"Their trunks were as tall and straight as ship masts. Who knows how old they were, but I'm guessing they were planted when the house was built in the 1920s. By the time I was a boy, their tops towered high above the roof. We played endlessly beneath the cover of these pines, twirling madly on a single rope swing attached to one especially formidable branch."
"Trees have a powerful symbolic presence in director Clint Bentley's Train Dreams, a Sundance favorite that began streaming on Netflix this Friday. They are resilient, but not indestructible, much like Joel Edgerton's character at the center of this story. They give, but ask for little. They can be dangerous. They can also be easily unnoticed, blending into the background. But if you look closer, there is power and majesty to behold."
The narrator remembers four hemlock pines planted in the 1920s that towered above a childhood home and sheltered endless play on a single rope swing. Those trees provided shade, protection from storms in memory, and a sense of steadfastness even as toys were lost in muddy ground. Trees serve as a central symbol in Train Dreams, embodying resilience, fragility, danger, and unnoticed power. The film centers on Robert Grainier, a laborer whose priorities are family and living in harmony with nature, even while his axe helps clear forests for emerging industrial forces on the early twentieth-century Pacific Northwest frontier.
Read at www.esquire.com
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