(no subject)

I mentioned on Saturday that I'd planned a post that did not come to pass because I'd neglected to acquire the visual aid. This is no longer a problem. I have acquired the visual aid, which you've probably noticed over there to your left. You can click on the thumbnail for a bigger, more clear picture (192K).

Every day, I drive past a sycamore tree (Platanus occidentalis) on my way to work. It grows on the banks of the Raystown Branch of the Juniata river, on the downstream side of the relatively new bridge on Route 30 between Breezewood and Everett. Now, there are a hell of a lot of sycamore trees along the Raystown Branch between Breezewood and Everett, most of them doing sycamore-ish things and living out their lives unmolested by anyone. This one is different from them.

A couple of years back, when PennDOT rebuilt the bridge, they felled a bunch of trees so that they could get their construction equipment in to work on the bridge. They also pruned some trees that were just slightly in the way, lopping off branches until they were out of the way. And then there was this particular tree, which got pruned harder than I'd ever seen a tree pruned. One day, it looked like a tree. The next day, it looked like a telephone pole -- it went straight up without any branches and ended flat at the top. At the time, it pissed me off that PennDOT didn't just cut the poor thing down, because that was a hell of a thing to do to a tree.

I stayed pissed about the sycamore tree all winter, as it stood there, telephone pole testimony to the blind and unthinking cruelty of man in the man vs. nature conflict. However, when spring rolled around, the damn thing leafed out. It was later than the rest of the sycamores, probably because it had to start from ground zero, but it leafed out with as much enthusiasm as I could possibly have hoped for from a tree with no branches.

In the years since that first spring, it's been getting on with the business of being a sycamore tree... and doing well enough at being a sycamore tree that I had to wait for fall so that you could see the structure of the branching. The structure isn't particularly normal -- the radial pattern of each branch-clump is NOT what unmolested sycamore trees look like -- but it's sufficient to the task, as we can see from the fruits (they look like dots in the picture) hanging from the otherwise-bare upper branches.

As it happens, many species of trees are designed to add additional branches on their trunks as and when it becomes productive to do so. This feature of trees is called epicormic branching and it's part of how sycamore trees work.

Were I a person of faith (I am a Godless Heathen), I could claim that here was the hand of Gawd at work in our daily lives, showing us something useful about the nature of setbacks and recovering from them. I'm not, though. The best I can do is note that life is some persistant shit. Isn't it neat?