Strolling Through TIme

                I took a stroll today that spanned not only distance but also nearly 30 years of my life.  The occasion was a return to Purdue, my old alma mater for my annual veterinary fall conference.  However, today I made a critical error in scheduling; believing an all-day lecture on clinical pathology was open to all attendees.  It was noted on the registration form that this was a session requiring separate registration and fees, but that form was submitted weeks ago.  All I was left with was my poor memory and an itinerary which listed only a clin path lecture.  So having taken a day off work, driving an hour and a half to West Lafayette and pre-arranging a lunch date with my son, a sophomore in the School of Science, I decided instead to spend my morning retracing the steps of my old college days.  

            After downing a cup of hot tea and a Danish meant for the "paying" doctors, I hopped back into my car and headed to the western edge of campus.  This is where I had lived the first four years of my seven as a student.  I did not travel there to visit my old dorm, but rather to seek out an escape that had served me well in my early college years.  My destination was Horticulture Park, better known as Hort Park, a clump of woods surrounded by a grassy area of rolling hills and together forming a 35 acre park.  It is scarcely known to the general student population so today, much as in 1980, one can find himself alone despite a student population of nearly 40,000.

The pond and bridge at Hort Park

            I first came to know Hort Park my freshman year when a girl with whom I had struck up a close relationship called me one evening and asked if I wanted to go for a walk.  So as the sun started its descent into the west, we left the dorm, passed the shopping plaza across the street and there found a lane that ran past the intramural fields and into the woods.  Following the lane, we first came to a scenic little pond on one side,  a house on the other and a small, arched bridge separating the two.  Passing by the pond we emerged into the park itself with a grassy hill sloping away to our left and the woods continuing on our right.  We located a path opening into the woods’ edge and followed it until we reached the far side of the park.  Here the woods ended at the back of an active dairy farm.  The Holsteins were grazing when they first heard us, and one by one their heads popped up and they started approaching the fence, forming a line opposite us.  For a while we just stood and stared at each other, and then a couple bolder individuals made their way to the fence to greet us and have their heads scratched.  Each cow had an ear tag onto which the farmer had written their names.  I recall some names such as Jane Dow, Blaze and March.  We talked and petted the cows until a whistle from the farmer, signaling the evening meal and milking, caught their attention.  Just as quickly as they had approached us, they now turned on their heels and headed back over the hill, forming a single file line and following the well-worn path to the barn which lay in the hazy distance.

The old dairy farm at dusk.

            Emily and I visited the woods on a few occasions.  One of the most beautiful walks came late one December night.  It was finals week and I had a math final the next day, but a heavy snow had started and the white stuff was piling up quickly.  Emily and I could not resist, so along with another girl, we bundled up, abandoned our studies and headed out to the woods.  It was well after dark, but the reflective quality of the snow illuminated the scene around us.  The snow was already a few inches deep and stood undisturbed on the arched bridge and frozen pond at the park’s entrance.  We ventured out onto the pond with Emily afraid the ice would break beneath us at any time.  Making my way a couple yards ahead, I decided to have a little fun by suddenly dropping to my knees and calling out as if I had just broken through the ice.  Emily screamed and froze in place before realizing that it was all just an act.  She quickly realized it was a joke, but her nerves were shaken.  It was quite a while before she rallied the strength to finish crossing the ice.  The snow was falling even harder now, and given that the woods are quite hilly the accumulating snow made the ravines treacherous.  Eventually, we abandoned the park and worked our way south to the airport.  There the blue lights pointing the way to the runways cast an azure glow to the snow.   We may have been limited on Christmas lights in the dorm, but those blue airfield lights stretching into the night before us more than made up for it.

Looking over the frozen pond on a snowy day.

Sara mooing at the cows.

            Eventually, I met Sara who would later become my wife, and Hort Park became a special place to share with her.   Even before I took her to meet my parents, I took Sara to meet the cows.  Just as before, when we appeared at the fence, the cows became instantly curious and came to investigate.  Perhaps they were lured by Sara’s mooing, a trait she carries to this day whenever she sees a cow. I remember one cow in particular that kept trying to reach out and touch her with its long, long tongue.  I can also recall one crisp autumn morning when we left the worries of school behind and strolled the woods and park.

Sara resting on an old grapevine in the woods.

