Sunday, April 23, 2023

The Leaf

When I was a boy in Michigan, one summer afternoon I was lying on my back in a field staring up at a large tree. It was one of those windless days, hot and still. 

I was alone.

After a while, I realized I was staring at a single leaf that for no apparent reason was turning on its stem. As far as I could see, this leaf was identical to all the other leaves on the tree, but it was the only one moving.

I watched it for a while, utterly perplexed.

In later years, I mentioned this leaf to scientists and asked them what they thought could have caused it to behave that way. One suggested maybe an insect or other small creature had caused the motion. Another suggested that perhaps the stem was weakened by disease and the leaf was preparing to fall.

But nobody could say for sure.

Over the sixty years since that afternoon, I’ve sometimes thought about the leaf and my odd fascination for people and things that differentiate themselves from the crowd. It is a lonely craft, at times, that of the journalist, being an observer, a witness, and seeking explanations. 

After all, one leaf turning might just be a story. Many leaves holding in place most definitely is not.

The problem with this practice is that by focusing on the exception to the rule, we may give the impression that the rule is no longer in order. An example of this is crime reporting. Covering one shocking crime, through a megaphone, can create the illusion that an entire city is “awash in crime” when the fact is the opposite is true. 

In fact, the crime was actually just an anomaly, an outlier event. 

***

Of course, there is an entirely different way to tell any story. That solitary leaf I saw may have been ahead of its time — portending a climate disaster to come when all the other leaves remained quiet, steady in place, doing what they were expected to do.

In this version, the swinging leaf is a whistleblower, a ‘canary in the coal mine,’ an indicator of bigger problems.

Enter the investigative reporter, who picks up on the signal and spots a pattern that may provide an explanation for the turning leaf. After observing hundreds of trees, with many thousands of leaves, and interviewing numerous scientists, none of whom can say for sure, the reporter writes a more nuanced story based on the data.

In this new story, we learn that there are many such single leaves on many trees turning slowly on windless days where no one is there to see. But it is also possible that if no one saw them that it didn’t really happen. (Quantum physics.) Then again, perhaps there is a new disease affecting our trees that we need to address if we are to save the forest.

Meanwhile, the people reading these stories are still thinking about that one single leaf, turning without reason on a windless day long ago in Michigan. Just like the storyteller, they aren’t able to see the forest for the trees.

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