Those who were going to be trees

This is a happy and sad story, which in a few years will repeat itself happy and then sad, like exactly everything in life, without this being a message of pessimism but quite the opposite.

On January 18, 2020, the Portamérica festival planted 2,500 trees in Monte Xiabre, Caldas de Reis.

It was their second large plantation (they had started in 2010 in Valladares), and this time they grew hazel, holly, birch, oak, chestnut, cherry, strawberry, ash, maple and cork oak trees.

Why?

Portamérica is one of the most important music festivals in Galicia and with this action, I quote literally, intended to “compensate for the emissions generated by the celebration of the last edition of the festival,

help recover the land burned in the fires and create a natural firebreak with leafy species that will prevent the spread of possible new fires.”

Six months ago the initiative was repeated

tree: 300 trees in Outeiro Grande, the local mountain of Lantaño, in Portas (Pontevedra).

Mount Xiabre, in Caldas, has just burned.

The news shocked me.

“Whoever burns this knows when and how to do it,” said a neighbor.

The fire swept away the Portamérica plantation;

that is to say, trees burned and those that were going to be trees.

And those days of planting were devoured in a matter of minutes because fires bring, in addition to destruction, a very particular meaning that can move to many areas of life: the work it takes to plant something that takes years to grow can be destroyed with a match and a breath of wind.

There was something else that encompasses all of Spain: few natural disasters are just that.

So I called Kin, music producer for Esmerarte (Vetusta Morla, Xoel López) and organizer of festivals like Portamérica or Son do Camiño.

Many years before it was something as important as it is:

Kin tells me there wasn't even time for the 2,500 trees to grow into a kind of firebreak;

small and surrounded by brush, they disappeared in an instant.

Each tree planted by someone, he says, carried part of his life: a dedication to someone deceased or loved, a broken piece of life that was decided to continue living in another way through memory.

Kin's own father, who died on September 11, 2001, had his dedication on one of the trees that is now ash.

Like him, many neighbors saw what they planted burn, among other more practical reasons, to see something they love or have loved grow again.

Either way.

"When the mountain burns," says Kin, "my mountain burns and a part of my life burns."

Years ago Oliver Laxe explained it without anesthesia in

, a film that will eventually become a treatise.

It was written in this column and will be repeated until the fire is over: that it is in the relationship that its very few neighbors have with nature that the evaporation of that rural world where the State does not arrive and is not expected is best calibrated, and when it arrives he does it with the chopped hose.

And that if you look closely you can see how everything disappears in such a way that what burns is not the mountain or the houses, but a time and a place fought over by those who inhabit it without help or hope.

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