            Today was also an autumn morning, but unlike that day decades ago, the sun was not shining and a cool mist hung in the air. Repeating the route I had walked so many times before, I strolled past the shopping plaza and found the old lane that leads to the park.  I first noticed that what used to be an intramural field is now a rugby field complete with bleachers.  Passing the field and emerging where the house and pond had once stood, I was faced with only trees and shrubs.  Everything was different, and it was hard for me to place them in my mind. However, a treeless depression filled with tall grass and jewel weed betrayed the pond’s old location.  How often I had sat there on a bench studying calculus or physics.  If it was warm and my classes ended early in the afternoon, I would grab my books and paper and head to the park.  I never sought out libraries because sitting on the bench beneath the large trees, watching fallen leaves skate across the water at the mercy of the gentle breeze and listening to the birds was the perfect counterpoint to the rigors of my studies.  On a couple of occasions, a pair of spaniels joined me.  I never knew who owned them, but the pair would come bounding out of the woods and plunge into the chilly water.  I would watch their canine version of synchronized swimming, with the dogs tracing large circles in the water or perhaps passing over top of one another while swimming side by side.  Eventually, they would climb out of the pond, run to my bench and shake themselves dry, sending a shower of water onto my homework.  Sometimes they would lay by me and warm themselves in the afternoon sun, but at other times they would bound off just as abruptly as they had arrived.  Another animal that had caught my attention while sitting by the pond was an albino squirrel that lived in the trees behind the house.  In fact, there was a family of them and I saw them on several occasions but only for one year.  Now like the squirrels, the house and the pond have vanished forever.  

Another view of the pond in winter.  This is not the home mentioned above.

            As I emerged onto the top of the hill I could visualize the students that used to sneak away from the dorms for a secluded spot to sunbathe.  Blankets and towels would be scattered about the hillside, and here and there someone would be tossing a Frisbee with a friend.  Today, it was just a damp, empty lawn.  I started onto the path and was soon swallowed by the woods.  It is easy to forget you are at a large, busy campus when all you can see in any direction are century old trees.  Many were felled several years ago when a particularly strong storm hit the area.  They now lay on their sides, some uprooted while others lay snapped and twisted where their diseased, hollow cores had given way.  In places where they have fallen across the old path, the university has cut out the sections blocking the way but left the trees to follow their natural cycle of decay.  The nut crops are now ripening, and everywhere I looked squirrels were busy hiding their winter’s stash.  One squirrel nearly became a meal himself.  I had slowly been making my way along the path when suddenly I heard a very agitated squirrel barking.  I looked to my right to see it, tail twitching with each raspy bark, clinging to the side of a tree trunk about 4 feet in the air just as a hawk made a close pass.  I could not tell if it was a true attempt to grab the squirrel or just a coincidence, but the hawk sailed on and, once it had calmed down, the squirrel scurried on up the trunk to continue gathering walnuts.  It was these same paths I had walked in the spring time looking at the wild flowers each April.  It was the first place I ever saw a white trillium or a lady slipper orchid.  I even did a little mushroom hunting, finding one or two morels one year.  The spring ephemerals disappeared months ago, and now the only color seemed to be the seed heads of the withering Jack in the Pulpit plants.

Spring ephemerals popping up in Hort Park on a sunny day in 1981

            I followed the trail to the far end of the park, but today there were no cows in the field.  In fact, there is no longer a dairy farm.  The near pasture is overgrown and the area in the distance has been dug up and mounded in preparation for some construction project.  I do not know what is being done with this area, but I do know my days of talking to the dairy herd are long past.  I turned and continued following the trail along the length of the field.  I was looking for an old house foundation that I recalled from my early explorations in the 80’s.  I could not remember the exact location, but I did find evidence of early habitation, nonetheless.  Various streams carve their way through the hills, especially after heavy rains.  In one area, the water has uncovered the cast off and broken china of a former family.  Like the skeleton of a dead animal, pieces of plates and saucers emerged white from the mud and gravel below.  Although I searched the area looking for anything of value, nothing had survived intact.  So I abandoned my archeological inspection and continued on my way.  

The woods looking eerie on a foggy morning 30 years ago

            By now the sun had broken through the clouds, and beams of sunlight, accentuated by the evaporating haze, punched holes in the canopy overhead and spot-lighted the forest floor below.  Another familiar site now came into view - a stately home peeking through the trees.  The property is known as Westwood, and it is the residence of the Purdue University president.  A fence now divides President Cordova’s property from the woods, but I don’t believe there was a fence in place when I was a student since I can remember exiting the park by walking down the president’s driveway.  In fact, one winter when snow had closed the university, some of the guys from my dorm had gone walking through the park and found themselves at President Hansen’s house.  They decided to build a snowman on the grounds, and rather than calling the campus police, the president came out to talk with them and to take pictures.  Afterwards, he and his wife invited the men in for some hot chocolate.  That was the kind of man Arthur Hansen was.  

