Wrote a book and lived to tell about it

Shall we talk a little about it?

A year and a half ago the tallest tree in New York fell. My friend Philip was hiking with another friend when they found it and alerted nearby forest rangers to her. Her name was Tree 103 and she stood alongside her sisters for more than three hundred years in a place near me called Elders Grove. When she fell, one nearby forestry professor said, she would have produced the energy equivalent to several sticks of dynamite.

Last fall my friend Philip and I paddled a nearby pond we love, whispering to one another across the water about loons and lichen, and afterwards, he and I hiked back to the fallen tree. Someday I will tell you about that walk through an old growth oasis. Some say the word Adirondack comes from the Mohawk word, ha-de-ron-dah, meaning “eater of trees.” It probably refers to a neighboring tribe who were known to sometimes eat bark, but I like to think it referred to the rampant logging that white settlers brought to the area in the 17 and 1800s. Somehow Tree 103 and her sisters were spared, but again, that’s a story for another time.

This hike we took coincided with a crashing and crumbling fall in my own life. That fall had begun seven years earlier.