I was recently flipping through Dirr’s illustrated encyclopedia Dirr’s Hardy Trees and Shrubs. I came across the Striped Maple, Acer pennsylvanicum, of which my own wooded property has many. I know the “candle glow” in the fall he describes. Dirr comments on this particular species that when cultivated outside of it’s familiar native woodland habitat, “the vagaries of the domesticated environment often wreak havoc.” This sparked my imagination.

When I think of really wild things, I think of the wolf, the grizzly, the elephant, the polar bear, the salmon, the great white, the Redwood, the Mangrove forests of India where tigers live. I have this preconceived notion that where things are truly wild, in these scary places, there are no rules. Just endless roaming and a vicious cycle of wind and water and sun and sky. To eat and to breathe and to pulse with the cadence of the universe.

Wild things often invoke a feeling of fear and wonder in me-being face to face with a cobra, or in the top of one of the world’s tallest trees, or both at the same time. Not that I have even been in either situation. But that feeling, if you can imagine, is of being on the edge of things, right between this side and the other.

Wild things are not, in fact, vagrants. Quite the opposite. Wild things are not wanderers, they are not adventurers, they are not explorers.  There is high order and explicit rules in the wild. Wild things are as consistent as the wild landscape that transpires them. Like the sun is wild, everyday, forever burning. Wild things are free from inconsistency. Of course their physicality can be disrupted, but the spirit of the wild is impenetrable and irreplaceable. Wild things take care of themselves.

Only with domestication comes vagrancy and inconsistency in character. You don’t see beggars in the forest or on the tops of mountains. A lion, in a cage, is no lion at all. The havoc that is wreaked on the striped maple that Dirr talks about domesticated downtown is such a sad thing. The candle glow is blown out, and with it the wildness of the striped maple is stripped. The vagrant and the vagrant tree alike, is downtrodden, sad, and needs help. Many will look the other way.

But there is a bravery in the vagrant spirit, I think. It is noble, trying to deal with inconsistency. Charitable. The only consistency, maybe, is playing the cards you’re dealt. Sorrily wandering, not quite how wild things walk the earth. When will you get another drink, or another meal to eat? Will the UPS truck come zooming by today to blow apart my lower branches? All this impermeable surface makes me tired. And how about a potted Japanese Maple in front of the nail salon, the Honey Locust in combative construction zone, the wheedwhacker, the lawnmower running over your ankles and toes. All the mechanical things that the vagrant must bare. The trash and the smog.

As an arborist, I used to think that I flew like an eagle, or climbed like a panther in the jungle. But I wonder if the arborist has more in common with the zoo keeper, the claims official, the job placement liaison, the scooper at the soup kitchen.