More treeblog trail things!


My first two years of elementary school we lived in Savannah. I considered it a magical place, with the swamp behind our house, a thick and forbidding woods to the south, creeks and rivers in the area. In short, is was a place that seemed custom made for boys. I loved the Spanish moss, still do.

I have had an extraordinary week of walks, including great weather and two coup stick touches on armadillos! The big excitement came in the county conservation area near Fishhawk Creek. I was following a fresh trail of feral hog snufflings, hoping it might lead to an un-rooted bed of truffles, when I happened into the shade of a massive oak. Seemed like a good place to relax and take a drink, so, I sat and leaned against the bark and rested.

I wasn’t long until I felt something scratch along my back. This is dangerous- critter country and one learns to move quickly in this wild. I tucked, rolled and jumped to a defensive position, my trusty razor-edged Buck knife in hand, only to find nothing. Then a rough, ultra-bass voice, “How would you like it if everyone took advantage of the shade you provide, without offering anything in return?”

I pivoted all directions. Nothing.

“Right here in front of you, stupid!”

The only thing there was the tree, the granddaddy of all trees in the area. I eased back, keeping my eye on the oak. There are homeless people living in the woods, at times, and I thought I was being pranked.               “Did you just talk to me?”

“Who else is around, numbskull?”

I darted to the left to check the other side of the tree, expecting to catch someone. Again, nothing but the tree. Then, there was a sudden storm of acorns, hundreds falling on and around me. It was not dangerous or painful, just strange. Could it be? I lived in Wichita once, as a young boy, so, I was not in Kansas anymore!

“Tree?” Asks a meek me.

“Who else?” Says he.

So, I won’t go into all the words and details, but we engaged in lengthy conversation and it happens that the tree played a small roll in The Wizard of Oz. He is still bitter about events and shared his story for the first time. The arborists who provided the trees to the studio failed to reveal that the oaks would be playing the part of apple trees. It wasn’t until after rehearsals, in which the trees threw acorns at the characters, that apples were tied to their branches. Those that refused to pluck and heave the apples were placed in the background, or hauled to the back lot by forklifts, where they burned, from the heat radiating off the asphalt onto their root balls, and died.

During the first shooting the tree said one of the apples he tossed plunked the head of the Mayor of Munchkin Land. That created an outrage in the little people ranks and they began peeing on the oak’s root system.

“I nearly got cirrhosis of the bark,” he lamented. “The main characters were great to work with, but those Munchkins were a vile bunch.”

The trees received no sunlight and very little water during the filming, the director being worried about the cost of moving them outdoors on a daily basis and about actors slipping on wet spots along the yellow brick road. “There was an horrific mistreatment of arboreal life!” The oak choked up a bit at the memory of the difficult time.

In the end, the trees’ grievances were heard and as additional compensation the studio agreed to relocate each tree to a place of its choice. This oak picked this quiet hammock and has waited for a sympathetic ear to stroll by on the sandy yellow path.

Welcome to those following the blog trail of the Festival of the Trees. I will be posting several tree related photos and writings this month, so please stop back!

 

What better way to begin than with this massive oak located in Safety Harbor, FL

and a poem about the small oak in my own yard.

Advice to Parents

I have the tree everyone on my street hates.

The same tree the builder planted in every yard,

but mine is wild and gangly, a shock of twigs

and branches, with acorns that dangle freely.

The problem is that my tree resides in an area

that seeks conformity, where every plant must

be pruned and trimmed. Branches must be high,

so folks who don’t watch where they’re walking

won’t get poked in the forehead or eye. My tree is not

a pretty tree with its thrust and parry beyond boundaries

of acceptability. It gropes into spaces that interfere

with UPS or FEDEX trucks with drivers in conforming

uniforms delivering conforming packages to tan homes.

My tree dares to poke leaves into spaces which defy

the sheer madness of conformity. Its gathering of Spanish

and ball moss has choked the life out of smaller branches,

in a place where death is not allowed. If my tree could talk

it would not be in a shameful whisper. Nor would it bore us

in some cloned monotone.  It would shout and scream:

“Look at me! With my gnarly bark and scraggly tentacles,

my unkempt beard. Gaze upon the glory of my wildness.”

