“There are old growth trees back there,” he’d told us.
After a late afternoon of bending low and looking at moss and fungi in the Denison University Bioreserve, biologist Andy McCall was saying that in the back part of the reserve, there were big trees.
Most of the forest we see is made of young stuff, new growth trees. You can forget that Ohio was once pretty well deforested. That the trees that clean our air and comfort our eyes are from an “after” period. So the idea that there were trees from “the old time” sets a person out on a pilgrimage.
A couple weeks later, my wife Tina and I hiked back there. In fact, we hiked right past it. We stopped to rest and have a talk, and then I decided I was done for the day. We’ll find the tree another time. But there, on our way back, right in front of us, was this giant. It would take 6 people holding hands to ring its trunk. It was 40 feet up to the first branches. This was an old giant.
It was worth a fortune if a lumber mill could get it. What was it worth like this, as something to ponder? How many hundreds of years had it stood here? How many births and deaths, fights and reconciliations, successes and succumbings, had its branches wavered over.
We stared up at the big oak. I’m still staring at it now.
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