Kick Ass Trees of Delmar, Part 1

Like most homo sapiens, I’ve been known to exaggerate for effect. But I’m not kidding when I say we must have just about every major species of tree that can grow in the Northeast on our property, and then some. We’ve got red maple and red oak. White ash, white poplar and white oak. Black walnut, black willow, black cherry, black oak, buckthorn, boxelder and beech with bark smooth and cool as snakeskin. Cottonwood, dogwood, and basswood. Apple, Sycamore, sugar maple, silver maple, sassafras, sweet birch, swamp oak, shagbark hickory and hornbeam. We even have a stand of quaking aspen, which is really an enormous single organism that grows in clones, reproducing primarily by sending up sprouts from its roots. The oldest known specimen, in Minnesota, is over 8,000 years old. WTF?

We also have several majestic catalpa trees in our front yard, with their twisting trunks, massive heart-shaped leaves, enormous white blossoms and seed pods longer than drumsticks. No one seems to covet these anymore, probably because they’re so messy for half the year, but I could just about cry when I gaze long enough into an early summer setting sun as it back-lights their collective canopy in full bloom. They transport me back to my childhood home, where my little sandbox sat beneath the shade of a young catalpa, where I’d wait for my father to come home from work and build sandcastles with me. As teenagers, my friends and I would whip the crap out of each other with those pods, which hurt like a bastard when plucked ripe and green from the limb. Once spent, the dried husks rained down for days, until one year my mother cut the giant down when she grew weary of the clean-up associated with maintaining it. Curiously (and thankfully), I have no memory of that event, but I know it was her. She was an absolute sadist when it came to trees. This was a woman who once let an errant maple sapling flourish in her flower garden for well over a decade, intentionally, only to saw it down when it was about 15 years old, when she perceived the leaf and polynose raking had suddenly became a chore. “Yuck!” she’d cry, with a grimace, at the thought of another season of playing mother and maid to another messy child. She sent me packing at 15 as well, so this should have been no surprise. But it was.

Then comes the conifers. Less omnipresent so more obvious. We have red pine, pitch pine, jack pine, Douglas fir, Eastern hemlock, and who knows how many varieties of spruce and cedar. Best of all we have a majestic and mystifyingly fragrant white pine out by our back deck. These primitive beauties can live to be over 400 years old, and were everywhere in Delmar before the bulldozers really brought the hammer down in the Mid-20^th Century.* A doctor from New Hamphire who came of age at the corner of Elsmere and Kenwood in the 1950s, across from Bethlehem Cemetery (you’ll read more about him on this site in a week or two) tells a story of climbing the white pines next to his house with a friend to spy on the family that lived on the second floor; though the good doctor is now 73, he could still climb those trees and peek into those second story windows if he wanted. We also have a dead one still standing down by our creek, the remnants of its dusky crown weathered into broken scarecrow shards by decades of wind, rain and snow; its trunk still shedding fieldstone-sized shards of bark and riddled with the holy handiwork of pileated woodpeckers; where red-tailed hawks and owls still perch, alert for the inevitability of unsuspecting prey. Last week, our neighbors just up the road at 125 Elsmere reduced four verdant, healthy white pines – which sprouted from the soil long before the Northwest Expansion – to a garish row of stumps in less than 6 hours, the grey ghost of my mother hovering nearby, hands clasped and nodding wryly. Yuck!

We even host dozens of American elms (in reality, they host us) which never fails to impress because most in America died off when Dutch Elm Disease started ravaging their numbers in the 40s and 50s. Maybe it’s because our back woodlot has remained untouched since that era, when Carl and Gwendolyn Wehrle bought the property from the estate of Jane Louisa Barkhoff to build their empty-nest compound here, at the dawn of the Atomic Age. Who knows? Most are scraggly and we have lost a few for sure – they get brittle quickly when they die so it’s smart to cut them down quickly though they aren’t great for firewood – but there’s still a handful of majestic midlife and senior specimens on our six acres, and scores of younger adults. They’re kind of like The Waltons of 116 Elsmere.

