Perhaps, when compared to all the dancers on the world’s stage on that particular day, it was of little import. But on our farm, last week’s mini-blast nonetheless cut a deadly rug through the woods.
This has been the spring of many odd and intense storms: The recent eruption that dropped an inch of rain here and seven inches less than a dozen miles away. The storm whose gusts knocked out power in 800 residences in nearby Kingston, yet hardly sent a breeze down Paint Rock way.
The storm last week was a whirling dervish that came through with such force that the windows and walls shuddered, the trees swayed, and at least one neighbor was left looking for the roof of his barn. It arrived as an unexpected guest, late last Saturday night. Rain blowing at the horizontal wetted the front porch wall to the five-foot mark. Our lights flickered and went out for a few hours.
The storm, spending its energy in a fury, moved through the valley in less than an hour and then petered out over the eastern ridge. The following morning’s blue skies revealed no damage but a few small branches down around the house and a porch swept clean of chairs and rug. Only did my walk through the back forty to forage for mushrooms later that day tell the true tale.
Up the lane, in the heart of the wood, four modest oaks, each approaching their century celebration, lay in a tangle across the roadbed. Two reds and two whites, branches intertwined as if clutching at each other for support in their last moments.
Further into the wood, on a west-sloping ridge, lay a giant white oak. Assessing age by diameter is difficult, since trees can stay small for many decades before exploding in growth when the opportunity arises, often at the death of a parent weakened by age or illness. But this oak was twice the diameter of the other trees, fully mature, now laid low by this localized event, this small storm of no consequence.
Across a fence into the upper pasture, on opposite sides of a field, two of the most ancient oaks on the farm lay toppled, majestic sentinels of the wood now sprawled like drunks on a bar floor. One red and one white, both already anchoring their communities at the nation’s founding, they somehow looked out of place, prone instead of upright, in their slow death.
These old ones now await, in a condition of helpless indignity, men who will scramble up their sides, hack off limbs, and saw up their trunks, before carting the bits off for the beneficiaries’ own purposes — the oaks’ final will and testament ignored, that they may lay in the ground they lived on and with for so long, their utility reduced into so many cords of firewood and saw logs and days of labor.
No one will miss them but I and the other residents of the backwoods. I, for their solid, reassuring presence as I pull up my tractor into their shade for a midday lunch. The squirrels, for the mast harvest of massive proportions, a feast epic in tales to be told through the generations.
They were only seven oaks of varied age on a small farm in a small valley, located in the lower end of one of the 95 counties of one of the 50 states of one country on this planet. And now they are gone.
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Reading this weekend: Meditations on Hunting, by Jose Ortega y Gasset
