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Morning arrived quietly with the autumn of the year. In the still, silent hour before dawn, a cool white fog lay deep and low upon the land, and the dampness which clung to all things had not yet evaporated, but the sun was on its way. Creeping reluctantly over the eastern horizon, the orange orb, like all else, seemed to move more slowly at this early hour of the day, but its energizing presence leveraged itself into the sky to greater effect with each passing minute.
The rising sun looked down upon the town and bade it to come alive, and the creatures of the somnolent earth methodically responded to its call. The nocturnal chirping of the field crickets soon subsided, and the mosquitoes obediently returned to their mysterious hiding places. The bustle of daytime activity—the barking of dogs, the singing of birds, and the chorus of sounds of all other species going about their daily chores—had yet to find its voice. Nature was in its daily state of transition, caught in that brief lull between sleep and consciousness when, by all appearances, nothing seems to be happening, and yet everything is changing.
From the celestial perspective the town was not considerably different from many others. In size and geography, in color and contour, in sound and smell and sight, it was nothing beyond average in most respects. Resting on the eastern side of a low ridge, nestled comfortably between a wide, slowly flowing river to the north and a vast unbroken expanse of forest to the south, it was a moderately-sized city in a nondescript locale. If the sun were to have the constitution of an accountant, with the inherent need to maintain a ledger for each of its clients, it would have to study this common community for some time before it could identify any distinguishing characteristic by which to label the debits and the credits. And when this town's features were fully known, only two in particular would stand out.
They stood precisely in the center of town, dual objects of stately size and manner which faced each other from opposite sides of the main thoroughfare. On the eastern side stood a large tree—an immense tree—eighty feet tall at the center, with far-reaching branches that spanned almost the entire oversized block upon which it grew. It was a strange-looking tree in some ways, with multiple trunks rising from the ground at some distance from one another to support a spacious canopy of thick green leaves. If one were to pause under the arc of that canopy long enough to count them, one would need more than the fingers of both hands for the task, for there were twelve fully mature trunks which gave this enormous plant its wide and pillared footing upon the earth. And if one were sufficiently intrigued by this finding to push the question one step further and undertake to count the branches which radiated off from those trunks, one would have to recycle one's digits several times over, and might require the better part of an hour to do so, for each trunk splayed off dozens of branches in all directions around it. And in the course of enumerating these branches, one would be remiss not to notice the peculiar way in which each limb diverged from its trunk, and that peculiarity would be that there was no identifiable point of divergence. There was, in other words, no specific place where the trunk ended and the branch began. There was no crook, no elbow—no joint sharply made for any trimmer looking to prune a branch off cleanly at its base to know precisely where to make the cut. The branches instead rather flowed from their trunks in slow, gracious curves, bending off and away from each other like jets of water in a fountain.
Each of the many branches that flared off thusly from these trunks soon met up with other branches that came off of other trunks, some pairs bending around each other as they passed as artfully as square dancers in a circle, while at other places two branches seemed to merge together in mid-air, each leading back to the adjacent trunks from which they originated. This extensive labyrinth of hundreds of branches, meshed together at every conceivable angle and offset, gave the interior of the canopy a haphazard and crowded look, an aerial nest of wooden snakes, as they twisted and curled over each other.
From the outside, however, the tree took on an entirely orderly appearance. Its foliage peaked smartly in the middle of the block and sloped gently and evenly downward toward the edges, which were roughly circular from the center. And propped up as it was atop its many-poled foundation, from a distance the tree resembled nothing so much as a great green wallless tent, perfectly pitched and secured.
At first glance many people did not realize that this broad urban woodland of leaves and branches and sturdy trunks was in fact a single organism, and yet it was so. Each trunk grew from a common system of roots, through each branch flowed a shared sap, and within each leaf was harvested the sustenance of the daily sun for the benefit of the entire plant. Indeed, this singular tree, in its enormity, was the largest living thing now passing under the eye of that quickening sun.
Even decades earlier, the tree was so impressive and unusual in its size and appearance that it captured the civic imagination of the town. To insure that the tree would continue to have room to grow, the city council decided to dedicate a park around it. By a unanimous vote of the council, the entire block upon which the tree stood was purchased, along with the five adjoining blocks on the same side of Main Street. All of the buildings on these blocks were torn down, and the gridwork of streets which crisscrossed the newly consolidated parcel were dug up and overlaid with fresh soil and grass.
