Signs in Nature

On just about every hike I’ve walked in Northern New Mexico over these past several years—as long as there is a convenient stand of aspen—I’ve found tree graffiti. Many are the marks of lovers, but others reflect the politics and humor particular to America. Some are crass and offensive, others poignant and beautiful. But no matter what is written, the irony remains: out on a trail, far from roads and stores and cell-phone coverage, we cannot help but create another instrument for our human voice, another canvas upon which to prove we exist.

Of course, humans have been carving their mark on the landscape since our species trod its first footpath into the earth between a watering hole and a campsite. We’ve probably been marking up stones and trees for almost as long. The first recorded instances of lovelorn tree carvings date back to antiquity. My favorite account is in the Renaissance epic Orlando Furioso, in which the femme fatale Angelica and her new husband carve their names entwined in love on every available surface—tree, rock, hut—in the vicinity of their love nest. Orlando, Angelica’s jilted protector, comes across these signs of betrayal and subsequently goes mad.

I like this account because it tells both sides of the tale—that of those who have left their mark and those who come upon it afterwards (incidentally, after going mad, Orlando proceeds to tear up the offensive forest). My response is to photograph these marked-up trees. They tell a contradictory tale: that mix of ephemeral, poignant love and destructive hubris that so characterizes our relationship to nature.

June 19, 2010; San Pedro Wilderness, New Mexico

© Alexandra Huddleston

For over a year I’ve been a hiking enthusiast. I’m not completely satisfied if I don’t get a good ten-plus mile hike in at least once a week, preferably with over 2,000 feet of elevation gain. I like to feel that unity of mind, body, and place that comes after an exhausting trek. When I was a child, however, I was reluctantly dragged out on the family summer hiking jaunts. I was the youngest and the slowest. As a teenager, these hikes came to mean a chance for my mother to pose the most intimate and embarrassing questions. (“Are you gay?” “Well, no, mom.”) So, I’ve known for a very long time that humans seldom enter the wilderness to commune with nature, but rather to commune with themselves and with each other.

In truth, I cannot recognize many varieties of birds, or flowers, or trees. My knowledge of the lifecycle of the forest is limited to faded memories of k–12 science classes. Perhaps this is why my eye and my camera focus on the palimpsests of the human psyche left on bark around this state. In these living and growing canvases there is a similarity to the tattoo, though perhaps branding or scarification is the better analogy.

July 1, 2008; Hyde State Park, New Mexico

© Alexandra Huddleston

Some are the relics of a nearly defunct pastoral tradition, the remains of shepherds and cattlemen with plenty of down time on the job. Others clearly come from a momentary narcissism and boredom felt in a long wait for slower companions. But how to explain the “Luhan” and “God is Love” carved countless times into aspens in the San Pedro Wilderness? Are they part of some spell? An obsessive neurosis?

For the most part the graffiti doesn’t harm the trees, though some, too deeply carved, may create a seeping wound where disease enters and sap escapes. Other humans must confront these arboreal billboards along the trail, but as far as I know, the birds and insects don’t notice. For them, the tree remains a tree, but for the human brain, these words and drawings on trees fundamentally transform the trees into something else—a book, or living parchment . . . or billboard. In the Middle Ages, man was more inclined to see...