The Oaks on My Side of the Creek

The skidder came up Wade Ellison’s lane at ten minutes after seven, grinding in low gear, the chains on its tires slapping the frozen ruts. I heard it long before I saw it. In the hills of southern Indiana, sound carries down a creek bottom in November like it has somewhere to be.

I was sitting in a folding lawn chair with my back against a white oak that had a bright orange slash painted on it at the height of my head. My plat map was folded on my knee. My dog, Belle, was lying across the toes of my rubber boots, and my coffee was still too hot to drink.

Wade’s pickup got there before the skidder did. He came down the lane fast, parked crooked, and got out with the door still open and the dinging going. He was a big man, fifty-two, with a new canvas coat that still had the fold lines in it.

“Laura,” he said. “What in the world are you doing.”

“You’re going to get yourself hurt,” he said. “That’s a forty thousand pound machine.”

“Then I expect the man driving it will stop,” I said.

“You are sitting in the middle of my timber sale.”

“I’m sitting on my own ground, Wade. Same as I told you Sunday.”

Then the skidder came around the last bend and he turned to wave at it. I unscrewed my thermos lid and poured. My hands were steady. I was not steady anywhere else.

The Paint

It had started three days before, on a Sunday afternoon walk.

I carry mail for a living. I have had Rural Route 2 out of our little post office for sixteen years, a hundred and twelve miles a day, most of it gravel, six days a week and some Sundays in December. When I get a day off, I do not want to drive anywhere. I want to walk my own woods with my dog.

Our place is eighty acres of hill and hollow, mostly hardwood, with a hayfield on the flat by the road and the house and barn up on the ridge. My grandfather, Ray Hensley, bought it in 1951 with money he saved driving a milk truck. My mother grew up here, and I did too, more or less, and when Grandpa died it came to me.

The east side of the farm drops down to Mill Creek. On the far side of the creek is the old Bauer place, a hundred and twenty acres that Henry Bauer farmed for sixty years before his knees and his eyes sent him to the senior apartments behind the Methodist church in town.

The man who bought it was Wade Ellison, from up around Columbus. I had met him exactly twice: once when I put a welcome card in his mailbox, and once when his heifers got out on the county road and I helped him push them back with my mail Jeep.

That Sunday, Belle ran ahead of me down the hollow the way she always does, and I followed the old cow path to the creek. And the first thing I saw when I came out of the cedars was orange.

A slash of orange paint on a white oak, chest high, bright as a hunter’s vest. And a dot of the same orange down low on the root flare, where the stump would be.

A logger marks the trees he has bought with a slash you can see from the skidder, and a dot at the base so that after the tree is gone, a forester or a landowner can still count the stump and know it was marked.

I stood there a long time. Then I walked up the creek, and there was another one. And another. A big one by the sycamore. Two on the bench above the bottom. A whole run of them along the slope where the soil is deep and the oaks grow straight.

I counted sixty before I made myself stop counting.

Some of them were on Wade’s side of the old fence line, up on his slope. But most of them, forty or more, were on the strip of bottom ground between the creek and my hill. My ground. My grandfather’s ground.

The trouble was the creek.