I don’t think my family ever went on anything that could be called a “vacation”. I find something repulsive about the idea. But we did often go “over the hill” to the Wairarapa, where both sides of my ancestry are from. Smartphones not yet being invented, we had to spend our time singing to the songs on the radio, or pointing at things out the window as we passed them: strawberry stands and vandalised signs, or cows gathering for a hui in some odd corner of the paddock.
A peculiar tree always caught our attention. I am ignorant about these things, and could not tell you what sort of tree it is. I can only describe what appears in my mind when I think of it. It is big—the size of a giant—with absolutely no leaves. Nothing grows on it. Its branches are thin, curving along towards spikes which thrust in all directions of the sky. Pointing out this tree became a family tradition. We called it the Diablo tree, after a particular tree in Diablo II. The Diablo tree looks as though it has existed for centuries and looms over the surrounding human habitations and paddocks.
Such a tree serves no purpose to the situation around it. Its bare branches let all the wind through – and it’s in the wrong place anyway – so it’s no good as a windbreak. You’d struggle to chop it up for firewood. Neither cattle nor sheep could hide in its non-existent shade, and though birds may rest in it branches, they would scrabble nothing from its bark.
Probably because the tree has no purpose, it remains in the exact same condition it has for the last 20 years I have noticed it. Its uselessness becomes its reason for continuing to exist. Olga Tokarczuk points out this paradox in Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead. Its narrator, a reclusive, seething vegan who lives by astrological forecasts, touches upon it in one of her scathing rebukes of the hunters with whom she shares a village:
But why should we have to be useful and for what reason? Who divided the world into useless and useful, and by what right? Does a thistle have no right to life, or a Mouse that eats the grain in a warehouse? What about Bees and Drones, weeds and roses? Whose intellect can have the audacity to judge who is better, and who worse? A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless. (248)
When I try to assess the Diablo tree in objective terms – width, colour, height, species – none of the observations stick in my mind. It resists the usual methods of comprehending. I cannot imagine its beginning or end, even though it must have both of those things. I cannot even reliably place it in the world, because it stands on the edge of a small country town where distinguishable buildings have given way to uninterrupted farmland. Indeed, it places itself in my mind in an ahistorical, almost pre-rational way. When I think of the Diablo tree, I think of something sick and yellowing, something yoking under the burden of a curse.
The tree’s very wretchedness, by dooming it to irrelevance, also ensures its survival. It exists in an in-between-space where the usual considerations of human use or need or convenience no longer apply. I do not look at the tree as something to be burned for warmth, or sheltered beneath, or admired for its beauty, because it does not pronounce itself in any of these ways.
Many such places exist. They have no purpose and carry on a neglected existence beneath the level of human attention. Free of the need to be useful or relevant, a kind of ugly beauty emerges. Birds nest in the crumbling bricks of earthquake-condemned Wellington. Bats find peace and quiet in the abandoned villages of the Istrian hinterland. Moss carpets those ponds too filthy to swim in. Weeds perpetually return to the cracks in the footpath.
These places are liminal in the sense that they are not totally beyond the consequences of human actions. They occur in the same places people do, but somehow fall between the gaps and stay there. They are never important places. They are not even worth looking at. No pictures will accompany this essay; that would only distract from the point. What such places illustrate – if they could illustrate anything at all – is that human considerations are not universal considerations. There are places where our needs and conveniences and beliefs are completely irrelevant. There are timespans stretching beyond the breadth of our attention or even our life. What such things teach – if, indeed, we could ever learn anything from them – is that even the most thoroughly useless things are, in their own way, valuable.