merciless visage in the tree began to lose clarity. The branches and the thin, flat, needlelike leaves briefly reconfigured in such a way as to suggest a whimsical forest creature. And then there was just a tree.