After only a few years standing dead, the hackberry tree finally fell, blocking the driveway to our cabin on the Illinois River bluffs. So I hired Big Jim’s Tree Service to remove the snag and, while he was at it, an old dead black oak that would surely be the next to fall over the driveway. After Big Jim finished, I counted the tree rings on the stump and was astonished to find the 23-inch diameter tree around 200 years old. This knowledge caused me to step back and pause.
Black oak stump at the cabin, November 11, 2015
At that moment, I became overwhelmed by the amount of history and change that had taken place since the tree was a seedling; it was almost too much to contemplate. But at once, I thought of the Lewis and Clark expedition up and back down the Missouri River from 1804 to 1806, the 1809 birth of Abraham Lincoln in Kentucky, the War of 1812, Illinois becoming a state in 1818, undisturbed sand prairie and savanna communities dominating the central Illinois landscape where I now reside, and our cabin built in 1950 as a summer weekend getaway. And I thought about the advance of science and technology since that time. Later I would sit typing at my computer—the world, through the Internet, at my fingertips—a cell phone on my hip, and recall watching a high-flying jet airplane streaking across the Illinois skies, barely visible thousands of feet overhead. In 1815, most travel was still at the pace of a slow-moving beast of burden, the wind, or a gently flowing river. At that time, the steamboat was cutting-edge technology. And for the last 70 years, we’ve tapped into the power of the atom, the ultimate consequences of which may be to our peril.
Of course, the list goes on. And I am by far not the first to contemplate such things. In fact, Aldo Leopold covered this ground very well in Sand County Almanac (1949) in a chapter called “Good Oak,” in which he describes his saw cutting through the growth rings of a dead oak, recounting history along with each cut.
In recent years, I’ve noticed the death of quite a few old oaks, each at least 200 years old by my estimates. Oaks, though, are really not long-lived trees, compared, for example, with California’s redwoods; a typical oak life span might be measured only in the hundreds of years at most, it seems, before disease, insect damage, heart rot, wind, drought, or fire take their tolls. One suggestion I’ve heard is that recent drought years, such as occurred in 2012, were too severe for some of the oldest oaks. Perhaps. But these same old oaks, at the very least, survived the drought decade of the 1930s and the very severe drought of 1988. The ultimate cause must be something else, or a combination of factors including drought.
This white oak (the "Gudgel Oak") near Athens, Illinois
began life in the 1750s. The photo was taken in January
2014. The tree has since died.
It seems strange and unfortunate, though, to have more than a few old oaks dying within the space of a decade, as far as my recollections are accurate. This is especially so because oak trees seem to be having a difficult time reproducing under current ecological conditions. In the landscape where our oak got its start, fires regularly moved across the prairies and into the adjacent woodlands, keeping them open, letting in the abundant sunlight that is necessary for oak seedlings eventually to make it into the canopy. Our oak, in fact, has a fire scar deep within its heartwood, a tell-tale sign of a different world. Most of our modern Illinois forests, with fire long removed as an abiotic influence, have thick understories and closed canopies, where whatever acorns manage to germinate in the dim light never make it even to the sapling stage. But while showing my wife the narrow growth rings on our old oak’s stump, we discovered a black oak seedling several feet away. We will be closely keeping track of this small tree over the next several decades, and make sure that it survives.
A recently dead ancient oak at T. Stubblefield Grove
Nature Preserve in McLean County. Sugar maples,
not oaks, will eventually fill in the canopy gap.
* * *
One day before too long, I plan to cut up at least part of our fallen oak, so that it can be used to heat our cabin. We’ll then work its ashes into the soil of our vegetable garden. And eventually all of its elements will be incorporated into something else and all of its stored energy from two centuries will dissipate, as entropy inevitably increases. It’s the law, after all.
[Note 1. A story from the State Journal Register about the recent death of a 400-year-old white oak tree at Carpenter Park Nature Preserve in Springfield, Illinois, can be found by clicking on this link.]
[Note 2. Chapter 23 of my book Side Channels is called “Eulogy for an Oak.” It is about a white oak tree along one of my favorite hiking trails in the Cook County Forest Preserves near Chicago. To download a pdf file of chapter 23, click on Download Eulogy for an Oak-Chapter 23.]
For more information on Side Channels, please click on my Amazon Author page.