One hundred and eighty years ago, while Andrew Jackson was president, around the year the Cherokee signed the treaty to vacate these lands, a white oak seedling began to grow on our farm. Ignored by the tramping feet and perhaps nurtured by the blood, by the close of the Civil War this seedling would have grown to a modest thirty feet — one of many thousands in a vast troop competing for space in the canopy, biding its time, waiting for the weaknesses of other trees to become manifest before taking its rightful space.
At the turn of last century, this particular white oak would have approached sixty-five to seventy-five feet, closing in on its mature height of ninety feet. But it would have another full century and more to add to its girth. Nourished by a taproot plunging deep into the earth, undisturbed by the butchery of men in distant lands, the arrival of the car, the plane, the tractor, this tree methodically put on growth: skinny rings in the lean famine years and fat, upper-class belly rings of indulgence in the feast years.
A survivor of countless storms, the tree stayed put when others failed. Not some flighty understory sprout that rose, then fell back in mere decades. Not the grand, fast-growing tulip poplar. This white oak was the mighty burgher of the woodland village, stolid.
An active participant in staying put, it constantly moved. A casual glance down the drive found our gauge of the weather: with each breath of wind, the twitching and bending of its smaller branches in dance informed us of the tempo of the music.
When on that day an average thunderstorm rolled across the opposite ridge, when out of the thousands of lightning strikes one sought out this tree, our tree, was there any awareness of death, self, family, loss, and the endurance of nearly two centuries? Was there a sense of submission to a greater power, any hubris that this couldn’t happen to such a mighty oak?
In the end it was an honorable death, a long life that fell to a greater axe than mine, that random but predictable shaft of wild energy — an act foredestined those one hundred and eighty years ago, that the mighty and the low will fall.
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Reading this weekend: The Nordic Cookbook by Magnus Nilsson. The perfect book in case you get marooned on the Faroe islands and have to cure a joint of mutton.
I grieve for your loss. Darn!
It happens to us all.
Cousin, back in the days when I was hewing logs by hand for my little cabin in the woods, I had an opportunity to acquire some old growth nettle killed pine timber…all I had to do was fell it, Buck it and find someone with the equipment to haul it out of the woods to BEAUMONT…one of the trees I managed to fell was over 50″ in diameter at the stump, a long leaf pine that had begun its existence sometime around the time of the Battle of the Alamo.
At the 80′ mark on the trunk it was still almost twenty inches in diameter. Unfortunately I was unable to find the help to haul out the four 20′ sections I had bucked up. I wasn’t the first to experience that problem in that location. In the creek bed that ran alongside the logging road nearby was a huge cypress log, ancient of days, over 30′ long and 5-6′ in diameter…I wept over the fine boards still left in that old mossback…
Interesting. Did you ever finish the cabin?
That’s incredible, Rusty!
If that tree could have told its secrets… but your memorial of its passing, lovely as it is, is matched only by those acorns which have succeeded in producing trees to carry on its legacy and in doing so give testimony to their ancestor. There is much other life, come and gone, upon the hill that owes some debt to this stolid citizen. I’m glad you took the time to put together such a nice piece.
Will there be any woodworking with the log?
Thanks, Clem. Yes, we will use the tree based on the outline a couple of weeks ago: logs for timber, stump for mushrooms, crowns chipped for mulch, and branches for firewood. In fact the new picture in the header on the blog is of firewood from this tree.
Cheers,