Outside The Box

In the autumn of a time long past, over three centuries of falling leaves and gathering acorns ago, a young Creek hunter moved silently through the dense forest near Little Whiteoak Creek, in the heart of the Koweta lands in what we now know as Coweta County, Georgia. His sharp eyes tracked a squirrel darting among the branches of a towering white oak tree. We’ll never know the fate of that squirrel or whether the hunter’s arrow found its mark, but the prized acorn the squirrel was carrying back to its nest was lost, tumbling to the ground in that sheltered cove by the creek’s edge. The soft, loamy soil cradled it, hidden beneath a canopy of ferns, where the waters of the creek whispered quietly on their slow journey to the Chattahoochee River.

That humble acorn, nourished by the creek’s steady flow, took root in the quiet cove, its sprouting unnoticed by the Koweta people who fished and farmed nearby. Over decades, it grew into a mighty white oak, its branches stretching wide, a sentinel of the forest. It stood through seasons of plenty and hardship, witnessing the laughter of Creek children, the councils of elders, and the changing tides of the land. By the time European settlers arrived, the tree was already a giant, its roots entwined with the stories of a vanishing world. For centuries, it endured—through storms, droughts, and the march of progress— the weight of the centuries caused it to lose part of its crown just last week. Yet even now, broken but proud, it stands as a testament to that lost acorn, a silent keeper of Coweta’s deep history, whispering of a young hunter and a time when the creek, and the Creek, ran free.

My brother, William, and I spent many of the best days of our youth under that giant tree on our grandparents’ farm. Its roots were sunk deeply into the water table and a hand-dug well at its base bore witness to the tree’s longevity and the secret of its ability to thrive during the long, hot summers and drought years.

Our mother grew up under that tree. We played under it, cleaned many a fish after a successful Saturday on the pond, picked muscadines, and listened to our grandparents and great-grandparents telling stories, leaning back in the shade after a hearty Sunday dinner. No one knows how many other memories were sheltered by that sentinel. The farm our grandparents moved to during the Great Depression was old and in decline when they occupied it, but the tree had already borne witness to many long-forgotten tales.

We are concerned for the tree’s future, of course. Chances are that it will outlive us all with those deep and well-watered roots. But to everything, there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. If I grieve for that tree I grieve truly for the passing of all big trees. I don’t think we’re making many these days. Over the last 10,000 years, the world has lost about one-third of its forests, with half of that loss occurring in the last century alone.

White oaks don’t grow in asphalt and concrete, and we clear the trees from our mountaintops so we can sit on our behinds and look out a window over our phones. No sheltered cove is safe from our endless appetite for more. Separated from the natural world we think of trees simply as crops to be harvested to make toothpicks and toilet paper, and disposable lumber that splits and rots.

Understand that there were fellers of trees on both sides of my family and some fine years of my youth were spent making a living with a chainsaw. The lumber and pulpwood industry in Georgia is necessary, well managed and vital to our economy, even though you can’t find a decent axe handle made from hybrid rapid growth wood.

Therein lies the problem, when quality and tradition give way to the economics of a fast buck, and a society that lives in fractions of a second loses interest in things that take centuries to grow. We lose more than lumber with the passing of our sentinels when we forget the reasons why we play outside and sit in the shade of big trees listening to the old stories they inspire.