Lightning rods

The point of the story is this. Plants never give up. If a tree is girdled it will die because the cambium, (tissue below the bark that conducts sugar down from the leaves) is made discontinuous so that the roots can't get any of the food that the leaves make. The leaves may be able to live for a season because they'll get water from the roots through the sapwood.

But what if a tree was, as Miracle Max might say, "only mostly girdled?" It doesn't give up, it continues to grow however it can. Laura and I used a ponderosa pine that had been struck by lightning as a marvelous landmark. We could tell it was lightning because of the spiral pattern of the exposed and damaged wood. Lightning struck timber poses a hearty challenge to any carpenter who wants to use it! They'd tie themselves in knots just trying remember, "sand with the grain. sand with the grain."
It looks just like the grain is spiraling, but I believe it has to do with the heat of the lightning bursting the water in the tree's wood. Now, you may be surprised by this, but Lightning has a tendency to kill the tree it strikes. But not this one.

Allow me to build the picture of this tree for you piece by piece.

step 1) Imagine a dead log standing. The entire trunk of the tree is bare wood, where the bark has been stripped off by the lightning, the subsequent fire, the wind or the animals and beetles that took advantage of it afterward.

step 2) Except there is a boa constrictor of flaky, red bark that coiled halfway up the tree. The snake's tail is forked and pierces the soil, its mouth devours a single fat branch 20 feet off the ground and 15 feet below the pointy gray top of dry wood.

step 3) This branch that marks the highest point of the living bark-snake, is in fact, the beefy arm of your testosterone laden lacrosse coach waiting by the sidelines to give you a high five. The branch is short, strong, and extremely thick, perhaps two feet in diameter. It juts from the bole of the tree at a ninety degree angle and then abruptly turns upward at a ninety degree angle. From this branch is the epicenter of a vegetative explosion. Branches grow in all directions from all parts of this sole, central branch.

step 4) Now imagine your coach isn't slapping you five at all, he's got his arm in a puppet of himself, but since it is his hand and not his head that is the top of the figure, it is significantly lower. This tree held up a puppet of its former, (pre-lightning) self. The canopy looked just like the canopy of any ponderosa pine, but instead of being centered on the tree, it was lower, and to the side, held up by this ridiculous branch.

Have you ever seen a tree wound that's healed over? Exposed wood can't grow anymore, can't create new bark, only the cambium can do that, so instead of creating a new layer of skin like a person does, the tree swells its bark on either side of the wound until the bulging woody membrane is pushing against itself to create a seal.

This tree was making a valiant effort to perform this feat of controlled growth, but being more wounded than not, the result was this appearance of a round woody snake climbing around the tree.

What about the branches? Can the branches live if the cambium underneath them is dead? No they can't, they have been disconnected from the roots. But on this old tree there was one branch left. And HOOOOO BOY was it ever making a go of it!

I wish I could say as much for myself. We have a lot to learn from trees like that, who like war vets bear the wounds of society. The pain and the suffering and the conflict that stem from our daily lives are not enough to harm us much, not us civilians. But when there is a war, these maladies of our culture are concentrated through the funnel of our misrepresentative government. Each little bit of hate, of waste, of ignorance gets thrown into the funnel. And the pissing end of it is centered on our troops and on the countries they occupy like the crosshairs of a speeding stealth bomber.

And sometimes its the same for our trees. Lightning strikes the tallest object, and that means the most dominant tree. This tree must have once been truly grand, towering over the rest on that South facing slope in West Montana. It got plenty of sun, outcompeted the other trees who couldn't handle as much drought, and it probably made hundreds of thousands of seeds. Maybe some of those seeds will grow to be as dominant as their mother once was, but maybe thats a curse, like being an outstanding young man in highschool who is virtually forced to go to Norwich or West-point, or some other institution of the noble, bloodthirsty, professions.

These are the young men I've known who have joined the service. Gavin Wageman, Jake Fangman, John Cody. May you all bend down during thunder storms.