Tree Hugging...

There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a scrub oak. 
                                       Henry David Thoreau


I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them.
                        James Russell Lowell

The best time to plant a tree: twenty years ago. Or today....

Countless times over the years I have driven past this stately giant. I like to call it my favorite tree. Regardless if you're headed either east or west, the tree is hard to miss. It towers above the vine maple and other roadside shrubbery, majestic, mast-like, a tree my two brothers, loggers in another life would have called "a big stick." Most likely the tree was impressive at the time of my birth and barring some cataclysmic wildfire or, heaven forbid, timber sale, it will be standing long after I have passed on.

Pinus ponderosa, my pine tree. One could not find a more perfect specimen among forests of its kind; you might say it is a Pinus in the classic style. The tree stands on the north side of Highway 2 between east bound mileposts 87-88 some fifty feet off the shoulder. At milepost 87 the highway curves beneath a railroad overpass, my cue to look for the tree's familiar spire. Beyond the curve the highway straightens and I see my tree, its trunk plumb bob straight, signature bark furrowed and creviced. "Ah, there you are, old friend," I think and if I'm not driving, I take in the welcome view as we pass, crane my neck for one last look to watch the pine fade from view.

The noble Ponderosa is the tree of the West, the American frontier, so archetypally western that a fictional ranch in a T.V. series bears its name. Old growth Ponderosas are immune to wildfires as their branches grow far above the understory ladder vegetation that fuels fires. The tree's thick bark renders it nearly fireproof, subject to a superficial scorching only as the fire burns about its feet. Native Americans use its tri-cluster needles in basket making. When a breeze sifts through a pine grove, the needles become musical instruments, fragrant aeolian harps, that sigh the ancient song of the Ponderosa.

To my favorite pine: let me share some recollections and memories. In my Boy Scout days I used your sap as a fire starter. Thanks. The fragrance of sunbaked pine duff on a hot summer day brings to mind childhood and the school bus trips to July swimming lessons, windows down, pine scented air wafting through the bus, cooling our hot faces. Apples in my boyhood days were freighted from the field in pine boxes, boxes I tediously repaired for two cents apiece during summers. The box sides came from the mill in bundles, twenty or so strapped with a wire band. I'd pop the band with my box hatchet, releasing the fragrant odor of fresh milled pine, the sawdust still damp between the boards. You gave us winter firewood, too, slabwood sawed to square the logs and cut in fireplace lengths, hauled by Mumma's Trucking and dumped in a pile next to the yard. We burned it green, fresh from the summer's harvest at Martha's Mill. Winters I pried many a frozen slab out of the snow covered pile and laid it by the hearth to warm.

One late spring when the river was in flood a monstrous ponderosa saw log escaped upriver and drifted by our riverbank. I secured it with a rope and after the waters receded, the log took up residence on the bank, lay there for two or three years. Periodically when I had frustrations to vent or felt the need for exercise, I'd take my maternal grandfather's hefty single bit ax, his legacy to me, and lay into that big log, make the chips fly. Each year I'd deepen the notch a couple of inches, perhaps nearly a foot of log chopped away. One spring when the river was on the rise, I untethered the log and let the rising waters carry it downriver, out of my life, our time together represented by that shallow, random notch.

And my old dairyman woodworker neighbor was laid to rest in a pine casket, handcrafted by its occupant during healthier times, preparing for the end game he knew must inevitably come.

H.D. Thoreau during his experiment in simplicity and bean farming at Walden Pond reported in winter he "...tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech tree, or yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines...." Yet year after year I've passed that majestic conifer, never once stopping to introduce myself, make the tree's acquaintance up close and personal.

We pull over on the shoulder where a wide spot awaits as if it were a convenience stop for tourists visiting an historic site, which for me, I guess it is. I cross the road, camera in hand, for our first meeting, an historic event for us both.

I make my way down the shoulder and thrash about through the tangle of vine maple and brush until I'm within arm's reach of my tree's iconic trunk. While the pine doesn't seem to mind the commotion, a snowshoe hare, mottled, in transition from winter's garb to summer's, though definitely curious at my presence, decides that discretion is the better part of valor and darts down a bunny trail, leaving just the tree and me to ourselves.

In addition to the camera I have brought along a tape measure to record the tree's circumference, the extent of my foray into dendrology. When I was a boy, my fifth grade class visited a logging camp where a forester demonstrated how to determine the age of a tree by using an increment borer. The tool enables the dendrologist to remove a core from the tree. The rings in the core reveal the tree's age. An increment borer is not among the few tools I own and besides, on this, our first date, how rude to poke a hole in the tree's belly. About chest level I tack a small nail into the thick bark, hook the end loop of the tape measure over it, and slowly unspool the tape as I walk around the bole. Back to the nail where I mark the measurement on the tape: circumference 133.5." Approximately eleven feet around, my pine. How tall the tree is I have no idea. When I gaze up the trunk, the top is hidden by the high branches, hard to estimate its height. Of a tree's length Abraham Lincoln said, "A tree is best measured when it's down." It is my sincere hope this old growth giant is never measured in my lifetime.

If Thoreau could fall in love with an oak tree, I reasoned, why couldn't I be smitten likewise with a Ponderosa pine? Not sure my affection for the old pine is true love, but I'm not ashamed to admit I did throw social distancing to the winds and gave the old pine a hearty hug.

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