The Oak
My love affair with the plant kingdom began with the enormous black oak that grew in front of our childhood home on Cleveland Terrace. I imagine it had sprouted up long before the house was built in the 1890s. The tree was so large, the route to our front porch consisted of two semi-circular walks, shaped like a giant horseshoe, which curved around its base.
Bigger than any other tree on the block or in the park nearby, it had a trunk wider than we were tall: a dark and furrowed column that stood silent and impenetrable to us noisy children, who raced up the two symmetrical walks to the house, my twin Jackie on the right, me on the left, always ending in a tie. The trunk rose high above, before huge branches, each the size of other trees, diverged and spread, a leafy umbrella that covered the roof of our three-story home like a giant benevolent goddess.
Our tree was visible from every front window of our home and shaded the entire house for most of the day, and much of the year. It rustled me awake with the morning breeze. Jackie and I would watch squirrels dance their loopy steps along its branches from our third-floor window.
Beneath our black oak lay a colony of lilies-of-the-valley, a shade-loving woodland plant that spread by underground runners and delivered a delicately scented fragrance when they blossomed in early summer. The flowers, tiny white fluted bells, hung upside down, as many as a dozen borne on a single stalk.
In years after ample snow, which we shoveled into the bed around the oak, the lilies-of- the-valley grew thick and glorious, a fitting skirt for the grand old goddess.
In autumn, one of our chores was to rake the fallen leaves in the yard. They were the largest leaves of any oak, up to ten inches long. Jackie and I would drag them into massive piles as high as we were, then take turns jumping inside, burying ourselves completely. The dusty brown leaves, just begun to decay, emitted a resinous and musty odor I can smell to this day.
While its acorns weren’t small, about three-quarters of an inch, their scaly caps covered so much of the fruit, they looked like little forest fairy-faces, peeking out from under a fine-shingled headdress. Sometimes we would separate the shingled caps from the acorns, place them on our fingertips, and have fictional conversations between them.
The black oak was so tall and spreading that, from the ground it was part of the heavens, seeming quite inanimate, except when the wind blew.
One morning, just after our thirteenth birthday, Jackie and I stared out the third-floor window, wordless, as a sudden wind brought the crown of our oak to life. Stiff wooden boles bent and cree-eked, swaying in synchronicity, one branch following the next, and stretching to the tensile limits of the wood underneath their dark skin. Each gust orchestrated frenetic rhythms, the smaller branches swirling like banshees back and forth, relinquishing their leaves to the air. I became mesmerized, suddenly believing the tree was sentient: a dance partner to the wind.
As the day grew stormier, we learned that this was Hurricane Daisy, headed north. The tempest brought wild whirlwinds and buckets of rain which blew in at severe angles.
From upstairs, Jackie and I kept our perch at the window as the tree-sized limbs shuddered and jolted in the gusts. We worried they would be torn off, violently ripped from their source. The London Plane trees on the street were losing limbs, their severed branches strewn across the pavement like so much litter.
“Dad, aren’t you worried about the big tree near the house?” Jackie asked, when he came upstairs.
He was quiet for a moment. “Well, oaks are strong. They used to build ships out of their wood.”
The next day, we ventured out to inspect the damage. There were small twigs, leaves and acorns everywhere in the yard, but no branches had broken from our oak.
Of all the trees I climbed as a youth, and there were many, our black oak was the one I most dreamed of climbing. But the limbs were so large and far apart it would have been impossible. As a young teen I studied potential routes at length. I even climbed out the third-floor window onto the tiny sloping ledge of roof, to see how close the nearest branch was, that maybe I could leap to it. It wasn’t long before I realized that even if I had made the near suicidal jump, there would be no way to get back.
Years later, I studied horticulture at Rutgers University. Some textbooks claimed black oaks (Quercus velutina) were common in the forest, but I found them to be rare: I remember only one other in our neighborhood. Perhaps there were more of them down by Wigwam Brook in the time before it was walled-in to make a park, with large open fields on the far side and meandering paths on the near. Or perhaps it was because the species had been subject to several diseases, including the infamous and malevolent Chestnut Blight.
Recently I traveled East and made a pilgrimage to visit the old neighborhood. As I drove down our street and came to our home at number sixty-four, I gasped.
Our magnificent black oak was gone.
While I had fond memories of the home I grew up in and left over forty years before, the loss of the oak cut me deep, like a knife, a grievous wound in my psyche. How could this have happened? The massive tree would have been well over a hundred and fifty years old but too young to die.
I pulled over and shut off the engine.
Sitting across the street, a stranger now to this place, I imagined the wail of chain saws, operated by men who carved at and disemboweled the giant like ants at a carcass. How much work it must have been to take the tree down, cut it up and haul it away. Or perhaps it had finally fallen and had to be hewn into pieces. Surely, I hoped, someone had preserved the main trunk, so huge and straight, for re-use as prime furniture wood.
It was then that I realized what this tree had given me.
Its crown, its roots, indeed its aura, had surrounded our home for all the years of my youth. It blessed me with a sense of place, the massive straight trunk a beacon, visible from afar.
Each time, after playing in the park, our last undertaking before coming home was to race around the venerable oak. Sometimes I would hug it and stretch my arms out on the dark gray bark to see how far around they could go. As I grew older, I would touch it in respect whenever I went by.
Our giant guardian had been the hub in the wheel of my learning reverence for trees, living things, and my future chosen path, landscape architecture. Our black oak was the first tree I saw in the morning, and the last in the evening: my alpha and omega. It was the central element in our part of the forest.
The canopy of our oak merged with other tree-tops, a web of branch-ways for the squirrels who never had to touch the ground, and a home for the robins and cardinals we adored. The forest canopy was a living lattice overhead, the uppermost layer in the web of nature. And now I realize that somehow, deep down, I had always known all living things are woven together in this place we call earth.
There is so much in nature we do not yet understand: phenomena we are still discovering, and circumstances in life which shape our future long before we become aware of them. Living under the Goddess oak and the forest it presided over shaped the course of my life in a profound and lasting way.
I hope that we can replenish our urban forests to provide meaningful natural places for all our children, and their children’s children.
What about you?
This is so special and beautifully written. Thank you for sharing.
Such beautiful moving words. My home goddess was a pepper tree, with one long low sloping branch that held our hammock. When they turned the last two blocks of 40th Street into interstate 15 in East San Diego, all 4 of the pepper trees on our two blocks were sacrificed. They live in my memory & a few photos.