I Often Dream of Trees

Just LOOK at that gorgeous, handsome as all hell, bark!

Thieving from Mister Robyn Hitchcock:

I often dream of trees when I'm alone
I lay underneath them, reaching another zone
I dream of them constantly
Standing tall into paradise or Brattleboro or Quincy

I often dream of trees when I'm awake
They reach the sky beside a frozen lake
And there in an upper branch
I wait for eternity or Brattleboro or Quincy

Drake Park in Bend, Oregon has the most fabolicious trees. Tall, tall Ponderosa Pines. Ten has a post up over at his place about one of them – a three hundred year old babe who had to, molto sadly, come down.

Me, the tree worshipper, immediately jumped to the conclusion that it was taken down for some no good, nefarious-fucking, blindingly selfish, it-ruins-my-view, bullshit reason.

Ah…no. Ten filled me in:

It’s a public park, the threat to the many outweighs the nostalgia of the few.

Those Ponderosa Pines, being a desert species, don’t have a tap-root per se, but a system of shallow spreading roots that don’t hold well in the wind. The butt six foot or so was about a third “punked out” as well, not necessarily rotted but not the sort of thing you would want to build a house with. That tree, back in the day, would have provided enough lumber to frame out one of today’s McMansions, and would’ve probably been worth in today’s dollars ten thousand.

Not a question of if but when it would blow over. It needed to come down. One of those things.

All the same, I haz a sad.

There are some stone beauties here (particularly right here in Valhalla) BUT we’re not quite as tree-rich as I’d like. I am greedy for trees!

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