Paying Homage to a Fallen Tree

Riding my bicycle home from the library on Wiggins a few days ago, I encountered some neighbors across from the cemetery gathered around a tree stump, and stopped to inquire what they were doing. 

They had affixed strands of masking tape to the stump, radiating out from its core, so that each could mark waypoints on the tape as they counted the rings. Far better than my approach to date, which involves counting halfway, losing my place, and then having to start over. 

When people die, we write up an obituary that includes age. When a tree dies--and a lot of trees have been dying in Princeton in recent years--chances are the tree gets chipped up by giant maws and the stump is ground down into sawdust. Passersby may sense something missing, but not know for sure what had been there.

Having long cast shade from its strategic spot southwest of their house, this tree had clearly been loved, enough so that family and friends gathered around to pay homage and track the tree's life back to its beginnings. The tree's life story was all there in the rings. Widely spaced rings showed extraordinarily robust growth in its mid-years, narrowing towards the end as bacterial leaf scorch took its toll on the vitality of this oak and so many other red and pin oaks around town. Consensus put its age close to that of one of the counters, with birth around 1960. 

Update, May 19: I passed by the tree stump yesterday and saw this touching inscription. 

My family, too, lost an oak recently, a red oak that had started life around 1960 and grew up to shade the patio. The house was built in 1960, by the Dubas, who were proud that their name in fact means "oak." One of three red oaks they planted on the property, this one had been in decline for years--probably a combination of bacterial leaf scorch, some heavy pruning by the 17 year cicadas, and some other sort of insect activity underneath the bark. Most of it we split up for firewood, but I saved a 7 foot section of trunk that friends Victorino and Wilbur milled into boards. They've also been milling fallen trees in Herrontown Woods to craft a boardwalk. 

There are many ways to value and pay homage to a fallen tree.

Afterthought: For anyone wishing to help count tree rings, I've been photographing the "faces" of various extraordinary fallen trees in Princeton. We could call the project the "Tree Rings of Princeton". There are 200 year old trees that grew next to Washington Road. And here's a great white oak, the last of several that used to stand along the Veblen House driveway. A neat thing to do would be to print the photo out on a large piece of paper, and then count and study the rings, marking significant years, e.g. when the gypsy moths defoliated Herrontown Woods in the 1970s, or when the Veblens bought the house in 1941, or when the Whiton-Stuarts built the house in 1931. One question is whether the 17 year cicada years would show less growth, given all the pruning that happens after the cicadas lay their eggs in the twigs. It would be a great thing to display in Veblen House.