Then we have the stock that was deliberately planted here, including several types of apple and crabapple trees, Japanese maples that look almost like kinetic sculptures, and the little leaf linden that came courtesy the Town of Bethlehem’s forward-thinking Street Tree Program in 2017. This land also has a legacy in red mulberry trees, a specimen which author Richard Powers calls, “older than the separation of yin and yang, the Tree of Renewal, the tree at the universe’s center, the hollow tree housing the sacred Tao.” Their tilting remains border the north side of our land, lengthwise from the house to the City of Albany’s water line way out back. I have no proof but suspect most of these were deliberately planted for fruit, and since their lifespan is only between 25-50 years (75 max) they may have been sown by the Wehrles when creating their getaway here, or by Bill Bender before them, when Lt. John Leonard’s old Colonial farmhouse still stood at the highest grade on the property (more about him as well in future posts).

These trees were one of the first things Karen Hunt – the middle daughter of second homeowner G. Howard Goold – asked about when she visited me unexpectedly in the summer of 2018. She mentioned a particularly large one in the front yard which I assumed was long gone, but a year later a long dead tree tipped to the ground behind an overgrown knoll near what used to be garden space owned by the O’Hern family on the corner of Norge and Elsmere. Lo, it was a mulberry. “We would eat all the fruit that fell from those trees in the summer,” Karen, now 74, explained during her visit. “Between those and the raspberry rows out back, we kept ourselves pretty busy.”

Brenda Unright recalls that there were many more than now when she and her husband-to-be Lou moved here in 1978. The Unrights have a long history in Bethlehem and the couple lived their whole married life in our home before entrusting it to us in 2013. “There was one right behind the garage near the swing set and more across the yard toward the next house over,” she told me. “In July of 1979, I think 80 out of the 86 people at our outdoor wedding had mulberry stains somewhere on their clothes.” This would have made my mother go, as it is imparted in certain discerning circles with a penchant for vivid imagery, totally apeshit.

But the trees that captivate my imagination most are those that line our gravel drive from Elsmere Avenue, which is more likely than not the same entrance to the property that existed when it’s owners would arrive and depart by horse and carriage, perhaps to church or taking produce to market in Albany. There is a sugar maple, two silver maples, one red maple, one Norway maple, one Siberian elm and one Himalayan birch. These trees were planted sometime before the dawn of the 20^th century, making them approximately between 125-140 years old. They have eyes of patient providence. Of Horus, of healing and making whole. Together, their all-seeing eyes have witnessed so much, the ravages of seasons, the merciless and endless lash of human convention. Of living and dying, of soaking in the inimitable weight of consequence, of mistaking miracle for just another cross to bear. Generations of children ascending into and leaping from their branches. Weddings, anniversaries, high school reunions, birthdays. Regarded as if in repose by teachers, administrators, accountants, farmers, firemen, field workers, lawmakers, diners, enforcers, contractors, ideologues, soldiers, socialites, salespeople, students, gardeners, grease monkeys, hairdressers, headbangers, mothers, fathers, fighters, lovers. Drinkers, thinkers and tinkerers. At 3 AM I can hear them breathe if press myself against them in stillness on the grit, joined, as Herman Hesse once said, “in a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life.” They stop the mind and never ask for the time, for not long after the first flower opened its petals to the sun in primordial bliss, their ancestors figured out how to persevere, thrive, rooted in place with crowns at the mercy of blistering cold and sweltering sun. Drought and flood. Without judgment and bereft of the excessive and destructive burden of human thought.

The original Survivor Series.

So as this pandemic plays out as it will, and we try to reabsorb what it means to live in a society characterized by persistent rather than occasional change, waiving uncertainly and unpredictably between a desire to spring forward into the future and a longing to return to the hierarchies and comforts of the past, I’m paying tribute and looking out for survivors, for the kick-ass trees of Delmar, which somehow remains loaded with ancient specimens hiding in plain sight, safe (somehow, for now) in its willfully suburban crests from the phantom of my mom’s lumberjack loving lovelight, beckoning to an earlier era when developers took pains to build neighborhoods around legacy trees, as opposed to clear cutting all of them. Send me your trees and their stories! I’ll share a few favorites of my own.