Five of Pentacles

The Five of Pentacles is the coldest card in the deck. Two ragged figures, one on crutches, trudge through the snow past a stained-glass church window glowing with five coins. The light is right there and they don't go in. It's the card of hardship, exclusion, and being left out in the weather, and of the help that was close by the whole time.

White pine blister rust came to North America around the start of the twentieth century on nursery seedlings imported from Europe. It infects the five-needle pines, a group that includes the eastern and western white pines, sugar pine, limber pine, and whitebark pine. Like stem rust, it needs two hosts. Spores from currant and gooseberry leaves infect the pine's needles. The fungus grows into the bark, and every spring its cankers swell and split open in orange-yellow blisters that release spores back to the Ribes. A canker that circles a branch kills everything beyond it. One that circles the trunk kills the tree.

Nowhere is this sadder than high in the mountains. Whitebark pine grows at the tree line, in wind and snow where little else can. Its fat seeds feed grizzly bears, squirrels, and a bird called Clark's nutcracker, which buries thousands of seeds each autumn and forgets enough of them to plant the next forest. Between blister rust, bark beetles, and a warming climate, whitebark pine has declined across much of its range. In 2022 the United States listed it as a threatened species.

So when you draw the Five, the first thing to ask is whether you're outside the window or whether you are the window. The card can mean genuine loss: money, health, or a place in the world. It can also mean a whole system has lost something without knowing. The pines are going, and the nutcracker's pantry and the bear's autumn go with them. The opportunity is the church window itself. Help exists. There are people in the world breeding rust-resistant whitebark pines and planting them back on the ridges, one seedling at a time. The risk is pride, the kind that keeps you walking past the light because you don't want to be seen asking for it.