My friends heading out on their winter expedition that brought them to the president's house

            I still had not found the old homestead, but a path branching off the main trail and heading back towards the center of the woods looked promising.   I did a right-face and moved along the new path.  It wasn’t long before I spotted it, a square platform of concrete in the middle of the woods.  This spot has always attracted me, not because it is interesting to look at, but because it invited me to imagine what sort of home had sat there and who may have occupied it.  Was it a farmer?  Was it part of the university faculty?  The answers will never be known to me.  What I do know was that it was a very small structure with a fireplace at one end.  The chimney had long ago collapsed, and now the slab is covered with the loose rubble and pieces of mortar.  It appears to have been fashioned from the river stone found on site, but the firebox was made of brick.  Digging through the rubble, the charred bricks are still evident.  As before, I began searching the area for any artifacts that might shed light on the home’s history, but other than scattered shards of the old window panes, there was nothing.  The only intact item I found was a blue marble half buried in the soil behind the old chimney.  It may not have been much, but it helped me feel a connection with the child who once lived there.  

The entrance to the woods

            The path led me back to the starting point, and as I emerged from the woods the sun again disappeared behind the clouds.  It was as if a magical light had been cast on the exploration of my old haunts, but now I was back to reality, sort of like Dorothy stepping out of the colorful world of Oz and back into the black and white world of her everyday existence.  Still having time to kill before meeting with my son, I did something I always enjoy.  I joined the throngs of students headed to their 11:30 classes and followed them back to campus.  I started at my old dorm and retraced the steps I had repeated thousands of times.  Like the park, the campus has evolved and changed considerably since my days at Purdue.  Where once I had played football and Frisbee, there now stands a dorm and parking garage.  Another luxury dorm has replaced the small, flimsy “temporary” housing that had been Fowler Courts for 30 years.  New buildings stand on what used to be green space on campus, and still others are in the process of getting face lifts.  But it felt so natural to fall in line behind these kids and head toward the heart of campus.  In my mind, I am still one of them.  I feel like the twenty-something year old kid who once shouldered his backpack and marched off to class.  It is only when I walk past a reflective surface and see the tired, overweight, middle-aged man looking back that the illusion is broken.  However, today reality was not mirrored back, and so I could remain lost in the dream of again being a college student.  I sat by the old fountain that used to mark the engineering mall, and from which I wrote letter after letter home to my parents and friends at other colleges.  The fountain was moved in my final years at Purdue, but it felt good to again sit by its splashing waters.  I then moved on to the strip of buildings that housed most of my freshman classes.  There was Stanley Coulter where I had attended psychology class.  Walking a little further I passed the chemistry building where both biology and chemistry classes met.  Just past this was Heavilon “Heave” Hall where I took my early morning freshman communications class.  Grissom Hall, named after the Apollo 1 astronaut from Indiana who died during a fiery accident on the launchpad, was also the site of an early morning class (I can’t recall which one) and completed the row of buildings.  I cut between Heave and Chem and returned along the engineering mall, passing the physics building, the electrical engineering building (“double E”) which once housed two tall antennas which were my early navigational landmarks along with the old smokestack, the mechanical engineering building and the chemical engineering building.  This was my home sophomore year as my engineering classes became more substantial.  This was also the year I realized that I did not want to be an engineer and changed horses in mid-stream to pursue veterinary medicine.

Those buildings marked my favorite years at Purdue.  The college experience was still new, I was growing and developing so much as a person, and I was part of the student family.  Later, once I was accepted to the School of Veterinary Medicine, my classes were all held within one building located far from the rest of campus.  I was to spend my last four years isolated from the heart of campus life and with the same sixty some odd students.  While they were academically the most important years of my college experience, those early years moving among the crowds of students, building new relationships, writing letters by the fountain or in front of the chem building, throwing Frisbee in the evenings on the intramural fields behind the dorm and attending the dorm’s social dances were by far the more formative and more enjoyable years.

Jeff Kirby jumps for a Frisbee while I get sidetracked with handstands in front of the dorm.

All good things must come to an end, and so too did my stroll about campus.  It was time to meet with David and share a lunch.  Even that has changed.  Gone are the cafeterias within each dorm were student waiters dished out one of three limited entrées.  Now only certain dorms have food courts, and they rival many current day restaurants.  The company was nice and the food was good, but the old residence hall comradery was missing.  My son is happy and is getting a better education than his mother or I ever received, but there are times I wish he could step into our shoes and take a walk with us through those earlier years.  Today, I am just  glad I was able to once again take that walk, even if most of it was through the fog of 30 years of memories. 

