backpacking / survival

Over the weekend, my partner and I went on a backpacking trip to Lassen Volcanic National Park (in Lassen National Forest). Lassen is an old growth forest, and there was a fire in a area in 2004. Plus it's a relatively dry climate. So we got to see a lot of destruction, decay, and regeneration. Some areas were pretty bleak, with just the jagged, blackened hulks of trees and a lot of sandy ash on the ground--but a lot of areas had selective burns--only the driest of trees burned while the greener living trees kept right on living. Before we left, we went to a ranger talk about some of the trees. My new favorite tree is the Lodgepole Pine. It has two types of cones--one of which is covered with thick wax that only activates in the presence of a lot of heat--namely a forest fire. The Lodgepole is one of the first trees to repopulate an area after a fire, and its bark is relatively thin because it doesn't need to withstand fire. The other part I noticed about the tree skeletons is that some trees seemed to have grown in a twist, as if under the bark, the tree was rotating itself, ending up like a candy cane, while others grew straight up and down. I was curious about how the different growth patterns helped support the tree's strength in growing tall and withstanding wind.
I'm fascinated by all this, and it reminds me of talking with my mother-in-law about the role of community and individuality in people's lives. Where she grew up, extended families function as retirement accounts, where those who can make money share it with those who are struggling. We also talked about the falseness of the American image of individuality and self-reliance--people do not get where they're at by their own effort--it depends a lot on how our families raised us, what opportunities and supports we had when we couldn't take care of ourselves. It has a lot to do with privilege and how much we trust that we'll be taken care of. How we grow, and what grows around us, does a lot to determine how we survive tough times.
The other thing I think about is survival beyond the individual. The Lodgepole Pine says "Even if I don't survive, *we* survive." As we hiked, I tried to think of the human equivalent of a pinecone covered in wax. Being the religious sorta person I am, I think about sacred texts that have been passed down for generations. Our myths and stories contain wisdom that's not always easy to see on the surface, and hopefully some of that wisdom helps us survive even beyond individual survival.
Which of course leads into my rant that reading a religious story (or any mythical story, even many movie plots) solely on the surface means that we miss the deeper wisdom. Stories tell us who we are, and the stories we tell shape us just as much as we shape the stories. It makes me crazy when people read the Bible, for example, as if it's literally true. Why not read it the way we read about Greek and Roman Gods? They don't exist in a literal way, but they also have some interesting truths about humanity. And not just ancient stories, but many modern storytellers (James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison....) participate in this process too.
So at the end of the day, maybe it's just me, but I like those connections. We can learn a few things from an old-growth forest.