Another American Adventure: A great tree falls

Sunday, February 24, 2013

A great tree falls

This tree was unusual because it was really a "twin" tree, growing up beside another tree - Siamese twins that didn't split until after emerging from the ground. I wonder what caused it to fall. It didn't appear to be sick or diseased. Perhaps lightning? The tree(s) was larger than most of the surrounding trees. I wonder if the remaining tree is now unbalanced.

The branches that broke the fall almost look like knees.

This is the remaining tree - the other half - left standing.

3 comments:

BarbaraFebruary 24, 2013 at 1:24 PM
Looks like it was dead for some time and just fell.
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beth cioffolettiFebruary 24, 2013 at 3:22 PM
Why does it look dead, Barbara. It looks like the other trees to me.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.