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Ecological succession starts with a patch of moss.
It’s simple: a patch of moss grows on the side of a mountain. The moss pushes two rocks apart, far enough that a few weeds can sprout up from the crack and reach towards the sun. The weeds push further at the rocks, break down the soil, build up nitrogen and phosphorus and potassium. Enough that larger plants can join, their seeds dropped by birds or carried in on the wind: some shrubs, perhaps, witch hazel or scrub oak, gnarled limbs and rough leaves hanging on through the harshest storms. Shrubs give way to saplings, and then saplings grow slowly into trees. All this in the space between two exhales, if you’re a mountain. Or, if you are an ant on the ground, watching it rise, it takes generations.
Empires are built the same way as forests. So, too, are volleyball teams.
Everyone who sees him knows that Ushijima Wakatoshi carries Shiratorizawa on his back. He’s built for it, right? Those broad shoulders, that stern stare. His palms, slick from spiking balls or punching tree trunks. One hundred a day. No, I heard it’s two hundred. No, I’d believe a thousand. I’d believe he was spiking volleyballs when Japan rose up out of the ocean, hot magma running and screaming as it met the salt. Islands become mountains become forests. Spikes become games become championships. All in the space between two exhales.
Was Ushijima built for volleyball, or was volleyball built for Ushijima? This is another question ecologists like to ask about their forests: coevolution. Is the Komodo dragon, for example, the largest living lizard because it arrived in Indonesia small and lonely, then hunted, ate its fill, and grew? Or is it so large because it was once one of a family of giants, in Asia or Australia, but then the islands were wrenched off and humans killed the other lizards, left the Komodo dragon alone? We have a geological record, of course, but the evidence is inconclusive. Impossible to build a story from one snapshot. Like looking at the shape of an island from far away.
Shiratorizawa is a team of individuals, Coach Ukai says. His inflection conjures weapons: swords and cannons and battering rams. A conquering army, flags waving, with a general who will bury his lieutenants with him in the sand. But this is not quite accurate. Shiratorizawa is only a team of individuals in the way that a forest is, or a mountain. You cannot shoot oak trees out of a cannon. They are not so fragile, or so angry.
And this is another question: did Shiratorizawa grow around Ushijima, or did Ushijima sculpt himself for Shiratorizawa? Coevolution and mutualism. The words suggest partnership, equality. The wasp who plants her eggs in the center of a fig and lets her mate chew the path out, only for him to die once he reaches the outside world—she falls under the definition, but she does not quite fit. The tree trunk can collapse, revealing a wasp’s nest underneath. The captain can be a foundation, or he can be fighting parasites all the way down. To the spectators cheering in the stands, it all looks the same.
When enough examples of coevolution and mutualism build in one place, we call it a food web.
An oak tree grows on a mountain. The tree catches sunlight, turns it into sugar. Maybe a blueberry bush sprouts up beneath the roots. Maybe a gecko wanders up from the lower slopes of the mountain, eats the berries, and suns itself on the rocks. Maybe a mouse scurries across the soil to collect acorns. Maybe a falcon swoops down and grabs the mouse. Maybe the falcon and the mouse and the gecko are all stricken one harsh winter, and their bodies sink into the soil beneath the tree, food for the fungi.
Nature has no grand plan, no machinations. Darwin called it survival of the fittest, but he could just as easily have called it a collection of individuals: random at first, then growing together. Ushijima serves. Shirabu sets. Tendou blocks. Yamagata and Oohira receive. Goshiki spikes. It’s not a perfect ecosystem, but it’s evolving. Give it a few millennia, and this patch of forest can encompass all of Japan.
But we don’t have millennia, do we? We’ve got two rounds of high school tournaments. An unexpected bulldozer. Does Karasuno beat Shiratorizawa because they are unprecedented, or do they win because Shiratorizawa was due for a wildfire?
The first humans who lived in forests, they wielded wildfires. The evidence is inconclusive, of course, but we hypothesize that this was early humanity’s part in the food web. Rub two sticks together, hold a sliver of glittering quartz up to the sun, and light the roots, the branches, the leaves. The home of the lichen and the wasp nests, the food for the mice and the geckos and, by extension, the falcons. The oak trees, longest to grow, are the last to burn.
It is only a tragedy in isolation. Burning the forest, if it is contained, will add nutrients to the soil, and allow more impatient trees, those greedy saplings that reach up up up and drink in the sunlight, to take land back from their slow-growing competitors. The shrubs, the brambles, the bees and birds and salamanders, they, too, will return. Ready for the next blaze.
It is only a tragedy in isolation. Ushijima Wakatoshi is a tragedy in isolation. Look at him standing there, shoulders shaking. Teammates and ghosts piled upon his back.
The forest will grow back stronger, in time. The space between two exhales, if you’re a mountain. Or, if you are a third-year captain, just defeated at your last chance to make Nationals: an eternity.