In subsequent years the town regularly appropriated generous sums to enhance and maintain the park. Benches were installed at scattered points around the grounds and walking paths were laid out to connect them. Perhaps emulating the limbs of the tree which they surrounded, these paths were not mapped in straight lines but rather wandered in graceful curves and soothing undulations, unhurried patterns that discouraged rapid movement from one point to the next and instead invited walkers to stroll casually from place to place, perhaps pausing to rest on a bench here or there to take in the fresh air or to simply admire the great tree before them. Picnic pavilions and play areas for children were constructed around the periphery of the park, and large groups of people regularly gathered at these places to socialize and relax. Funds were reserved for periodic fertilization and landscaping of the grass and shrubbery, and a special allotment was approved for the installation of an underground sprinkler system so that the grounds could be watered automatically after dark during occasional periods of drought.
The tree itself was an aggressive grower, and it took full advantage of the open space that the town had cleared for it. Each year it extended its roots further into the soil, gaining a deeper foothold into the fertile earth from which it grew, and spread its branches farther across the fields which had been endowed to it. Its leaves annually covered a greater expanse of sky, reaching higher and higher into the air and casting an ever-widening awning of natural protection from the sun and the rain to any creatures, human or otherwise, which sought refuge below it.
Every fourth or fifth year, one of the tree's more outlying branches, having extended itself horizontally to the limit of its ability to resist the force of gravity pulling it downward so far removed from the nearest trunk, would conspire ingeniously to defeat that force which sought to limit its growth. From a point somewhere near the end of the branch, a thin vine would sprout and begin to extend itself in subtle, almost unnoticeable fashion toward the ground below. In time this slight, supple offshoot would reach the ground and from there penetrate the soil, whereupon new roots would emerge from the subterranean tip, and the aerial portion of the vine would begin to grow thicker and stronger. Within a few years the once-slender stalk would have established itself as a new weight-bearing trunk—another sturdy pillar upon which the tree could support itself as it continued its outward expansion.
In this manner the tree pronounced its inherent intention to extend itself as far as the surrounding space would allow, and no law of nature seemed adequate in restraining its growth. The tree's metamorphic ingenuity proved itself capable of overcoming all impediments. Its trunks spread out into branches in all directions, its branches begot roots, and its roots buttressed themselves into new trunks—a self-perpetuating cycle of growth and regeneration which would not stop until some insurmountable object or undefeatable force, heretofore unencountered, stood in its way. Thus the tree, through all its clever devices, continually claimed the void as its own, and for its entire life it met no boundary to its ambitions.
With the exotic and ever-expanding tree growing at its center, the park soon became a favorite site of recreation and ceremony for the townspeople. On warm, sunny days, hundreds of people would come out of their homes and spend the better part of an afternoon in the park, playing frisbee or horseshoes, or walking their dogs, or simply lying on a blanket to read a book or doze lazily in the cool, comfortable shade of the great tree. It was a place where people came to find peace and relaxation and to forget for a few hours the cares of their busy lives. On countless spring and summer days over the years, couples of all ages had stood hand in hand beneath the natural cathedral of the tree's arching bows and exchanged their vows of matrimony, or renewed again the vows that they had made long ago in other, more basilican places. In later years they would return to the park to watch their children and then their grandchildren run and laugh and play beneath the very same tree, the elders smiling silently to one another at the youthful ignorance of their offspring to the special significance that their newfound playground held, their happy peals of laughter only adding to its hallowed history. And for as long as anyone in town could remember, not a single parade had been held on any holiday or public occasion which did not pass by the front of the park, the largest and most enthusiastic crowds filling the grandstands which were set up along the side facing Main Street, the most distinguished guests pleased to be photographed for the local newspapers in their reserved seats at the top of the gallery, with an imposing and instantly recognizable summit of lush greenery filling the background.