Gone Fishin'

“Gone fishin’ by a shady wady pool

I’m wishin’ I could be that kind of fool

I’d say no more work for mine

On my door I’d hang a sign

Gone fishin’ instead of just a wishin’”

            Bing Crosby sings to me from my iPod as I drive along.  He’s hit just the right sentiment in my opinion.  I’m looking out at one of the retention ponds that now dot the urban landscape.  The blue sky is reflected on the water which is broken into hundreds of little ripples by a light breeze.  The cattails are gently rocked by that same wind, and a swallow skims the pond’s surface.  It is a small scale version of a scene repeated so many times in my past.

            In my mind’s eye I’m not looking at a small pond surrounded by houses, but rather Raccoon Lake in the 1970’s.  My parents and I are tracking through the mud about to clamber into a small, flat-bottomed jon boat.  My old, canvas tennis shoes leave their muddy prints on the aluminum bottom as I climb over the seats, each with a life cushion resting in the middle.  I’m small and not a good swimmer, so I have my orange life vest strapped tightly around my chest.  I sit in the middle seat of the boat while Mom takes up her position in the bow.  Dad hands mom the fishing poles, the tackle box and the bucket of minnows before taking hold of the lip of the boat, lifting it off the mud and shoving off into the water.  With a knee on the front seat, he kicks his other leg over the side and gingerly makes his way to the back of the boat.  He primes the small outboard motor and gives several tugs before the Johnson engine belches to life, and we are off.

            Our destination is a steep bank several inlets away from our little cove.  The magic spot is where several trees have toppled into the water, the soil having washed from beneath their roots.  The vast network of branches below the water’s surface creates a perfect hiding place for the crappie we are seeking.   Dad guides the boat into position then lowers the anchor over the side.  The rope uncoils and slides through the pulley for a surprisingly long time, demonstrating that the steepness of the rock strewn bank above the water continues well below.  We’re not far from the shore, yet the water here is very deep.  As the boat swings into position, Dad drops the matching anchor from the bow of the boat, and again the rope hums through the guide until the anchor settles in the soft mud below.

            And now the fun begins.  Poles are distributed all around, and hooks are baited.  I’m still too young for this task so Mom scoops out a minnow and slides it onto my hook.  The minnow continues to wiggle as Mom casts out my line.  We use slip bobbers, so the orange and white float lies on its side as the line is pulled through by the weight of the minnow and a small lead sinker clamped a short distance above.  When the knot we have tied to the line reaches the bobber, it stops and the bobber pops to attention.  We measure our depth by the length of our fishing pole, so today we are fishing two pole lengths deep. 

            Mom and Dad cast their lines near mine, and we begin the waiting period.  The sun is warm on our backs, and Dad strips off his shirt.  A dragonfly pauses on the anchor rope for a moment before launching itself back into the air.  The water laps against the side of the boat, tapping out its steady meter and gently moving our bobbers slowly away from the boat.  After several minutes, one of the bobbers quickly dips then rights itself.  It dips again then suddenly disappears below the surface.  Dad jerks his rod into the air and begins reeling in his line.  The tip of the pole bends as the line traces a zigzag pattern in the water.  Finally, a silver flash appears in the murky water below, and Dad pulls a good size crappie into the boat.  The scene would be repeated over and over throughout the morning- the dancing bobber suddenly disappearing from view, a quick tug of the line then a squirming fish brought to the surface.  In between these catches, we’ve snagged a few of the trees branches.  Most of the time we are able to pull our line free, but on a couple of occasions, the tree has won and the fishing line has snapped.   The goal now becomes to gently reel in the remaining line while trying to coax the bobber to the boat, but invariably someone’s bobber will break free and float away.  My father is frugal, so when after a couple hours of fishing we decide to return home, the anchors are pulled free of the sticky clay which seems bent on keeping them forever fixed to the lake floor, and the boat is guided to the bank to retrieve our runaway bobber.  Later we will scale and filet our catch, tossing the small slabs of meat into an old cottage cheese container to freeze for future meals and the carcasses into a deep hole dug into the loamy soil of the adjacent woods.

My brother, Jerry and I (along with my little life vest) showing off our morning catch.

