The Quebracho Nobody Invited Back

Michel Salas and Jorge Alcalá were walking along a gently sloping hillside, the blue March sky pressing close against the canopy, when they found something nobody had planted: a quebracho — Astronium graveolens — that had decided to return on its own terms. Someone had cut it down before. It doesn't matter when. Whatever was left of that stump held on to just enough to begin again, and there it stood, a mid-sized tree now, surrounded by wild shrubs and dry earth, as though nothing had ever happened. The quebracho is the kind of wood the old-timers reached for when something had to last — fence posts, enclosures, structures that time wasn't meant to win against. But here, at this point in the reserve, its worth lies elsewhere: in the fact that it can grow to thirty meters tall, and in the fact that it is already finding its way there without anyone guiding it by the hand. The photograph Michel and Jorge took that Sunday shows it standing alone against the blue, no company around it, all the work still ahead.