“Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands…”

“O no, Dad, not again!”

That was my youthful reaction to my dad’s quoting of the one poem he remembered from eighth grade, the last grade he attended as a farm boy shortly before the First World War.  It was the beginning of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s classic, “The Village Blacksmith,” a poem I eventually memorized myself in a time of nostalgia long after my dad’s journey to Glory.  He’d quote it whenever any of us kids came home and recited poems we’d learned in school—and then he’d go on with, “You’re a poet and don’t know it; your feet show it—because they’re long fellows”: long feet being something that could be said about most of us boys of Dutch stock.

My nostalgia, however, was not just related to Dad’s quoting of the poem; it was also the result of knowing that the chestnut tree has been extirpated from America.  “Extirpated” [meaning, fittingly, "uprooted"] in the botanical sense means that no viable and self-propagating individuals remain and mature in a region where they were once common.  Specimens may still be preserved, however, typically as the result of lots of TLC and chemicals.  The chestnut is one of the trees that we’ve lost—the result of a chestnut blight fungus that, ironically, was already killing the majestic trees when my dad was learning the poem.  I still remember prints of paintings that illustrated Longfellow’s poem.  The fungus eventually killed some four billion trees [and resulting now in a new business endeavor: salvaging and selling chestnut timbers from old barns and homes].

Then in my day, the elm bark beetle, arrived in the Midwest about the time I started college (1960), and by the end of the decade all the towering Y-shaped elms that graced many of the streets in our area were dead.  A few specially cared for large specimens remain to remind us of the common beauty we lost.  [Since the disease does not kill the roots, short elms still grow to about thirty feet in fence rows before they die].

Now another pandemic tree disease has changed the landscape on our very own street.  The emerald ash borer has infested ash trees all over Michigan and is marching on to the north and west.  Today when I walk home, on my left will be at least a dozen dead ash trees and on my right will be a few living ones that were given treatment just in time to save them—at about $150 a tree per year.  However, the trees in the wild simply must succumb to the disease—once again leaving us only with specimens for recollection of more fruitful times.

These are the dying trees that have had an influence some way on me in my place.  In your place, you may be losing millions of hemlocks (Appalachia).  Further south, you’ve already lost your long-leaf pines.  In the Southwest, you’re losing your saguaro cactus.  In Colorado and California, your mountains are turning brown and being made susceptible to massive fires and then landslides because of the die-off of your lodge-pole pines.  All over the nation we are losing our dogwoods.  And all around the world this depressing story is repeated—with human exploitation adding to the decline caused by disease.

As a long-time lover of trees, I’m saddened by this.  The causes are multiple, mysterious, and mostly unmitigated in spite of our human efforts to save them.  This reality brings to mind a poem by C. S. Lewis, a fellow tree-hugger:

The Future of Forestry

How will the legend of the age of trees
Feel, when the last tree falls in England?
When the concrete spreads and the town conquers
The country’s heart; when contraceptive
Tarmac’s laid where farm has faded,
Tramline flows where slept a hamlet,
And shop-fronts, blazing without a stop from
Dover to Wrath, have glazed us over?
Simplest tales will then bewilder
The questioning children, “What was a chestnut?
Say what it means to climb a Beanstalk,
Tell me, grandfather, what an elm is.
What was Autumn? They never taught us.”
Then, told by teachers how once from mould
Came growing creatures of lower nature
Able to live and die, though neither
Beast nor man, and around them wreathing
Excellent clothing, breathing sunlight—
Half understanding, their ill-acquainted
Fancy will tint their wonder-paintings
Trees as men walking, wood-romances
Of goblins stalking in silky green,
Of milk-sheen froth upon the lace of hawthorn’s
Collar, pallor in the face of birch girl.
So shall a homeless time, though dimly
Catch from afar (for soul is watchful)
A sight of tree-delighted Eden.

See you outdoors,

Dean

One of the saddest commentaries on our times comes from “A Report on the Movement to Reconnect Children to the Natural World” by the Children and Nature Network.  It quotes a fourth-grader from San Diego: “I like to play indoors better ’cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are.”

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by such a comment, since that’s the reason most of us adults play and work indoors.

Even though as a kid I lived in town, my friends and I hardly played indoors except for rainy weather and deep winter.  Actually that was true until Dickie Andrews’ family purchased the first television in the neighborhood.  Before TV, we all played outdoors after school until we were called inside for dinner.  Then came Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, Howdy Doody, and Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. And I can remember, just as depicted in the movie “A Christmas Story,” waiting impatiently for my own magic decoder from Ovaltine—and being disappointed that it was not as exciting as it looked on TV.

But come summer, daytime TV could not compete with the woods, the pasture, or the creek.  The moms of  we “OAK Boys” (Ohlman, Andrews, Kenfield) typically asked us in the morning, “Are you going to be home for lunch, or do you want me to make you a sack-lunch?”  If the choice was sack-lunch, it came along with the admonition to be home by supper-time—an admonition that was often fruitless, since none of us had a watch.  Sometimes what we were doing was very well worth coming home to a cold supper for.

I truly grieve for my grandchildren today—for their not having the opportunity to experience the joy we Oak Boys had of almost total outdoor freedom, of tree houses in the woods, of shinnying up and bending down trees, of pulling apart stumps searching for a possum, of trying our hands at milking farmer Kelly’s cows in the field, of catching “hair snakes” in the creek, or of finding and keeping track of fledgling growth in a robin’s nest—at the risk of being beaten on the noggin by the mother bird.

I even grieve their loss of such risk: risk of a dunking trying to cross the creek on a wobbly log or launching a poorly constructed raft, risk of getting a poison ivy rash, risk of getting a nasty pinch grabbing crawdads, risk of getting stung throwing stones at a paper wasp nest, risk of getting sprayed by daring to be the one who got closest to the skunk before it cocked its tail, and even the risk of falling through the ice on a shallow muskrat pond—one we had grown familiar enough with to know that it was not deep enough to drown in.  Life itself is a big risk, but it is less risky when we learn from having taken smaller risks—risks that often result in scratches, cuts, burns, bruises, slivers, rashes, and barked shins. Pain is not only a great teacher, it is also a great behavioral change agent—the whole point of spanking!

Author Richard Louv has written a valuable book that goes into all such matters and offers us adults a great challenge: to get our children and grandchildren back outdoors: Last Child in the Woods.  Louv also spearheaded the formation of the Children and Nature Network that seeks to perpetuate the ideas, concepts, and precepts he suggests in the book.  With spring coming on (the male red-winged blackbirds are back!) take time to examine these valuable resources and motivate yourself to be active in the fight against NDD: Nature Deficit Disorder—and CKD: Creation Knowledge Disorder.  If we worship the Creator, should we not become intimate with His creation?

See you outdoors,

Dean