            This scene was repeated hundreds of times in our two decades at the lake.  The boats changed through the years.  When we first went to the lake, we borrowed a row boat before advancing to the jon boat.  I always enjoyed the rhythmic creaking of the oars in their locks as Dad pulled on the handles and sliced their blades through the water, creating miniature whirlpools that twisted away and swirled past me as I watched from the back of the boat.  Later we purchased a small speedboat, but by the end of our time at Raccoon, we had moved on to a comfortable pontoon.  Just as our boats changed over time, so too did our fishing spots.  There were always a few tried and true locations that could be depended upon for an almost certain catch, and still others which were chosen based upon the most current scuttlebutt of other fisherman.  However, there was one location which remained a constant each March and April.  Swollen by the heavy spring rains, the lake would rise and flood the wooded edges.  A couple inlets away, a grove of small maple and willow trees became a prime spot for spawning crappie.  This was the period of our small speedboat, and Dad would ease the boat into the trees then climb out onto its nose.  From this perch, he could pull the boat by hand from tree to tree and was in a good position to reach his pole even deeper into the flooded maples.  Here the fishing was fast and furious, and we had the added excitement of trying to retrieve our catch through the maze of branches.   This was the time of year my father most enjoyed. 

Me holding the crappie with which my mother won the fishing rodeo down at the lake. 

            Once spawning was over, we returned to our more traditional sites of felled trees or sunken stumps.  However, with summer came additional fishing opportunities.  There was always the early morning trip as the sun was just breaking in the eastern sky, but to this was added night fishing.  Our target fish was different at night with Crappie being abandoned for silver bass.  As the last rays of light faded into darkness, we would again head out onto the water.  A chorus of frogs would call from the water’s edge while screech owls hooted their eerie calls from the surrounding woods.   For the first few years, we joined our neighbors at a popular spot just outside our cove.  Several old stumps, accompanied by discarded Christmas trees, covered the bottom of the lake at this point.  To mark the spot, someone had tied an old Coppertone suntan lotion bottle to a long line and anchored it to one of the stumps below.  Boats would gather in a large circle around this bottle, and one by one they would begin lighting there Coleman lanterns.  I can still hear the sizzle as the wick would grow bright and the smell of burnt lantern fuel wafted up to my nose.  The lantern was then positioned over the side of the boat where it would start attracting a cloud of small insects.  As the insects swarmed, a good number would invariably fall into the water thus drawing minnows.  The minnows, along with the light from the lantern, attracted still larger fish, and these were our ultimate goal.  It always took longer than I liked for the fish to start biting, but once they did the action was fast-paced, and it took very little time to fill a stringer with bass.  

Author with the previous night's catch of silver bass

I will always recall the one evening when the fishing was especially good, and the stringer was filled to nearly capacity by some pretty good-sized fish.  It was late and we were pulling up anchor, but my father was reaching deep into the water behind the boat.  I thought he was having trouble with the anchor until I realized he didn’t even have the anchor rope in his hands.  When we asked what he was doing, he sheepishly answered that the stringer had accidentally slipped from his hand.  He even went as far as to troll the area with a bare hook on his line trying to snag the runaway fish, but of course he was unsuccessful.  Word quickly got around camp, and I can remember the next day one of the neighbors joked that his buddy had been out the night before and had miraculously caught a whole stringer full of fish.   Ah, good ole fish tales!

There was other fishing, as well.  Lazy, hot summer afternoons were the perfect time to fish for carp.  For us, carp were not for food but for fun given that they were by far the strongest fighters of all the fish that inhabited the lake.  My first experience with them was when I was about seven or eight years old.  My parents and I were fishing from the small row boat when I hooked a large carp.  I fought it valiantly, picturing the deep sea fishing I used to watch on Wide World of Sports, and I soon learned the sheer strength of carp as our little boat started being pulled along the water.  It was my very first carp, and I felt as if I had just landed a marlin.  This is the only time I can remember carp fishing from the water.  Usually, my carp fishing was from the bank or from a boat tied up to shore.  Many summer afternoons, I lounged on the back of our pontoon, one eye on my pole and the other eye on a teenage girl about my age that usually appeared on the opposite bank for an afternoon swim.  I landed lots of carp, but I never did meet that girl!

Our never-failing bait was a dough ball made from stale Wheaties and garlic powder.  A small ball of this formed over a treble hook was irresistible to a passing carp.  For me carp fishing is a much more relaxed form of angling than either crappie or bass fishing.  You cast out a line without a bobber since the carp are bottom feeders, reel in any slack until there is just a gentle curve of line extending to the water, and then you wait.  As the carp take the bait, you notice that the bowed line suddenly tenses and jerks.  You must still wait a little longer until the line starts playing out and moving away. That is the time to set the hook and the fight is on.  Carp are extremely strong, and one must be careful because they are good at diving for cover.  I have lost several carp to broken lines as they swam into brush or around dock posts.  As I’ve already said, carp are not considered a fish worth eating, so we would release them at the end of the day.  A special treat, sort of like grabbing the brass ring on a carousel, was catching a goldfish.  Only my mother seemed capable of this, almost always hauling in a 12 to 18 inch bright orange fish with each outing.

