Julie M. is a Trollup
No one knows who Julie M. is. She never got a chance to defend herself. But sometime in the late nineties, her name was scratched onto the clean, smooth bark of a beech tree at the top of a hill next to a trail at Saugatuck Dunes state park. Since then, all through my childhood and early adulthood, the tree has stood there, proclaiming to all who pass by that “Julie M. is a Trollup”.
And what a good insult! No one uses that. We can only assume it means “slut”, “whore”, or other derogatory word used to arbitrarily insult a woman. But it has enough abstraction and whimsy to it that my father would read it aloud as we passed, even when I was eight years old. Mere hours after sitting through a church service where we all pretended that swear words might end our relationships with the savior. But it's not a swear word, it's not used often enough to have that weight. It's a perfect insult, and one that I have never used.
The trail begins in a parking lot in grassland with prickly pear cacti growing amongst the big and little bluestem, the dune grass, and other hardy grasses and forbs of west Michigan. The cacti were the only cacti growing this far north. The trail ends at the mighty Lake Michigan, with sand that squeaks as you walk on it and shores that change from summer to winter, and shrink and grow as the massive sand dunes erode and give way to the waves. The dunes themselves become waves, moving with geologic time rather than the whims of the wind. The lake is freshwater, and therefore does not have a tide. Even so, the only hint of the other side is the faint glow of Chicago on the clouds, visible on certain nights when visibility is just right.
Beech trees can grow to be 400 years old, and this one looks to be around 70. It will continue to grow and so will the announcement of Julie M’s trollophood. The bark has blistered and healed and the words have become un-erasable in the flesh of the tree. It is on protected state land, so barring any horrible environmental policies in Michigan’s future, it will remain. The dune will shift under it and its roots will hold the sand in place. It will reach downward for water and upwards for sunlight, converting CO2 into wood and oxygen. Insects and birds will find a home in it, fungal spores will enter through the weak point in the T in “trollop” and live off of the wood, releasing CO2 slowly back into the air.
When the fungi fruits, which could be two hundred years from now, more insects will find them and live off of the nutrient-rich fruiting bodies. Porcelain fungi, turkey tail, and horseshoe polypores will emerge, perhaps eventually causing the collapse of the tree. Julie M. will finally find rest, as the wood feeds the fungi, insects, and birds. The soil will be enriched by the fallen tree, and slowly decaying log may become home to salamanders, feeding grounds for snakes, and eventually the legacy of Julie M. will become soil on which new trees can emerge. She will be used by all the life in the area, enabling the cacophony of the forest, everything looking to find a mate and breed, find food to gorge on, a perpetual festival of sex, violence, and feasting. Julie M. will become the Dionysus of the small of the small dune, a feminine goddess of the trollops, the plants, animals, and fungi that live off of the captured sunlight that has become Julie M , the trollop of the forest.