Across the street from the park where the communal tree stood rose a creation of even greater dimensions. The Heritage County Medical Center was the largest man-made structure in town and one of the largest hospitals in the state. A solid, bleach-white edifice of concrete and glass, it was in many ways the perfect complement to the verdant acreage it opposed. The front wing of the building was more than a century old, its lobby centered in the middle of the block and facing the park. As the population of the town had increased over the years and the demand for medical care had grown in tandem, additional wings and extensions were built onto the older structure. The result, after a hundred years of sporadic expansion, was a sprawling, heterogeneous tangle of a building. Each wing, designed and constructed a decade or more removed from its brethren, had its own unique architecture on the outside and its own distinct character within. The original structure was unpretentiously quaint and unmodern, with tarnished brass handles on the doors and wooden-sash windows that moved stubbornly when the air grew humid. As one passed through into the newer wings, the ventilation and illumination became noticeably better, the hallways and doorways wider and more functional, but the atmosphere lacked much of the charm of the older space. At many places inside the complex, hallways ended abruptly, crossed at right angles by other corridors which led after a short distance to yet another hallway, the backbone of another wing which sprouted off the former and which extended the building in yet another direction. Traversing this maze of interconnected corridors which was their familiar working environment, the medical staff routinely encountered the puzzled faces of visitors lost in the search for a particular room, and each became quickly adept at giving precise directions from any point in the hospital to any other which involved the fewest number of turns. Despite its Byzantine structure, however, the building in the aggregate served its purpose well, and the peculiar pedigree of its component parts did not detract in any meaningful way from its functionality.
The newest addition to the complex was almost a separate building onto itself. Constructed as a squarely shaped appendage which shared only a small portion of one wall with the main structure, it was partitioned into a dozen small rooms on each of its four floors. The first floor offered a waiting area with its own entrance as well as five general examination rooms and a slightly larger room for scheduled procedures. The upper floors housed office space for the physicians and the administrative staff. In the manner of its construction this addition reflected its financial and legal separation from the hospital, for it was designed from its very beginning to be an independent entity, with only the most distant and indirect association with the primary facility. The newer facility was run as a clinic, with its own staff of physicians and nurses and its own roster of patients. The clinic had no beds or other accommodations by which to provide twenty-four hour care, and any patients who required such care were referred to the hospital under separate admittance. Likewise, a patient who came first to the hospital seeking certain specialized procedures might occasionally be referred to the clinic. For the most part, however, the clinic operated at arm's length from the larger medical center which had sponsored its creation, sharing the land on which it was constructed and rolling up its financial results at the end of each fiscal quarter into the books of a common parent corporation, but otherwise functioning on its own.
The reasons for the tactical separation of the hospital and the clinic were unimportant to most of the patients who were treated at either facility, but they were of keen interest to the lawyers and accountants who worked behind the scenes. The people who managed the paperwork did not see the medical center primarily as a place where illnesses were diagnosed and treatments were administered and wellness was achieved. Instead, they saw mostly risk—the risk of litigation, the risk of constraining regulation, the risk of financial loss. In managing the business of the hospital they sought to minimize these risks as much as possible, for this was their job, and for many years they had succeeded. But when events overtook their traditionally safe and predictable operations—when one too many attorneys began routinely filing papers at the county courthouse with the hospital's corporate name listed in the upper left-hand corner, when one too few politicians were willing to be on record as having tried to offer legislative protection to the hospital corporation's bottom line—the administrators found themselves to be publicly friendless. Forced by litigation to endure ever greater costs of doing business, and restricted by regulation from raising prices to fully cover those costs, the administrators pursued new lines of business that would offer greater profits with less risk.
What they sought, in a word, was outpatient work—relatively simple procedures which could be performed in less than an hour, which did not involve general anesthesia, and which required little in the way of pre- or post-operative care. Such were the areas of modern medicine in which the greatest margins lay. It was not assembly-line medicine per se, since every patient was an individual and no two procedures were performed in precisely the same way, but to outside observers it appeared close to being such. The clinic hired only experienced physicians—doctors who had practiced in their field for years and who had likely already seen and overcome every known complication that might arise in their work. They were the least likely to make mistakes, and therefore the least likely to expose the clinic to unnecessary expense. Their salaries were higher than those of their less experienced colleagues, but not excessively so, for the corporation found that many older doctors were willing to compromise on their salaries in return for a guarantee of more flexible working hours and a generous corporate contribution toward the cost of their malpractice insurance.
For all of these reasons, the clinic was established as a separate company—a legal and financial entity onto itself. It would, the corporate executives hoped, provide the steady and predictable income which their hospital found more difficult to produce with each passing year.
And in its first year of operation the clinic had succeeded marvelously in meeting the expectations that had been placed upon it. With a staff one-twentieth the size of the hospital's, the clinic had treated nearly as many patients as the larger facility and had boosted the corporation's net profits by more than thirty percent. Due to the rapidly growing demand for its services, within a few months of its opening the clinic was scheduling non-critical appointments more than two weeks in advance. The only mistake the administrators had made, as they saw it in hindsight, was in underestimating the community's need for clinical services, and they now wished that they had built a larger space into which they could expand their new line of business.