Small crappie and bluegill caught from limestone ledge high above the water.

Through the years there were variations on the theme.  There was the early period of cane pole fishing, fishing for bluegill at a nearby pond, cat fishing with stink bait, unsuccessfully attempting to catch crappie with jigs, a cold and equally unsuccessful attempt at ice fishing, fishing from high above the lake on a limestone ledge, and trying for largemouth bass with lures.  My bass fishing period was short-lived but eventful.  On my very first day of trying for a largemouth, I had hoped to use a frog lure that was in my brother’s boat.  He didn’t want me to disturb his own fishing, so he tossed the rubber frog lure to me, missing my boat and sending the lure slowly drifting to the bottom of the lake.  He then fished around in the tackle box, found a Hula Popper and tossed that to me successfully.  I tied it onto my line and started casting at some willows, slowly popping the lure back to the boat.  On about the third cast, there was a loud splash as a huge lunker rose to hit the lure, and I immediately set the hook.  It was putting up an incredible fight, and my brother, who earlier had not wanted me near, suddenly took an interest in the battle.  As he paddled his boat which contained the fish net towards mine, he coached me on how to slowly ease the fish to my boat.  At one point the bass jumped free of the water, impressing us both with its size.  But just as my brother arrived, the line snapped and my trophy fish was gone!  I was heartbroken but now more determined than ever.  That afternoon I went to Ebert’s, the small family run fishing/grocery store that supplied the camp with all its needs, and purchased a new Hula Popper.  Early the next morning, I was back at the clump of willows casting out my line, when suddenly a large bass jumped in front of me.  I looked at the growing rings of concentric circles marking the spot of the splash, and there floating on the water, where the fish had just jumped, was the lure I had lost the previous day.  Could it be that the bass I had hooked just 24 hours earlier had reappeared to spit out my lure and mock me?  It seemed like a fishy version of “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.”   I retrieved my “lucky lure,” but never again was I able to hook a largemouth.

My lucky Hula Popper

The memories drift away as Bing and Satchmo are winding down the song, the pond well behind me in the distance.  It is emblematic of my fishing experiences since they, too, are well behind me.  It has been 30 years since I’ve seriously fished.  How I miss those quiet days on the water and the mornings and evenings spent with my parents.  I would love to cast a line back in time, hook those days and pull them back to me, but that is just another one that got away.

The Family Tree

    It is with great sadness that I announce the passing of Silver Maple, born Acer saccharinum over a half century ago.  It was preceded in death by two partners- pin oak, Quercus palustris, and Chinese elm, Ulmus parvifolia.  It is survived by many pleasant memories shared by the home’s owner, his four children, eight grandchildren and eight great grandchildren and innumerable birds and squirrels to which it provided food and shelter.  In lieu of flowers, donations can be made to the Arbor Day Society.

    Is it wrong to have such strong emotional attachments to a tree?  The entire family felt a great loss a couple weeks ago when my father had the old silver maple removed from the back yard.  Once a strong, towering specimen, its main branches had become hollow and split over the past several years, and Dad was afraid a storm would bring its weight crashing down onto either his or the neighbor’s garage. 

    The tree has always been a part of my life and has shared over half of my father‘s nearly 90 years on this earth.  My earliest memory is of a backyard flanked on the west by the maple and on the east by the pin oak.  A little to the north and west of these was the old Chinese elm which stool vigil by the old toy trunk and which littered our pool with its ever shedding small leaves.  The elm was the first to go when I was still a small boy, but the maple and oak continued to frame our yard.  I loved the beautiful red and russet colors of the oak in fall, and the small acorns it would drop each year.  While the maple was wide and branching, the oak stood tall and straight.  However, the oak was never as healthy as it should be, and despite Dad’s best efforts, it continued to decline.  So Dad had it removed some years later.

Both the author and the trees in their infancy.  The elm is on the left with the old toy trunk by its base and the maple is to the right.

    There were many other trees that came in and out of our lives through the years.  At various times there were peach, pear and apple trees.  These dad dug up and transported from a nursery that was going out of business in his hometown of Tuscola, Illinois.  The most I remember from the peach and pear trees was the number of bees they attracted.  I was too young to ever remember a peach from one of those trees, but I do remember sampling some pears, a fruit for which I’ve never developed a taste.  

    But the apple tree remained and became one of my early childhood companions.  Being much smaller than the maple and oak, it was the first tree I was ever able to climb.  It, too, drew bees in the spring, but I had by then learned they were not a threat to me.  In late summer, it started dropping its small green fruit.  This was not a tree to produce large, sweet, red apples.  Rather it produced small green ones that never seemed to fully mature before falling and which were firm and extremely tart.  I loved nibbling on those sour apples, but thankfully never ate enough to succumb to the common intestinal woes of young boys eating too many green apples.   

