Day 85.

My essay for the second UC prompt. Not sure that counts as an ending?

My first kiss was a sycamore tree. I was thirteen years old and hiking near the Potomac River, my family somewhere ahead or behind. I didn't even think about it. Under my lips, the dappled bark was wrinkled and sun-warmed. I heard the rustle of leaves, and a bird, and further off, the river. And that was the beginning of my love affair with trees.
It's common courtesy that if you love something, you should know its name. So in freshman year, I joined a club at my school sort of like an environmental Acadec, called Envirothon. Each school has a team that goes to the state competition, and each team had a person who specialized in one of the five areas: aquatics, wildlife, soils, current issue, and forestry. As the forestry expert, I learned that there are many things you can know from a tree: whether there is a river nearby, what kind of animals depend on it, what kind of soil there will likely be. I learned how to measure a tree's height with a clinometer, a Biltmore stick, and an educated guess. But my favorite things I learned, my proudest accomplishment, were the names of almost every native tree in Southern California, common and scientific. I learned that the tree I kissed was a Planatus occidentalis and that its sibling in California was Planatus racemosa. To remember the names, I looked up the meanings, which mainly consisted of obscure botany terms and the explorer or naturalist that named the plant. But there were many surprises: The genus name for manzanita, Arctostaphylos, is a combination of the Greek for "bear" and "bunch of grapes"--probably because of the berries and red-brown bark; the name for willow, Salix, is a combination of the Latin for "near" and "water." I love being able to know my surroundings like this, to tell which living things preceded humans here. Knowing names lets me talk about them, and it connects me with centuries of people seeing these trees. I read what Thoreau thought of the pitch pine or what John Muir thought of the hundred-foot Douglas fir he climbed in a Sierra windstorm, and think that on the massive cliff of things I don't know, knowing and loving these trees is a foothold allowing me a view.