My favorite tree lives in the quiet north end of the Long Pasture cradled between two drumlins on my family’s farm in the town of Avon, NY.  There is no one alive who can tell me the tree’s story and so I like to try to use the clues that are laced into the land’s surrounding storyboards to create a plausible scenario. 

            To look at the tree is to know it is old.  At its narrowest, it measures 5 feet in diameter.  It is likely to have been growing when the fields were cleared around the turn of the 19^th century, and yet not too long before because it has a full and evenly distributed crown with strong low horizontal branches.  Whether it sprouted before or after the clearing still leaves me with the question: why was it spared?  It is, unlike other trees, not associated with a fence line.  Everywhere on this farm trees find their protection from cow and plow with the fences.  The story of my well-grounded friend appears to be an exception; the fencerow that skirts its trunk is 25 feet away and therefore offers this tree no protection.   It is my conclusion that since the land was cleared, this tree must have been big enough not to be eaten by livestock and was allowed to stand as a young tree because it was recognized as unusual.  I speculate that the fellows who wielded ax and crosscut looked up and saw not just an oak, but a chestnut oak, a tree that is on the fringe of its territory in upstate New York and one of a kind on our farm.

My beginnings with this tree started when I was young.  The Long Pasture is one field away from my childhood home and was in line with the quickest walking route cross lots to my grandmother’s house and the main farmstead which was the hub of all activity.  When I was walking this route I would often take a moment and sit in-between the two west facing root stems that flared from the main trunk and then disappeared into the soil like buoy chains disappearing out of sight into deep water.  The seat created by these two 12 inch diameter flares felt like a thrown.  The space between the two was recessed and wide enough to cradle my hips comfortably while my arms rested on the tops of the root flares as easily as they would in an armchair. 

I would sit in this druid thrown with my hands palm down on the roots and imagine my fingers growing and intertwining with the roots deep in the darkness and becoming one with the underworld. At the same time my back and head would rest against the gathering trunk and follow the flow of energy into the sky above.  I would sit, sometimes quite a while, feeling the depth and reach of this tree which I imagined as my friend and mentor.   I would ask it to tell me its secrets, and though it always remained silent, I have felt something seep into me that is special to this tree and spot.