MOUNTAIN VIEW: Ode to the Oak

Love of the oak tree is acquired, like a taste for bitter coffee or hiking, work or philosophy.  It may hold no sweetness or excitement for us as children, but has an enduring appeal that grows with time.

I think this is why the old universities and cathedrals are surrounded by stately oaks, instead of flat lawn and floodlights. These old grounds may not offer golf-course lawns, theme-park thrills, fast food or giddy entertainment, but they retain something enduring and life-giving.

I remember, as a child, finding our Roanoke oak trees uninteresting—unsparkly, ungaudy, devoid of spring flowers or sweet perfume or the fruit my brothers and I found on other trees. The oak had limbs too high for climbing or tree houses. Even the dirt under an oak would not grow grass; it was twig-stubbled and gritty and punched acorn bits in your backside when you sat down.

But as a teenager, backpacking down an autumn hollow one October with three friends, I paused in amazement to hear the oak leaves. The poplar foliage had buried the trail in yellow; the maples and sourwood, sumac and hickories had all fallen to the forest floor. But high overhead in the wind, the dry oak boughs still shook like wild, exultant rattles, tingling the spine bone with their ancient sound of beauty and bleak survival. In that lonesome call, one could feel that they had outlived many generations of people, that they would be here long after we were gone.

Oak-affinity especially strikes us after decades of human life, when we can appreciate the oak’s history and staunch, imperfect, rough-skinned endurance, feel aware of its unseen roots, and understand the silent work that is going on to absorb rainfall, translate water and sun and dirt into food for wildlife, cool the climate and generate oxygen. Only after scores of seasons can one relate to the winter beauty of this craggy creature, jutting up into a bleak January sky.

Some adults, especially in our indoor age, never do relate. They don’t want an oak in the yard because it “drops things” onto the perfect lawn. It might fall on the house! It attracts birds and squirrels which, in our new American spirit of tameness and domestication, alarm us with their untidy wildness. Those messy, imperfect, dead-leaf squirrel nests, so high above our rooftops!

After all, the oak will not be tamed into some poodle of a dwarf, ornamental tree we can feel in-control of and taller-than. It can’t be topped and hat-racked into the pitiful paraplegics people create of their maples, which Roanoke arborist Lee Hipp calls “green meatballs”—round blobs on a stick, the way a kindergartener might draw a tree. Hipp says this kind of barbaric “pruning” job ultimately destroys any tree, since it must instantly produce numerous weak “sucker” limbs, thin and brittle, and then struggles to feed itself and survive the following years.

Even staunch hat-rackers hesitate to ruin oak trees in this manner, though I’ve seen homeowners insist on it so that tall oaks won’t “get away from them.” These trees, shorn of their dignity, essence and sufficient foliage, soon die—perhaps to the relief of the homeowner who felt intimidated by these peaceful giants.

Our need to domesticate this world, prize our own assets more than life, and remain in control, takes its toll on the oaks.

They come down because of their debris, shade and height, because of nearby utility lines, swimming pools, roadways, buildings and golf courses, because some insurance companies require denuded or dwarfed, “risk-free” landscapes, because a homeowner wants nothing wild, tall or untidy in the yard, and because of ever-expanding development up our mountainsides and along rivers. They come down, often, for the sake of human fear and materialism.

Back in June, I spent a week in Grayson, where I spotted a homeowner along a dirt road I often walk here. Something nudged me to stop and tell him how I admired the great oak in his yard. He was pleased, and spoke of how a utility crew had come through and removed numerous trees along the right-of-way.

“I told them they ought to get rid of that oak up the road,” he nodded uphill. “They said it wasn’t in the way and it wasn’t dying, but I said well if it ever falls, it’ll land on my shed.”

As I strode on up the hill, I saw the ancient, giant oak, along the old right-of-way. Across the fence stood a dilapidated shed, composed of rotting planks and holes. The shed looked about 70 years old; the vast tree, two centuries. The craggy, gnarled tree was full of life and beauty; the slumped, ramshackle shed was in decay.

This month I returned to Grayson. Walking along the road, I saw with horror that the shade was gone, the giant oak flattened to an wide stump like a neck-high table—not one bit of rot anywhere across its vast platter of wood.

Just over the fence, the rotten shed still stood, unthreatened by the ancient tree, preserved only because it was a dead object someone owned, yet still unable to produce wildlife food, oxygen, shade, rainfall absorption, organic matter, or any beauty. The shed-owner had acted on his values, and the oak and her wildlife had paid the price.

Our Virginia oaks are not merely threatened by the disease of human materialism today. The gypsy moth has moved its way into our mountains, as Mr. Eddie Hoge called from Giles County to tell me. A deer and bear hunter, and a lifelong appreciator of oaks, Hoge worries that the spread of this invasive insect will destroy our mountain forests and their wildlife. He wants a widespread spraying operation now, because “it’ll be easier to address it sooner than later.”

Perhaps we need a “sooner than later” operation to save human values, as well, for the sake of the oak forest and all wildlife.  Young kids may not naturally appreciate the unthrilling oak, but if they are shown how these noble trees feed the deer and bears, protect the water of springs and creeks all kids love to play in, keep things cool and shady on a hot day and make the air good to breathe, perhaps such children will grow up to value an oak—and life itself—more than any of the safe, dead things our culture teaches us to prefer.