My son, David, learning to climb in one of my father's fruit trees.

    Our backyard was bordered by a neighbor’s cedar privacy fence, and this became the target for my early pitching practice.  Actually, I never played ball, let alone pitch, so it might be more accurate to say it was the perfect outlet for a young boy’s pent up energy.  As I would find apples, I would step back, take aim at the fence and let them fly.  The goal was to hit with enough force to shatter the green missile into a dozen fragments.  I have no idea what my neighbor thought as he heard the repeated bangs of apples striking his fence from the opposite side, but I sure enjoyed myself.  I was less fond of the apples when fall came and the crop dropped in earnest.  That is when Dad would send me into the yard with a bucket to pick up all the fallen apples before he mowed the lawn.  The benign honey bees of spring had by now been replaced with the more threatening hornets which fed on the fallen fruit to load up on carbohydrates before winter, and although I tolerated the bees, I did not like these hornets.  I also did not like the rotting apples which had turned brown and mushy with a sickly sweet scent.  I would put on a pair of Dad’s oversized gloves and pick-up the apples as quickly as I could before dumping them on the garden to be turned under the soil later.

My son enjoying some of the last days of the tree house.  The old cedar fence was still standing.

    The apple tree was also the site of my one and only tree house.  With a sheet of plywood left over from an earlier go-cart I had built, Dad created a very simple little tree house.  He basically cut off the main leader of the tree and nailed the sheet of wood on top of that, along with some additional bracing and a couple 2 x 4‘s nailed up as railings.  There was no structure other than this simple platform, but that was all I needed.  My friends and I could still climb up and sit together on the tree house to talk and plan out our daily adventures.  One side of it was near an open area of the tree, and from this vantage point we “parachuted” out by grabbing the two by four rail, swinging out from under it and dropping to the ground.  On the other side was a lower branch that was forked.  By climbing down to this branch and walking its length, it would gradually bend and lower itself to the ground.  This we called “the elevator” and thankfully, given our small sizes, it always managed to spring back to its original position.  This tree house saw a second generation of climbers as my nieces and nephews took advantage of it in later years.  

    This was also the tree that stood in as a defensive player in backyard games of basketball.  The old basketball goal was just behind the tree, and in the early years that was not a problem due to the tree’s small size.  But as the years passed and the canopy spread, branches started reaching out to sometimes smack down a shot.  Dad kept most of these pruned, but in games of HORSE, there were always a few shots that involved squatting under the apple tree and shooting between low hanging branches.  This old family friend survived until a few years ago, when it too joined the list of departed trees.

    Another tree which earns special mention was the English walnut tree my dad planted from a walnut collected off his own father’s tree in Illinois.  He nursed the tree along, and after many years it had finally reached a respectable size and was producing its first crop of walnuts. What most intrigued me about the walnut tree was its tendency to lose all of its leaves in a single day when autumn rolled around.  Eating breakfast in the morning I would look out on a tree with a full, yellowed canopy, but when I would return from school that afternoon the tree would be totally bare and the ground hidden by a thick blanket of its compound leaves.  It was a trait I particularly liked once I became of age to help with the annual leaf raking.  Rather than repeating my job day after day, I could rake the whole batch of leaves in a single setting.  However, there was one fatal flaw with Dad’s tree and that was that he had planted it in the part of the yard in which the vegetable garden was located.  The garden had expanded through the years until a large part of it was adjacent to the walnut tree.  The problem with this arrangement was two fold.  First, walnut trees are allelopathic, which means they produce chemicals which inhibit the growth of other plants.  Thankfully, being an English walnut rather than a black walnut, this trait was less pronounced.  What proved more problematic was that the tree left most of the garden in shadow throughout the day and its roots competed for water.  Dad was faced with a difficult decision- relocate the garden or cut down the tree.  There was no other practical spot in the yard for a garden, so with a heavy heart Dad cut down the tree he had grown from his father’s tree.

The author with daughter, Rebecca, and son, David celebrating an old family chair that was moving on.  The maple tree is the backdrop.

