Published: July 17, 2008 11:14 pm            

A Priceless Photo – Lost and Found

Did you ever have something be an important or inspirational part of your life and then have it go away leaving you feeling more alone in the world? Of course this happens as a circumstance of nature with persons. But it happens with inanimate things too. Often you regret that you never took a photograph to help you carry the memory.

One of these inanimate things is what I am missing in my life today. I have been missing the old tree for a long time now , actually over half my life. It stood more than double the height of the largest mature timber that surrounded it. And I never took a photo of it that I can recall. Just a tree? No, not just any tree.

I wrote about this huge pine tree over 10 years ago by looking back on its likely life experiences. It stood in the woods of the Bailey community north of Meridian. Mr. John Carpenter, who encountered the tree during his fox hunts until the middle of the 20th century, said it was dead when he first saw it as a youth. He was born in 1891. This means the giant pine had to have sprouted from a seed in the 1700s, long before Meridian was an unnamed settlement.

Early loggers with crosscut saws skipped it during the first logging in the area because it was crooked and its grain spiraled from ground to crown. Such trees were hard for the mules to skid and lumber cut from spiraled trunks was weak and practically worthless.



Surviving and Thriving



So the old tree reigned over many 20 and 30 year loggings. Today it would have been destroyed with the powerful machines that do our logging. But two-man crews with crosscut saws spent their energies on salable timber, leaving the aging tree to grow larger and larger.

Lightening began to strike the tree often once it loomed high from its roots that reached out to the cool and nourishing water of Bailey Creek. This caused its top to spread out and send damaged limbs in every direction. The years piled up and lightening and logging came again and again. By now its lower limbs that had shed naturally and its aging bark had fallen at its base for so long that the litter was three feet deep and Choctaw and settlers alike had to walk up hill several yards to approach the giant pine.

More than a dozen years before the turn of last century, an enormous bolt of lightening tore into the tree’s jagged crown and stripped bark in spiraling twists all the way to the ground. This was the final blow from the stormy skies that would at last take the life from the magnificent old tree.

It would take several years for the tree to stop pushing water and nutrients up to the highest limbs, but one spring over a hundred years after it had sprouted and well before the Wright brothers left the ground in their flying machine, the landmark leviathan died.

As the tree weathered, it shed many more limbs and eventually all its bark, tons of which now lay as a mound at its base. Perhaps about the time of Woodrow Wilson’s presidency the tree’s bole had become shiny gray and the remaining limbs reached out to the sky like the tentacles of some threatening swamp monster.

The years that saw the first automobile and telephones in homes and the Great Depression were the years that squirrels and birds made holes in the scarce remaining sap wood of the great dead tree. What had held it upright for 150 years was a solid core of heart pine or, what locals called it when gathered from fallen trees, lighter wood. The rich and tough heart is used to light fires.

Getting Acquainted



I first saw the tree while squirrel hunting along Bailey Creek about 1951 or so. My friend, Ivan Chisolm, and I soon expressed our awe of the giant tree and were moved to attribute spiritual qualities to it as people are prone to do with one-of-a-kind wonders. Chiz gave me a color slide of the creek bottom taken from his house which showed at a great distance the tree towering above the forest. Years later I lost the slide and searched for it among my scattered photos for years.

I had become resigned to the fact of its permanent loss, when Chiz and his wife, Marietta, came to visit last week and he presented me with a much better photo of the tree which he ran across in some long overlooked photos. The picture was taken from near the base of the tree. He knew how moved I would be upon learning that a photo exists, so he made a copy for me.

Some time in the 1960s, Chiz sent me word that the tree had fallen. It was an emotional time for us. In 1996 I got the courage to go learn if there was a heartwood log remaining or any trace of the old tree. Logging of a mature forest had occurred perhaps twice since it had fallen and there was no trace. But strangely the spot where it stood was devoid of timber, even young trees.

Had it been burned and the heat damaged the soil? Had the tree’s spirit enshrined the spot somehow? Contemplating the answer will go on. But my impassioned ponderings of this tree that stood in three centuries will not continue to be burdened by lack of an image. I now have a photo to take me there beneath my favorite plant; the one that I only knew long after its death. But, as may be profoundly prophetic, in its afterlife it speaks volumes.

        

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