Ride On: To Tree #2317

I tell ya, there are some fantastic oak trees on the Pomona College campus. Tree #2317 is one such oak. Growing just outside the Sontag Greek Theatre, it is a rangy thing with branches as big as trees growing not upward toward the sky, but out to two sides, perpendicular to the ground. Vines cover the outstretched-most reaches of those branches, almost as if in a struggle with them, attempting to pull them down to the earth. The leaf-litter thrown all around is deep and not quiet. It would be something to have lived as long as tree #2317, to have observed its story; would it be a common story, full of bird nests and squirrel running along its branches, or something more. Whatever the case, it is unlikely to have been as tragic as the story of the oak and the man in the poem below:

"... Oh, foolish man, why weep you now?

'Tis but a little space,

And the tie will come when these shall dread

The mem'ry of your face.

I feel the rope against my bark,

And the weight of him in my grain,

I feel the throe of his final woe

The touch of my own last pain.

And never more shall leaves come forth

On the bough that bears the ban;

I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead,

From the curse of a guiltless man...

And ever the man he rides me hard,

And never a night stays he;

For I feel his curse as a haunted bough,

On the trunk of a haunted tree."

"The Haunted Oak" - Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)

Even close to home there is stuff to see and wonder at; ride on and see what you can find.