    But the constant throughout all these other trees was the old silver maple.  While the apple tree may have been the first tree I was able to climb, the maple was the first tree of significant size that I was able to ascend and explore.  It was not an easy task in those early years.  I would have to get a running start, jump up and put my foot on the trunk for leverage and from there spring up to a large overhead branch.  Once I had grabbed the branch and was hanging freely, I could swing my feet over to the trunk and “walk” up its rough bark until I could latch them over the top of the branch.  Then with great effort and many contortions, I would work my body to the topside of the branch, and from there it was easy to move higher into the tree.  Perched in middle branches, it was my first opportunity to see the world from a bird’s perspective.  The world, and especially the tree, appeared so different from that vantage point.  I felt the urge to take wing and start exploring the loftier parts of the world.  Having finally reached a bird’s eye view of the world, I had hoped to finally explore a bird’s nest up close rather than just glancing up from the ground, but the birds were smart enough to always build in the upper branches beyond my reach.  

    The maple tree was an escape for me.  By the time I had learned to climb this tree, I felt I had outgrown the tree house, so if I wanted a loftier view of the world, it was the maple to which I turned.  There was a large branch that had the perfect angle away from the trunk and which was very stable, so this became my resting spot.  On warm afternoons I would climb to my special branch, lean back and try to nap.  I don’t think I ever actually managed to fall asleep, but I was always very comfortable and relaxed. The tree proved it could serve as a classroom or library, as well.  About the time of 5th or 6th grade, I had decided I would like to learn the Gettysburg Address, so I grabbed my Compton’s Encyclopedia, climbed to my comfy spot, and in that green cathedral with a warm summer breeze rustling the leaves, I memorized the first half of the address.  

    Around this same time, I developed aspirations of living off the land in some forested wild region.  As part of this phase, I became interested in the making of maple syrup.  Nick, the kind old gentleman who lived alone in his small trailer at the lake gave me a spile, the tube that is inserted into a tree to gather the sap, and so I set off to tap our maple.  I realized that ours was not the traditional sugar maple used to make syrup, but having tasted the sweet icicles that formed from cut branches in winter, I knew our tree’s sap contained a fair amount of sugar, as well.  So as the cold days of February gave way to the warming temps of March, I took Dad’s hand brace and drilled the appropriate-sized hole at the correct angle, and inserted the spile.  I then hung an old plastic milk jug and began collecting the rising sap.  It takes 30-40 gallons of sap to make a single gallon of syrup, and although I only managed to collect less than one gallon that spring, I still wanted to give it a try.  Dad was a good sport and decided to help me, so one evening he got out a pot and set it on the stove to begin boiling my meager collection.  It boiled and it boiled, constantly reducing in volume and increasing in sweetness, and I waited eagerly for the final product.  However, in the end, things moved sort of quickly, and we temporarily lost focus.  When we again looked at the pot, expecting to see a golden brown syrup, we saw instead a tarry puddle of black goo.  My great maple syrup experiment was a failure, and I never again tapped the old maple tree, but for me the experience was priceless.

The remains of the family maple.  The garden, firewood left from the old apple tree and the aging fireplace are seen in the background.

    Throughout the years family gatherings were often held in the shade of the old maple.  Many games of croquet were played in its shadow.  In fact, a croquet wicket, somehow left on a low hanging limb of the adjacent pin oak and forgotten, had grown into the tree and was trapped forever.  Eventually, Mom and Dad placed a porch swing there where they could sit and gently rock while keeping an eye on food cooking on the outdoor fireplace my father had built nearby.  Many a fish were fried under the canopy of the old silver maple.  Sadly, many of those fires were fueled by the remains of previous trees which had not survived the test of time as had the maple.  Eventually, Dad hung a swing from one of the trees branches, and many grandchildren and, in later years, great grandchildren took advantage of its long, gentle glide.  And just a few days before it was to be felled, Dad celebrated its life once more by putting his youngest great grandchild, Ava, on his lap and going for a final swing.  It was two big kids enjoying themselves in under the tree that had seen so much life.  

Dad with his great granddaughter Ava playing together one last time on the swing.  85 years may separate them in age, but they are both still kids at heart.

    But now there is only a stump.  It measures 46 inches in diameter, and a second slab is laid at its base.  Its surface traces the story of our lives, each ring giving testament to another year of our family history.  If I counted back, I could see the outline of the small sapling that stood when I took my first steps.  Counting further, I could find the year the tree withstood the great blizzard of ’78.  And just a couple more rings out I would again see the tree as it was when I left home to attend college, never again to climb its branches.   Those branches no longer spread wide to embrace our family as they did for half a century.  No, a great friend is gone, but it is not forgotten nor is it lost to the youngest of our family.  While they can no longer scale its heights, my father had the tree cut flat and smooth a couple feet off the ground.  It is now meant to be a stage for the great grandchildren, a place where they too can dream of their futures much as I did laying back on my perch many years ago.  I am happy that he did this, because this tree has been too much a part of our history to just vanish from sight.  Our old friend sits transformed, but its foundation remains, and it is still very much a part of our lives.