In Loving Memory of a Tree

In Loving Memory of a Tree

The visions begin to appear in the early 1990s: A green hill, standing alone in the blue sky. 

I sketch it, draw it, weave it. By the end of the decade, I have moved to this place, a clearing in the rainforest with a view of this hill out my window.

Called Cham-oh-Tee by the local native peoples, the “butte” is currently forested and surrounded by valleys. This butte is rocky, not forested, on the top, unlike most of the basalt buttes in the area. You can see all around for at least a hundred miles from up there. 

So it was sacred to native peoples, and later special to the European settlers, who got the town together to buy the land in the 1920s and preserve it from logging and save it as a city park. When the hippies arrived, shaman wimmin rededicated it to sacred status with crystals, ceremonies, and songs. The song, “Mother I Feel You Under My Feet; Mother I Hear Your Heartbeat” was received there.

But it was not always forested. Before the European invasion, Cham-oh-Tee was surrounded by open meadows. The natives managed the area for hundreds of years by burning the surrounding forests every couple of years to keep it open for hunting and gathering. The tradition may have gone on longer than that before fire suppression in all cases became the only policy: One old timer, Arnie, confessed to me that, as a boy, back in the 1920s, he and his brother had set fire to the butte to “burn out the rattlesnakes”. (Not that that would have worked, since snakes like hot rocks.)

Recently the city added chiseled steps to the trail to make the most difficult part of the hike near the top easier for more people. Helicopters lifted in the specially cut stone steps. It is part of a campaign to encourage everyone to stay on the trail and not trample the vegetation by taking short cuts. It is a well loved hike.

Every day I look out my window and check out the many moods of the butte. Sometimes it is capped with a downy comforter of cloud fluff, other days its rocky top is all I can see above the misty fog of morning.

So it is indeed a shock when I wake up one day to see something very different.

The little tree grew from a crevice toward the top, nestled eight or ten feet below the flat rocky perch at the tip top where climbers like to sit when they hike the butte. It was a cute little sapling, maybe three feet tall, when I first noticed it around the turn of the century. 

But I noted that in the year 2006, it had grown taller than the rocky summit. I noted the symbolic auspiciousness of this slight shift: for the first time in who knows how long, the tallest thing in town was not rocks, but a tree!

I kept quiet about my observation, telling only a few trusted friends. The tree was still small and vulnerable. But as the years passed, the tree grew tall and strong. People began to hike up to it at Christmas time and hang a few ornaments on it. It was something pointy and alive instead of flat and dead that I could see from my window every morning. It was, by now a good two stories high.

Then, one morning this year, around Valentine’s Day, 2021, I looked out, and it was gone! I was not the only one, apparently, who cared about the tree, for social media lit up with the chatter at once. Some speculated that it was done by selfish photographers who missed that 360 degree panoramic photo opportunity from that spot. Tree experts pointed out that someone had to have hauled a chainsaw up there, and criticized the bad cutting job they did.

But no one could miss the symbolism. In these tense days following the failed coup attempt in Washington DC, that had just taken place, and the history of forest mismanagement here, it could also be seen as an act of ecosabotage, political violence.

Police opened an investigation, but closed it a few months later, saying they had no leads. City leaders looked into planting a replacement tree, but were told it was a rather unique and irreplaceable circumstance that led to its survival and thrival, and probably that would not work. This was a very special tree, they said, that can make it in the harsh conditions in which it arose. Some proposed that a bench be built out of its wood and put up there in its memory.

History lurches back and forth. We had fifteen years of the tallest thing in town being a tree, then, back to the stone age. 2006-2021. 

But we love our trees, and only our love will survive. Change is a constant, and this forest is slated to burn. The changing climate will be too hot for the type of trees that grow here now. Fire will naturally come and clear the way for a type that will thrive in the hotter, dryer, conditions we are moving into now.

“All our wisdom is stored in the trees.” -Santosh Kalwar