Strange things can happen living along the coast of Georgia. One day I talked to an oak tree. Let me tell you about it.
Oak trees possess mystical spirits. Besides being great to climb as a kid, they are iconoclastic and do things backwards, sort of a stick-in-the-eye to protocol. Like shedding leaves in the spring, not the fall.
One March morning you look out and the trees are full of leaves. The next day a great migration takes place…the leaves let go. No sounds, no mourning, just a silent goodbye to the old. Each leaf an ending, and a beginning. Maybe one of the quietest sounds ever heard is the sound of letting go.
Silence scares people. It’s not loud enough to suit them. Our super-charged culture blasts its incessant cacophony of incoherent noise. It delights the serially addicted adherents of the modern-day ‘screen generation.’
It takes a while to get accustomed to living in a place surrounded by silence. It’s possible to vanish into silent moments while walking among the oaks, or strolling near the marshes. Its restorative value is incalculable.
The island’s silence is a little unnerving at first. It takes time for the nervous system to adjust to the slow-pace flow of island life. The gravitational pull of busy, big city life hangs on tight. It took about three years for me to break the shackles of its insidious vortex.
The seductive presence of ancient and massive oak trees helped. Maybe that’s why I respect their wisdom. As Anne Beattie once remarked, “People forget years and remember moments.” Here’s mine.
It is a day in March, 2017. The sky is blue and vacuous with wispy jet trails. They streak like ephemeral memories across the sky of the mind. And like most days, I’m hungry. Hunger makes strange music in a man’s stomach, maybe even causing him to hear mystical voices. It gets the blame for a lot.
I break routine and ride over to Jekyll Island. A change of scenery is good food for the soul. In those days the Rah Bar occupied the end of the marina pier near the Jekyll Island Hotel. Sadly, it has now been displaced, ‘restored’ they say, a euphemism for destroying the charm of an island icon.
The Dangerous Dan’s Dawg ruled the menu. It was hard to beat, especially when enhanced by a cold can of the brew that made Milwaukee famous. Such combinations are memories in themselves.
It’s healthy to walk off the effects of King Kosher nitrates. I take a stroll among the oak trees. It feels comfortable to associate with these massive specimens of antiquity. There’s a sense of eternity among these gnarled, weather-beaten survivors of the caprices of nature.
They exude an energy that’s palatable. Strange, I know, but if they could talk, what would they say? What wisdom would they impart out of the silence of their voices? I think to open a dialogue with one. This is how I recall it going.
“Hi, can I ask you a question?” It answers in silence. In fact, it’s so quiet I can hear the temperature drop.
Undeterred, I ask, “Why do you shed your leaves in the spring, and not the fall?” A slight breeze rustles the leaves. More fall around me. Is it speaking, I wonder?
“What are you saying?” The tree shakes slightly. Branches above me rustle, the air is electric. The wind whispers, “Listen.”
More leaves fall. Curious, I grab a low branch, study it closely. At the tip of the leafless branch is a tiny hint of green, another leaf in the making. It seems to have shoved the former resident off, making room for itself. Such is the way of all growth.
Nature speaks in silence. A resurrection resides in every branch, new life in every stem. Who needs words to understand this?
Maybe that explains the mystery of how oaks have had better luck in converting Yankees to the Southern lifestyle than Wesley had in spreading spirituality to the natives.
A quiet calm descends upon the place. Conversation ends. The breeze moves on. So do I.
Did the tree speak? What did I hear? Maybe just the simple reminder that age is no impediment to new growth, but first the old has got to go. Life is perennial.
Imagine talking to trees, and have them talk back. What a place to live.
Bud Hearn
March 24, 2018
Golden Isles Magazine
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