The Oaks on My Side of the Creek

Grandpa’s Survey

The survey was where I knew it would be, rolled up in a cardboard tube with Grandma’s wedding veil and Grandpa’s discharge papers and a Bible with the family names written in the front.

It was a copy of the county surveyor’s drawing from 1951, done in ink, with the old measurements in chains and links and a little hand-drawn square at the northeast corner of my bottom. Next to the square, in Grandpa’s handwriting, it said: “Stone. Henry & I found it 1952.”

Under that, in pencil, in a different hand: “Wire on line fence, east side, ’58.”

My grandfather was a quiet man. He did not leave me much in the way of advice. But I remember him walking me through that bottom when I was maybe eight years old, holding my hand, and stopping at a big oak and patting it like it was a horse.

“These aren’t for us, Laurie,” he said. “White oak takes too long. These are for your grandkids’ grandkids.”

I have two grandkids now. Emma is five and Cody is three. They live twenty minutes away with my daughter, and Emma calls the bottom “the tall woods.”

I went to bed that night and did not sleep. At a quarter to five I got up and made coffee and filled the thermos. I put on my long underwear and my jeans and my barn coat and Mark’s old knit cap. I got the lawn chair out of the garage, the green one we take to Emma’s T-ball games.

Belle was waiting at the door. She always knows.

Dawn

I waded the old ford below the house in my rubber boots. The water was cold enough to ache right through the rubber. Belle splashed across ahead of me and shook herself on the bank, and the sound of it was loud in the dark.

I walked up the bottom with a flashlight until I came to the first painted tree on Wade’s lane, the first one the skidder would reach. It was a big, straight white oak, maybe thirty inches through, with the orange slash right at eye level. It was standing, by my map, a good hundred and fifty feet inside my line.

I unfolded the chair and set it with its back against the trunk. I sat down. Belle lay down across my boots. I folded the map so the stone corner showed and put it on my knee.

And I waited.

I prayed some. I am not good at long prayers. Mostly I said, “Lord, let me be decent about this,” over and over, because I knew myself, and I knew that if Wade said one more thing about four acres of brush I might say something I could not take back.

At seven, I heard the log truck downshift out on the county road. At ten after, I heard the skidder.