I found myself home alone with the dogs last Saturday night. I was hoping for another cool spell that could warrant a warm fire on the patio but the return of high temps and the continued absence of any significant rain over the past two months erased such plans.
I sat quietly listening to the sounds of the neighborhood with dogs lying around my feet staring up at the giant oak tree in my backyard standing tall in the moonlight. It reminded me of a line from a John Keats poem.
“Tall oaks, branch charmed by the earnest stars,
Dream and so dream all night without a stir.”
I love oak trees. Perhaps because I’m a big fan of history, and few of us have as much history as the giant oaks that surround us. They have survived and seen so much.
The Pechanga great oak, a coastal live oak located on a reserve near Temecula, California is said to be the world’s oldest living oak and could well have been around for at least 2,000 years. And I thought the 150-year-old oak in my back yard had stories.
The oak family has graced our planet for a remarkable 65 million years and is one of its most ancient species. I find the strength and stamina of these giant trees almost magical.
Among the most famous I’ve encountered is the historic “Friendship Oak” located on the front lawn of the Southern Miss Gulf Coast campus in Long Beach. The Friendship Oak survived Hurricane Katrina, Camille and no telling how many storms that long predate us.
This magnificent live oak tree with its limbs curling in every direction is 500-plus years old. The tree is revered by Southern Miss alums and Coast residents of all followings. It’s featured routinely in wedding ceremonies, anniversary pictures and is visited regularly by tourists.
Live oaks can’t make it this far north but I have a few other varieties in my yard just north of the Bruce Square. I’ve referenced often in this column the picture once shared with me by Shed Hill Davis from his childhood. The black and white photo showed him on what is now the Bruce Square, back then it looked more like a dirt circle with a few buildings. The view in the picture was looking north toward my house and there were no buildings or structures in the photo, but in the background you could see the giant oak that anchors my backyard today.
Shed Hill I’m sure wouldn’t mind me saying that picture was from around 1940.
My neighbor, James “Duck” Drake, who lives just east of my home, grew up in a dogtrot house, built by C.W. Beckett, on the lot where he currently resides. It was said to be the first house in Bruce.
Duck has shared memories with me noting there was nothing but fields and woods surrounding his childhood home and a handful of neighbors lining what is now Rogers Street in Bruce. It was a gravel road then with just a few houses here and there.
Duck once told me that he, John Brasher and Johnny Brown used to climb the giant oak in my backyard.
“We would get up high sitting on those big limbs with our feet dangling,” he said. “I remember us playing with trucks down around the bottom. That tree was as big then as it is now.”
According to Duck’s stories, the only structures around my giant backyard oak at that time were a few chicken houses, Pappie Clemons’ garage and the Drakes’ outhouse, which Duck said he used until he was around 5-years-old, when they got indoor plumbing in the new house built after the dogtrot burned in a fire.
Thankfully the outhouse is long gone, but the giant oak persists with memories of all my family swinging on the tire swing hanging off one of its giant limbs, dogs chasing each other around its trunk in the snow, and the comfort of its far reaching shade in the sweltering summer.