He likes to tell Sabine and others that he won it in a poker game in a musty bar in southern New Hampshire, but those who know him catch the coruscation in the eye of the teller.
He immediately falls in love with the plot just behind the house; the resemblance to the Black Forest is downright uncanny. Slowly, he begins to learn English so that he can fit in with these suspicious New Englanders. Three times over, he is an outsider here — as German, as Jew, and as transplanted New Yorker, though given his experience in the city, he can only laugh at this last. Over the next couple of years, he and Sara make the New Hampshire home their permanent residence. He jokes that all he wants is to learn enough English to turn up his nose at someone greener than he in town. The real underlying motivation, though, is so he can read the presettlement charters kept down at the archive in the town hall, and learn the history of the land on which they live. It’s a beautiful tract, teeming with red oak and red maple, or Quercus rubra and Acer rubrum, names like those of old friends. There are also paper birch, yellow birch, and sweet birch on the plot, not to mention a handful of glorious white pines the likes of which New England is famous for. He practically expects to see the king’s demarcation on these last, for which, of course, he’d have to, at least mentally, reprimand the king. He’s fascinated by the impact humans have had here, the preponderance of stone walls in the south on pastured land, the massive logging of the White Mountains.
Nineteen thirty-eight is a lean year for a landscaper, as Americans eye Europe warily, and guard their own pockets accordingly. While he dreams of returning to Freiburg, the extended silences of his parents, other family, friends, and former students make Germany seem more and more distant and forbidding.
Then, on a September evening, the most powerful hurricane of the century rips through Peterborough almost completely unexpectedly. They have at most a couple of hours of warning. Florida gears up for the storm, and then it is mistakenly thought to have gone out to sea. The Weather Bureau calls for a “chance of rain.” By evening, Providence sits under fourteen feet of water and the streetcars have shorted out, setting off a ceaseless cacophony of horns. Schöner is landscaping a house in north-central Massachusetts, and Sara manages to get in touch with him. He tries to race home, but the storm soon overtakes him, and he takes sanctuary in a mill in southern New Hampshire. It takes him two days to get home — roads are flooded, bridges out, the rivers that passed underneath having permanently changed course. Sara, having waited out the storm in the attic, is unharmed, but the house is flooded. By the time he arrives in downtown Peterborough, he’s seen a lot of damage, but the sight of the steepleless church makes him stop short just where the traffic light used to hang.
First, he holds his wife tight, then he slogs outside to survey the damage in the plot. What he sees is catastrophe. Most of the red oak has uprooted. The red maple has either bent or snapped, plainly crushed under the falling oak or pine. The paper birch is almost all uprooted, bark strewn about like the papers of a raided library. Sweet and yellow birch, decapitated. The fallen logs lie like corpses to the northwest, where the wind came fiercest. Schöner can smell the lingering salt air of the ocean even though they’re nowhere near it; it must be in the soil now, glacial till heavy with days of rain. As he curses the storm, then, he doesn’t know whether to wave his finger up at the sky or down below, and so he does both. Knees sinking in the muck, he hears Heidegger, taunting, rejoicing in the destruction, the closing words of the rectoral speech: “‘All that is great stands in the storm.’”
The storm, though, is forgotten almost as quickly as it came hell-bent through. The next day, Chamberlain meets with Hitler to negotiate over Czechoslovakia. Soon, Hitler will invade the Sudentland in spite of this meeting, and a couple of months later, the world will awaken to the news that Germany has invaded Poland.
In the following year, the wood begins slowly, almost imperceptibly, to regenerate, forming a low, tightly packed canopy. The temptation is to clear the land, to try to get money for the logs, but 275 million trees have been felled in New England, enough to build 200,000 five-room houses. Market value goes kaput. Many of the trees have been too damaged to serve as wood anyway, and are only worthy to pulp. He convinces Sara that they ought not to try to clear the land, but allow it to be what it is, to become what it will become. He wanders the plot, hoisting himself over the many pits and mounds that have been formed by the felled trees, heaving himself over the downed wood.
For a year, he watches the red oak as it survives, but then passes away. The pine and the bit of hemlock are also down for the count. But then he notes as sweet birch, a novelty for him, clings to mounds and even to exposed rocks. Snapping the stems to release the soothing wintergreen, he admires its hardiness. And where mineral soil has been exposed in the mounds, of all things, paper birch begins to grow.
The fecundity of the plot and the number of species that survive amaze him. Working on the yards of the well-to-do, most of which were cleared of wood afterward, he cannot help but marvel at the greater richness and diversity on his own land, and the number of ways that it has managed to regenerate itself — through crown releafing and sprouting, seedlings and saplings alike.
But even more wondrous to him is the presence of new species entirely in the understory. They have sprung out of the pits and mounds as though they were just waiting for a storm to usher them in. One day, he discovers the Epilobium sp., whose stem will eventually turn red and offer up a white flower. A library visit reveals that this is common in Finland, close enough to Germany to make him tremble. On another occasion, he stumbles onto blackberry plants. And best of all is the common cinquefoil, the glorious yellow flower he decides he’ll pin in Sara’s hair. He crouches with the guidebook near the ground before picking one, squinting and rubbing for the slight serration that will distinguish it from imposter weeds.
The day he plucks that flower, he decides to write Heidegger. He is short but direct. He knows the chances of his words reaching Heidegger are minuscule. Nevertheless, he writes, wishing he and his wife well, asking where he now stands. He knows from some other Freiburg transplants with whom he corresponds that Heidegger resigned the Rectorate fairly swiftly in disillusionment, and has become seen as rather inconvenient to the Nazi cause at best.
In his letter, he includes a postscript describing the recent gems that he’s turned up on the floor of his forest. He writes, “You know, Martin, it’s strange. Trees have always defined the forest for me. I climbed in the canopy, because I thought that’s where the best, truest view was. But in the wake of the Storm of 1938, I find that the little plants of the understory have become very dear to me, dearer than I could have ever imagined. I will not burden you with their Latin names, but I do urge you to take notice of them the next time you are out walking in the woods. Humbly, Schöner.”