116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
A towering tree tale
The Nature Call: As well as a little maple that was lost to progress
Without realizing it, I had circled the giant, keeping my distance.
Into my second lap I got closer. I was acting like a fox circling a beached whale.
The sight was unexpected in magnitude. Was the giant really dead? Beware of getting too close until a diligent survey was completed.
I knew the giant wouldn't rustle awake and lash out. No, this giant was a tree, the state’s largest sycamore and I had come to bear witness to its wild.
After my second circumambulation, I guessed I was participating in a service of one. I walked a third lap because it seemed right and then I was finally close enough to extend my hand.
On the mild side of life was a red maple on the Linn-Mar campus, one with which I struck up an unintentional relationship. It wasn’t a tree really, not at our first meeting. Rather, it was more like a bush owing to a lack of proper care.
The species we’ve tamed to live in our built-up areas need help to fit into our lives. I appointed myself caretaker and then began to surreptitiously tend to the tree over the years. I pruned it, I wrapped its bark in the winter and I bestowed it a simple name, “Tree.”
With patience the bush became a tall and slender specimen. Years into my care, I remembered that Tree and I shared a tenure on campus, we both arriving in the late 1990s. Me to teach and Tree to mark the opening of the auditorium.
Tree was planted with ceremony. Such knowledge enriches a relationship.
The champion sycamore in Geode State Park was attacked recently. A villain set a fire in its hollowed trunk, cooking the living tissue that remained.
At a distance the super sycamore looked stately and vigorous. Its upper branches were the size of trees in their own right. The fissured bark at the base transitioned to the tell-tale smooth white skin of its upper reaches suggested health.
It stood erect that morning, facing the morning sun.
Yet, up close, the damage was clear, its lamentable fate certain. I leaned forward for a sniff, only then was the smell like a campfire discernible. I mourned, the wilds did not. The great hollowed portion will make fine roosting habitat. Its other cavities, dens.
Fungi will claim the wood. Nothing to waste save in the eyes of humans, nature’s most peculiar creatures. This sycamore was wild, the wilds don’t say “sorry.”
Progress is a debatable term. Progress was coming to our campus: a new performing arts center abutting the auditorium. Tree lived in the way of progress.
I returned from spring break expecting to find cleared ground. Temporary construction fencing was up but so were the trees. I knew it would be any day.
In preparation for the end, I had recently measured Tree’s height, about 27 feet tall. The diameter was 9.39 inches at breast height (29.5 inches of circumference). At waist height I had outgrown Tree.
Turns out the day back to school was the day. The contractors arrived while I was in a meeting and made quick work of the trees at the south of the area. They would work north to Tree in short order.
By luck I was able to watch. Born of ceremony, now callously uprooted by a great excavator like how some of my fellow recruits got teeth pulled at boot camp. Behind a pane of glass, I was a witness but not a participant.
The governor never called. John Muir wrote in 1897, “Any fool can destroy trees. They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed….”
While resting on a nearby log in contemplation of the sycamore, I spied movement to my right. A deer approached. Had it too journeyed like me? I wanted to think so.
I tried to slink away so as to afford the deer it's quiet moment with the sycamore. The deer noticed and bolted, it was indifferent to the situation. I was not.
My hour with the sycamore seemed like an appropriate amount. I walked out the way I came. I passed from the wild to the mild.
Professor Aldo Leopold asked, “Is education possibly a process of trading awareness for things of lesser worth?” What’s a great big sycamore worth? Same for a skinny maple — I don’t know.
I do know whether the mild or wild type, we find comfort with trees. As you stroll the streets or the forest, may you find an education in trees.
Looking up, looking ahead, and keeping my pencil sharp.
John Lawrence Hanson, Ed.D., of Marion, teaches Social Studies with an emphasis on environmental issues at Linn-Mar High School. He sits on the Marion Tree Board.
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