oreum

Oreum. The volcanic clusters rose like geographic tombs throughout the island of Jeju. After the expedition scale climbing on Dinosaur Ridge on the mainland, the oreums were short pleasant hikes. We decided to hike all of them. The Pacific Ocean surrounding the island wouldn’t let you forget how this island was formed. The forces of nature had solidfied a work ethic bound to creation. The highest elevation on Mt. Halle. the geometric rock formations, the caves, the river, the ponds, the beaches of white sand and black rocks. We wondered if anywhere else in the world had nature created so diversely so succinctly.

Though the lower elevations were populated by trees, you couldn’t find any trees at the top. Except at one particular oreum. Jeju in another character means the chief mourner. This oreum was like the chief mourner, with two pear trees standing watch over the fog that would come and go.

The pear trees always stood as a pair here. If you hadn’t climbed all the other oreums, you wouldn’t know that this was a singularity. The wind from the ocean, the torrent from the mountains, bent the branches to mercy. It’s probably why trees didn’t survive on the other oreums.

We went to visit the pear trees every year, once in the spring, and again in the winter. Every year, the trees created breath, warmth and guidance, but never fruit. We knew they were pear trees when we saw it blossom that first spring. Every year, the petals would dust the grass below, but never fruit.

As an exercise of meditation, we sat next to trees watching the sunrise, watching the sunset, watching the rain fall, watching the snow fall. For 6 years, we sat quietly together with the pear trees. We couldn’t come back the seventh year because of the pandemic. And then again the eighth and ninth year.

The tenth year, we returned in the winter. The branches bare and bent let the wind whistle through. We stood there thinking about the last three years and about nothing particular at all. Like the wind that whipped the branches into cancerous bronchials, our thoughts bent at the mercy of the wind. At a sudden moment, the wind blew the tip of one tree onto the tip of its pair. It had never happened before.

My hand shivered surround by warmth. We walked back down the oreum.

Next year, in the spring we would walk up again. And we would sit together under the cavernous older branches staring up at the fruit hanging mighty against the wind.

The democracy ruled by capitalism prevented all things. We never saw the pear trees fruit. The government opened up the island to foreign investors who brought their money along with all of their indiscretions. The oreums, once national treasures, vested world heritage sites, were crowned with concrete monoliths. Erasing the green blue skyline to grey, money littered the island. Trash strewn haphazardly by hands who knew and cared for nothing but their own presence, dusted what was left of the persistent green grass.

We never returned to the island.

The pear trees cannot be found on any oreum. The fruit buried beneath the concrete would require another age to place its roots and find its bearings enough to sprout a seedling. Like a tomb giving memories a place to live, the pear trees remembered how we climbed to the top of this oreum, in the spring and in the winter. The pear trees remembered how we sat at sunrise and at sunset letting the wind tell us what to recall, what to pause, and what to move on to.