Oddly enough, the pitch pine owes a great deal of its present prosperity to fire. It is one of the few trees whose roots stay alive and which comes back after an area has been burned over. Most of its competitors, except scrub oaks and black oaks, are killed off. It is a tough tree, and when it grows to good height with its rugged, wind-whisking look, a beautiful one; but it has its vulnerable points. It is very greedy for light, being what the tree experts call an “intolerant tree,” and it cannot stand competition. Pitch pines that come up under the shade of oaks or even of their own kind, soon die off. They demand their own ground. The oaks, especially the white oak, are much more tolerant of shade, and may in time push out the pitch pine, provided fires are held to a minimum in the future. The oaks are monumentally persistent. Cut them down fifty times and they will sprout back from the roots, which merely spread out a little further and send out more shoots. These “sprout hardwoods” have poor quality wood. They have fungus diseases, and are subject to attack by insect borers. The general attitude toward them is that they are worthless. Now that they are not much in demand for firewood, the bulldozer, rather than the ax, is their major enemy. But they deserve some admiration for holding their own. The first year or two after cutting, a sprout oak will grow very fast, but then it settles down for a long future, beginning to grow at a slow, insistent rate, taking what comes. This is a windy and salty land, where oaks may never grow to great girth and height, but they seem eloquent about their right to last out the next five thousand years on Cape Cod as well as we, even though thirty feet, or in some areas five, may be the maximum they reach. This is their chosen land. The late fall wind makes the brown oak leaves rustle and stir or sound like hail, and it soughs through the pitch pines. The whole year is full of the collaborative music of air and trees. They may be poor trees, low and rangy, subject to great abuse, but in their growth they make the land march between its surrounding waters. The gray oak trunks go in ranks and tiers for mile after mile down the center of the Cape, interspersed by individual pitch pines, or backed up and sided by pines in independent woods that look rounded and bunched in the distance, pocked with dark green shadows. The oak branches thrust up their candelabras of branches and stiff twigs against the pale sky, ready for next spring’s sunlight. The pitch pines stand with scaly, dark brown trunks and thick needles rocking and switching around, authorities on wind, and sandy soil, on impermanence, on taking your chances when and where you can.