The Old Birch

Another post from the Northwoods...

I always think of birch trees as thin, straight, white trunks with haphazard curls of paper-like bark peeling off.

The old birch by our lake isn’t like that at all.

Its trunk is gnarled and twisted, like an old man’s body ravaged by a lifetime of manual labor. Its bark beyond rough—gray, lichened scabs conceal its true identity.  It’s thick—my fingertips can’t even touch when I reach around it.

But it’s been a great tree, that old birch. It provides shade for us, habitat for bugs and smorgasbord for the nuthatches and the downy woodpeckers. Its leaves transform to yellow and carpet the ground. Its massive arms protect our bi-nightly fires in the firepit surrounded by a metal ring adorned in silhouettes of deer cavorting, deer at rest.

Originally, I didn’t even know it was a birch. Hidden among the hemlocks, its leaves obscured by the pine-type branches that crowd beneath its crown, it existed in obscurity on the hill above the lake. Actually, years later, I’d likely still be oblivious except a neighbor mentioned the old birch tree.

And, sure enough, when I took the time to look at it—actually stopped to notice—my eyes followed up the bends of the contorted, faded grayed trunk, and saw the familiar whitened, papery bark some thirty feet up, beyond the intruding hemlock cover, right where the birch splits three ways in sturdy, muscular branches, before heading up another, maybe, sixty feet.

When the old birch wasn’t nearly as old, it endured a heavy chain that supported one end of a crosswise log used as a clothesline, of sorts, to hoist up deer hunted down in the nearby forests, by those from another generation, another time. When we bought the tiny cabin by our little lake, the tree—still not recognized by me as a birch—stoically held that perpendicular log until a friend of ours (and, obviously, a friend of the tree) brought his wire cutters, shimmied up the trunk of the old birch, and finally set it free.

So now I take the time to look at it.

I notice the bare branches toward the top. I notice lesions of sickly-looking brown shrouding the trunk.

And I realize it’s dying, that old birch tree.

And I don’t know what to say, really, or what to do, except make sure I pay it notice. And enjoy its company while we’re both still here.

And maybe write something about it, so others might feel the sadness I do when I realize its days are numbered.

And, who knows, maybe it looks at me likewise as it notes my slowing gait, my graying beard, the ever-deepening creases across my face.

So we just sit, looking out at the lake, a fire smoldering before us on an unusually chilly July afternoon.

Just me and the old birch.