Over the Christmas holidays I took a non-direct flight to Louisville and found myself with an hour between planes in the airport at Pittsburgh. I had the usual choices of spending the time either (1) watching planes land and take off, (2) reading televised timetables, (3) buying a lunch I didn’t really want in a restaurant decorated like an underwater cavern, (4) visiting a modernly furnished and impeccably nondenominational airport ‘chapel,’ or (5) watching that curious form of terminal roulette known as luggage retrieval.
I picked the first option and went up onto the observation platform to watch the planes. The airport, modern and built outside the city proper, stands atop a flattened hill, a man-made plateau, and from the observation deck I could look back toward the gray mountain ranges of the Alleghenies. All across the back of Pennsylvania there had been little snow on the ground, and from the plane those great, gray ridges, long and unbroken from north to south, had looked to my sea-conditioned eyes like the frozen crests of gigantic waves, ten miles or more in length and two thousand feet high, on an overcast, steely ocean. Now, gazing back at them from the ground, it seemed they might break, fold over and spill out onto the brown fields that lay before me.
Then I noticed that the fields were not fields at all, but a large empty golf course, spread out below the airport and within easy walking distance of it. I have always been attracted to golf courses, not for the game, but for the unexpected surprises they hold for naturalists. They represent a kind of civilized climax growth, artificially maintained, of course, but often remarkably varied and full of numerous hints of their former histories. This one, for instance, had probably once been part of the great eastern deciduous forest, which had in turn been succeeded by primitive settlements, cultivated farmland and abandoned pastureland, escaping the final fate of housing development by being preserved for community recreation.
Checking the lighted boards, I saw that my plane had been delayed once more. ‘Why not?’ I thought, and walked out of the terminal, dropping off the side of the plateau to have a short jaunt in an unfamiliar Pennsylvania countryside that I had been viewing, only minutes before, from a God’s-eye height of twenty thousand feet. I loped off across the rolling, sloping, deadbrown fields in the rich light of a late winter afternoon. The only immediate inhabitants were a few crows, scavenging the fairways in much the same manner as they do the Cape beaches. I was evidently on the back part of the course, for there was no clubhouse in sight, though brick ranch houses ringed the edges.
Unconsciously, I found myself gravitating toward a large tree that stood alone in a wide ravine off the main fairway. Trees always reveal their personalities, their essential structures, much more readily in winter, and even at a distance I could see that this one bore the strong angular lines of an oak.
After several months among the stunted pines and oaks of our peninsula, I always find the size of a full-grown mainland tree startling. But this one was a giant even by inland standards. As I approached it, it seemed to grow and loom over me, weaving its branches through the slate gray sky. It was a magnificent black oak, Quercus velutina, rising up out of the ground like a dark, twisting, massive pillar. Its base was over six feet in diameter, and measuring it with my tape at breast height I found it to have a girth of over fourteen and a half feet.
I am not very good at estimating tree heights, but this one seemed to tower at least eighty feet into the air. The crown was not excessively wide, however, indicating that the tree started out life as part of a thick forest, spreading upward rather than out. Its outline was wonderfully dramatic, the trunk splitting early into two asymmetrical columns that leaped and soared upward in sharp, angular jumps. It had a deeply furrowed, nearly black hide, and its branches kept a surprising number of last summer’s leaves, hanging in clusters like curled, coppery claws.
For all its winter ‘barrenness,’ it seemed to breathe life, utterly healthy, with that strong sinewy relationship that oaks possess with the earth. It was totally unlike anything the Cape had to offer, a firmly rooted, indigenous expression of these clay and limestone hills.
Without taking a core sample, I could only guess at its age, though it was certain it had flourished in this ravine for over three centuries. It had probably known bear claw, Indian knife, and the sound of settlers’ axes. On one side I found the protruding end of a piece of old, rusted wire that disappeared deep into the tree’s flank, the last remnant of some old fence set once to mark some now-forgotten bound or to keep contained some cows whose bones are long lost. The only other sign of man’s presence, a single green metal bench already showing signs of rust and wear from the winter rains, was set next to the trunk, providing a place of rest and shade for summer golfers.
We study forest succession, the march of tree species across a landscape. But this single tree, this last local survivor of an unparalleled deciduous forest, had witnessed not only forest change, but the whole haste and ephemerality of human succession across the land. It seemed to gather the entire field to itself, to make all the fairways revolve about it, to lend a dignity to these frivolous greens and sandtraps and to justify the existence of the golf course for securing the tree’s preservation.
I thought of a line from a play I saw in Boston last year: ‘Life is only comprehensible in terms of a thousand local gods.’ If so, here surely was one. I had been vouchsafed a glimpse of it during a stolen hour from an airport terminal, and would probably never see it again. But it impressed upon me forcibly the uniqueness, the utter irreplicatability, as definite as a human voice, of each landscape.
Here on the Cape, with its streaming seaweeds, its creeping lichens and mosses, its beach grass bent and waving in the wind, the landscape speaks to us largely in terms of acquiescence, of a kind of triumph by submission. But there, in a Pittsburgh golf course, was a commitment to a principle that admitted of no compromise with its surroundings. Life, it seemed to say, was vertical and indomitable, despite crushing odds. Life lifts itself into towers and climbs upon itself with cellulose walls and calcium girders. Life grows and reaches upward, despite the grinding, abrasive, horizontal forces of the inanimate – whether dunes, waves, glaciers, or the shoals and piles of limestone held back and in place by the tree’s huge trunk.