But not all observers of the clinic's operations were quite so pleased by its success. Indeed, a small but determined group of citizens were fundamentally opposed to its work, or rather a specific portion of that work, and they made their viewpoint known quite publicly to all who would listen. They marched in daily protest on the sidewalks in front of the medical center. They handed out leaflets and pamphlets to anyone walking into or out of the clinic and to any other pedestrians who happened to pass nearby. They held rallies periodically to denounce the clinic and its business and all who worked within it, and the rallies became more frequent and more emotional as the year's political election season drew near. They saw the clinic's objectionable practice as neither medicine nor therapy, but as an entirely optional, and therefore avoidable, and therefore unjustifiable, means to an immoral end. It was, in their view, a contravention of the proper role of medicine. Medicine, by oath, ought to heal, and in the process do no harm. They could not sit idly by and allow such wrongs to proceed uncontested.
The clinic's opponents were not without opposition of their own, however, for each march which they orchestrated seemed to spawn a counter demonstration of equal size and passion. Each word that they shouted in defiance was answered in kind. Those who approved of the clinic and its work took their opponents' vehemence as a challenge to their own orthodoxy, and they were unable, in the face of such a challenge, to remain silent. They responded to each charge of immorality and sin with rebuttals of intolerance and bigotry. Anger and mutual disdain were the standard currencies of exchange in the very public arguments which were to swirl around the clinic every day of the year. Neither side was willing to allow that the other had the slightest justification for its position, for in the modern art of public debate and demonstration such allowances for even the most obvious facts were interpreted not as a token of seriousness and fairness, but universally as a sign of weakness. The two sides therefore agreed on very little, with the exception, unshakably, of the need to concede nothing.
Yet through all of this civic upheaval, through all of the protests and counter protests, through all of the arguments and threats and harsh words that were exchanged, the clinic and the hospital both continued to function more or less as they were designed to do. They each saw a full roster of patients on a daily basis, and none of those patients was ever denied any reasonable level of care despite the tumult of dissension which may have surrounded it. Word spread throughout the community of the services that the new clinic was able to provide, and those who found themselves in a position to desire such services were sure to know where they could be obtained. And so the clinic prospered, if not in the heart of every citizen, at least in the financial and occupational sense in which it was conceived. And the administrators of the medical corporation took note of the clinic's success, and they planned accordingly to make a greater investment in such services as time and circumstances would allow.
Thus the medical center was, in its parts and in its whole, mankind's most worthy counterpoint to the majestic creation of nature over which it watched the sun rise each morning. Each organism went about its daily business in its own irrepressible way, driven on by that common internal force which was written into its being and which commanded it to fully assert itself; each drawing its sustenance from the community it served and flourishing upon it, while simultaneously taking note of the forces aligned against it and maneuvering deftly to surmount them. And in the process of becoming the things that they were—the things that indeed they were destined to be—in their size and in their longevity, in the victories which they achieved for themselves and in the passions which they aroused along the way, they each became something far more than their physical forms would suggest. In time they became icons of those rare and special things which transcend the ordinary and which assume a place of reverence in the eyes of the masses. Not simply a tree, you see, but a forest within a tree. A tree to represent all trees, and by extension all things which nature engendered—a living idol to which the town could pay its homage and its respect. Not simply a hospital, in like measure, but a therapeutic temple of existential complexity. A place wherein life began, and life was preserved, and life ended, all under human control. A place where time itself was put in doubt when the span of life as deemed appropriate by human discretion sometimes ended before it even began.
There was a nobility which derived from the sweep of their ambitions, and from their ability to realize those ambitions amid a world which often seemed abhorrent of such success. They were objects onto which the people wrote their own favored meanings and purposes, and through which they drew a great measure of pride—pride for themselves, pride for their city—pride, ultimately, for all of nature and all of humanity and all of their expressly chosen ways. And to the extent that those very different ways seemed the same, the people rejoiced, and they thought themselves wise. And to the extent that those very same ways seemed different, the people fought, and they thought themselves wiser still.
And it was between these two grand objects of nobility and pride, of communal harmony and discontent played out side by side, these symbols of civic definition, that early morning traffic gradually began to flow in both directions up and down the main avenue of the city, opposing beams of light cutting one against another through the receding fog, and the sleepy town of no particular significance slowly came to life.