what hooks are

The colors come when the life-giving water and chlorophyll take their green wet business elsewhere, the leaves turn ghost, and we're left looking at shades -- shades of minerals, sipped in secret from the earth all spring and summer.  But what the botanists never tell is: who told the alder and the vineleaf growing side by side on a single ridge each to sip, separately, only the minerals that would turn their leaves dull gold, or blood red? And who told the neighboring firs never to die for the sake of a change of season? And who told the vineleaf and alder always to do so, but only for the sake of the change men call October? What the botanists never tell is why each tree, leaf and needle obey.  Not that botanists are at fault in this -- for mustn't it be that same who they failed to tell of who decreed what a botanist would and would not know? Decreed for example that they would know the phylum/genus/species of any plant a man might hope to see; decreed for example that they would not know why the dying leaves of the tree called "vineleaf maple" must turn the same blood red as the once-silver salmon that journey up the Tamanawis to give birth and die -- and at the same time of change: October; decreed for a final example that they would extend their analysis no deeper than to discuss the effects of water on the mineral Iron to explain why leaf skin, salmon skin, palm-of hand skin must be made scarlet in order to reach the ends they must reach.  Nor may a botanist wonder, within the confines of his discipline, what those ends are, or why they seem to be reached only by those who suffer, who know pain, and who learn in pain that it is this scarlet end and only this scarlet end that can free us from pain.  "So it is Iron?" I ask my Friend as we walked, "is it Iron that gives the blood its beautiful color ? And to learn to love that color will I somehow be wounded as Nick was wounded, and so come to know what hooks are, what they are, what they really are?"

David James Duncan, from The River Why