Thanks to Lee Ann Ann Roripaugh for allowing me to marry her beautiful photo to a poem I wrote maybe 25-30 years ago. I have added the link to her work for you to enjoy!

LaGuardia

My first flight from LaGuardia

was in the dark,

fireflies of freezing rain

riding the arrows

of a tightly strung wind.

Baggage handlers’ rubber soles

skating

                    from         

                                      cart  

to                           

                 conveyor.

Waiting.

                   Waiting.

                                     Waiting.

Men ogling the asses

of flight attendants

and hinting for early drinks.

The lungs of babies singing

over the tinny words of the pilot.

Outside, waddling figures with hoses

swaddling us with a coating.

The guy next to me grunts

something about de-icing the plane.

I was comforted,

knowing as we lifted off

that we would be slipping

from our crystal cocoon,

leaving it to melt on the runway.

I mostly write of real life events, or my interpretation of real life events.

Manzano

If only I had eaten her

fresh eggroll, or asked one more question

about the sago palm in the gallon pot.

Why hadn’t I asked to see the blonde

furniture for sale inside,

or handed her a twenty

instead of exact change

for the box filled with plenty

of things she’d already kissed goodbye?

Anything for a few seconds delay

so fate would have stumbled,

cursed me for tick-tocking

with its clock.

The woman and her four friends

bled across the columns

of Sunday’s paper—

lives ended at an intersection.

What could have been done

to keep her from leaving home,

picking them up precisely when she did, 

hovered in the dead space

between my eyes and the front page.

Fate, that fat fucker, tap-danced on my guilt,

gracefully bowed from the darkness of its heart.

Who will take a walk with me? We will follow a fence line about two miles. The terrain is rough and diverse, with patches of thicket, soft sand, stubble and stone. At the end there is a stream, narrow enough to jump over. We will make the easy leap, turn right, continue along the bank. Within a hundred yards it converges with another stream; the result is a larger run which quickly widens to about fifteen feet.  It won’t be long, less than five minutes distance, at our brisk pace, before we hear the water tumbling over a small fall. It is by no means a roar or sound of significant turbulence, more of an active splashing, like a child in a tub. The falls has maybe a fifteen inch drop. Once there, the air will be full of a faint iron and sulfur odor. The aroma may not be appealing, to some, but it is where we will soak our feet. The cool will shrink the heat from our skin and the fatigue within. The magic of the minerals will refresh our bodies. There will be a surprising vigor wicked into us. We will feel younger. We will feel young.

While here, the only talk can be that of past times, of things that made each of us happy in those times. There can be no discussion of tarnish; a tainted tongue is turned to stone.  As the talk continues you might want to swish your warm fingers in the cool bubbles, play with the sand in the shallow. Some may wish to skip stones across the slick and calm that is downstream. Others may search for fossils. Even the leaf that floats by will become something; perhaps it will be the Argonauts returning home, the canoe of Lewis and Clark or the Monitor seeking the Merrimac. The mind grows young when that kind of conversation jingles in the air. It is contagious and easily caught. Soon, everyone hangs above this denominator, for a short time, in a cycle where memory begets imagination which begets deeper memory. No person is excluded from the transformation. Very little sun shoots through the canopy overhanging the falls, so, it darkens quickly when the sun moves to late afternoon. With reluctance we’ll prepare to leave. Our shoes lighter, our legs stronger, on the silent walk back. Ponce de Leon died before he could find this. We will gather on the path and agree that this will be our secret, this place.

Kayaking

Kayaking

The zenith sun lays no clue

to which direction the river moves.

Its glacial motion may be flowing

backwards or uphill. Certainty

is nowhere, silence is alive.

Listen. Catfish whiskers tap

the bottom in search of muddy supper.

Hear turtles breathe from rotted logs

or fern spores roll like boulders to the water.

The chopachopachopa of a rotor

is only a dragonfly’s wings as it hovers

above a bustle of reeds.

Watches and calendars are unknown here.

Around the bend, in a small orchard,

Newton watches an apple fall.

Beyond the sycamores to the left

Copernicus tells a crowd that we are not

the center of the universe.

Beneath broad oaks, over a small rise

on the right, Clemens closes his inkwell

and smiles at a stack of papers

before placing them in a leather satchel.

I hope to see him when he comes to soak

his feet in the cool water.