The Angel Oak, Part 2: 300 Years

But trees are the foot soldier casualties of a tornado.  

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Trees have souls, I'm sure of it. Granddaddy was too. He said once when I was about 10, and the spring sun was coming through the Nashville sky so piercingly that it seemed to unfurl the new leaves of the ornamental pear tree right before our eyes: "Louisa, you can't tell me that a tree doesn't have some kind of soul, some kind of feeling on a level we might not understand. Just look at the leaves on that tree, uncurling in the sun, bright green and eager to grow and reach out. You can't tell me that somehow or somewhere that tree is not happy. I think perhaps all things of nature have a bit of soul attached." 

If Granddaddy, a Methodist theologian and author could make such a radical statement, then it was probably safe for me to believe it too, I thought as a 10 year old. Besides, I already did.

It stuck with me, so most of the time if I see a river, or the rocks at the bottom of it, or a splitting glacier, I think, what is happening to its soul? How does the Ocoee feel about being dammed and released, dammed and released, or to carry all those gleeful rafters along its back?

And if so happiness, then perhaps grief attaches itself to things of nature as well. And if this is true, then surely tornado alley, as we call it in our neighborhood is a massive graveyard of mourning right now, here in the shadow of Pine Log Mountain.  Spanning a swath a half a mile wide, trees are twisted off at 30 or 40 feet, as if the whole ridge had a bad shave,  revealing a layer of blue we never saw that close to the earth. And beyond it, lower ridges of the beginning Appalachians that had been hidden by the treeline, uncovered now, and more intimate in their new exposure.

And the most important living tree, the wind-torn old oak by the kitchen door that held the roof and house down, is thinking something. Possibly it is thinking, I have done my job, it's time to go. Possibly it is thinking, thank you for telling the money hungry tree removal people to leave me be, I'm the only one left to watch over this old place, the only one with the DNA memory of birth and death of 6 generations of cotton farmers, boney mules and wood plows, and coal smoke coming up through my branches from the chimney over the kitchen wood stove.

I don't know. But trees take a long time to grow and a short time to fall, whether to an ax or a tornado. The angel oak reminds me of another sentinal, a giant fir I saw once at the edge of a clear cut on the way through Oregon as we drove down to "Bluegrass at the Beach." The loggers had come in with helicopters and giant fork lift claws to lift out 6 or 8 trees at once, 60 or 70 an hour, and transport them straight onto trucks headed for pulp mills. In a few hours, a whole mountainside of 100 year old trees can be erased, leaving only the useless branches and a few too-thin trees that didn't make the grade on the ground. A natural auswitz of sorts. 

Against this bleak tapestry, high on the mountain at the edge of the clear cut, stood a giant tree that towered above all those in the next section of forest. I thought, they must have come to it at the end of the day and thought, aw, let's just go eat dinner and get that one tomorrow.  And this tree towered over all--the eroding hillside and the younger growth,  I thought, it must know its time is next. And I wrote this song, an a cappella song in a minor key:

           Three Hundred Years

                             Words and Music by Louisa Branscomb

I'm tall as a lighthouse and green as the sea

most magestic old fir tree you ever did see

all the creatures around, they look up to me

and I thought that I'd be here till eternity

The music of silence brought joy to my ears

sounds of the forest for 300 years

then they came with their chain saws, the worst of my fears

the forest cut bear and my fate drawing near

Sing one for the money and two for the show

takes three hundred years for another to grow

The deer have all fled and the undergrowth died

the earth bleeding mud down the steep mountainside

my roots pulling loose and there's nowhere to hide 

they may as well kill me for I'm dying inside

Sing one for the money and two for the show

takes three hundred years for another to grow

I hear the big loaders they come up the hill

I know that I'm next and I know that I will

be stripped of my branches, laid bare for the kill

the wind howls around me and will not be still

do you think of your children who never will know

the forest that fed them, do you think they'll grow old

hungry for something way down in their souls

who gave you the right to take what you stole?

sing one for the money and two for the show

takes three hundred years for another to grow

sing one for the money and two for the show

I know that I'm next, and I don't want to go

sing one for the money and two for the show...

                  words and music by Louisa Branscomb

                  c Millwheel Music 1997  

from the CD Louisa Branscomb: Fool's Gold

louisabranscomb.com