If
you go to the corner of Chestnut Street and
Rochelle Avenue, and look toward Midland School,
you might notice a huge hole in the sky. It was
once filled with the branches of a giant oak
tree. It was one of the oldest trees in town, if
not the biggest, and was close to 8 feet across
at the base. On the day it was taken down,
traffic was periodically stopped in both
directions, and only one-way traffic was allowed
during most of the time it took to cut it down.
No one seemed to know why the tree was being
removed, but to those of us who had grown used to
seeing it there, the emptiness was almost
heartbreaking.
Not
too long ago, I visited my step-daughter in East
Stroudsburg, PA, and spent a few minutes by
myself sitting out on the front porch of her
apartment. I watched as a couple of crows flew
over and landed in the tall trees across the
street. I haven’t heard a crow cry since the
50’s, and as soon as they started
"cawing" to each other, I leaned back
in my chair, closed my eyes, and was instantly
transported back to the woods that I played in as
a kid.
We
spent a lot of time playing in the woods. Our
favorite spot was the clearing behind our house.
There were two very tall trees along one side of
the clearing, about 20 feet apart, that were
connected by a long log that the older kids had
hoisted up and lashed to the branches. The log
was about 10 feet off the ground, and the big
dare in those days was to walk across it without
falling. The ground underneath the log was packed
so hard, that a fall from that height could be
just as dangerous as jumping off the roof of a
tree house.
My
next door neighbor Don and I used to dare each
other to do a lot of things like that, and if you
ask around the neighborhood, you might find
someone who can tell you about the time we did
jump off the roof of a tree house, using
parachutes we made from bed sheets. We got the
sheets from my mother's linen closet and tied
ropes to the four corners, but we might as well
have been hanging on to rocks when we jumped. I
managed to walk away with a few bruises, but Don
broke his arm and spent the rest of the summer in
a cast.
I'm
not sure whose idea that was, but I'm pretty sure
it was Donny who talked me into going out in the
woods earlier in the year, and climbing a tree so
he could chop it down, "just for fun."
The object was for me to ride it to the ground,
and believe it or not, it was fun.
Clinging to the highest branches of the tree, I
could hear Donny chopping away at the trunk, and
feel it reverberating through my feet, barely
covered by an old pair of P.F. Flyers. Then he
stopped, yelled something like, "There she
goes!" and ran off to the side to watch it
come down. At first, the tree started to fall
very slowly, and then it picked up speed and
headed toward the ground, faster and faster,
until it crashed in a tangle of branches and
leaves, and I half-fell, half-jumped out of it
just at the last minute, and landed on my feet.
The impact was surprisingly soft. The smaller
trees and undergrowth had cushioned my fall, and
I emerged shaking, but grinning from ear to ear.
As soon as Donny saw that I wasn't hurt, he
couldn't wait to find a tree that he could ride.
I
don’t know how old Joyce Kilmer was when he
wrote the first line of his famous poem, "I
think that I shall never see, a poem as lovely as
a tree," but I do know that learning to
appreciate the beauty of trees, and to admire
their strength and longevity, is probably not
something a 12 year-old would think of.
It's
not something many adults would think of either,
but when we were growing up, a tree was something
to play in, long before there was a town park, or
a set of "monkey bars," or even a
"swing set."
We
made our own swings, using ropes and tires, and
climbed to the very tops of all of the tallest
trees we could find, just to look out over the
rooftops and neighboring streets to get a bird's
eye view of town that no other generation would
ever get to see. Trees were amazing things, and
we took them all for granted.
It
will take a long long time to fill that hole in
the sky on the corner of Chestnut and Rochelle
Avenue. Longer than it took to grow up and
appreciate what we had, then and now.
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Copyright
2009, Skip Van Lenten
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e-mail: skipvanlenten@gmail.com