Old Guard

Photo by Geoff Carter

By Geoff Carter

My family is lucky enough to own lakefront property in Northern Wisconsin. We’ve been going there for over fifty years, ever since my brothers and I were children. My mother would pile us into our red VW bug on the first day of summer vacation, drive for five hours, and then we’d stay there until school started. 

One of my first memories of the place, when my dad pulled off the unnamed dirt road and into the driveway was the gigantic Northern Pine standing at the end of the drive. Even then, it was probably fully grown, well over one hundred feet tall. To my nine-year old self, it seemed like a sentinel standing guard over the tiny cabin perched at its foot. It was a stalwart presence. 

Over those years, as the brothers grew up and went our own ways, the summer-long vacations disappeared. I still go up for a week or two every year and—of course—there’s maintenance that always needs to be done. In 1986, the old cabin was literally falling apart, so we razed it and built a new structure and have been improving it bit by bit (kudos to my brother Bob) over the years. There is a lot more development in the area—Pizza Huts and Burger Kings and Walmarts and, of course, the ubiquitous McDonalds. The lake itself has changed, too. 

There used to be perch, bluegills, and crappies. They’ve since disappeared. The walleye are still there but not as plentiful and they’ve moved from the dependable fishing holes I knew as a youth. Of course, the rock bass are still there as are the loons. There used to be a robust bullfrog population that serenaded us every night. They disappeared suddenly, over the course of two summers. On a possibly related note, a population of blue herons have descended upon us. 

But through all pristine summer days and occasional winter visits, through the construction and all the other changes, the Northern Pine standing guard over our lot stayed constant. It was the first familiar sight we saw pulling into our driveway every June and the last thing we saw pulling out in August. It watched as bulldozers razed the old cabin and gazed at the new structure rising from the dust. It watched my brothers and I grow to manhood and bring our own children to the lake and woods. 

I’ve read that Northern Pines, also called Monarchs of the North, can commonly reach two hundred years but often live to be four hundred and fifty years old and can get to be over one hundred feet tall. On twilit evenings, returning from fishing trips, I could see the top of our own Northern Pine towering above all the other surrounding trees, guiding me home. 

About a month ago, my brother went up north and discovered that the top twenty or thirty feet of the Northern Pine—our pine—had sheared off and fallen to the ground, narrowly missing the back porch of our cabin. When we called in the tree removal guy, he said that it looked as if the interior part of the tree had turned brown and probably rotted out, weakening it enough for the recent ice storm to break it off. The remaining seventy or eight looked good, he said, but it was impossible be sure if the rot extended all the way through or not. The next strong storm could bring the rest of it crashing down on our—or a neighbor’s—cabin. 

The same thing had happened to some other very tall Northern Pines on our neighbor’s land next to the water. The tops had blown off but the remaining parts seemed fine. Of course, there was no danger of them crashing into anything but the lake. The one closest to our land was home to a bald eagle nest. We often watched the daily excursions of these beautiful creatures as they rode the updrafts over the lakes beneath them. 

Our Northern Pine is probably going to have to go; there’s just too much risk of damage or injury if it is diseased, but the gap it’s going to leave in the sky and in our memories will be monumental. I know it’s probably silly to lament so much over a tree, but recent research has shown that trees can communicate with each other and even protect each other; who knows if they’re sentient or what the nature of that sentience is? They live for hundreds of years. Our own tree might have had panthers living in its boughs and Chippewa tribesmen may have rested underneath its branches. It survived the great clear-cutting of the nineteenth century. Who knows what wisdom it absorbed from those centuries of life? 

But the truth is that this Northern Pine meant a lot more to us than we did to it. It was the habitat for generations of birds, raccoons, and other mammals as well multitudes of insects. Who knows how many generations of eagles nested in its branches or how much oxygen it pumped into the air during its lifetime?

To me, this tree is an icon of my childhood and a living piece of memory. It will eventually go the way of the drive-in theaters, Saturday morning cartoons, first loves, and other artifacts from the past. 

If the tree must come down, my brother has talked about using the wood for furniture for the cabin. It would be nice to still have it around in some form. I myself would like to keep the stump intact and count back the years of its existence, marking historical events like the end of WWII or The San Francisco Earthquake or maybe even our own entry into its existence, chronicling its long, long life—whatever a tree’s life may be.