Well Bottom Blues

I knew that place, those trees, well. I had given the shaded apse beneath the perfect arch of branches that shaded a soft place of leaf letter over cool earth a name: Oaken Hof, from the germanic word for a temple. I dropped a pin on Google Maps of that spot. When the bank broke me and I quit and started walking in the park daily, I would often stop there and sit and contemplate the fountain statue of Chloe opposite, or sometimes lay and look at the twinkling sunlight through the leaves.

I worried when I heard two live oaks had succumbed to this summer’s heatwave, but none of the online articles told me which trees or where. I went for a walk last Sunday and was looping back along City Park Avenue toward the Chloe fountain and saw the bright sunlight in that formally shaded place, and then the stumps, the dumpster and the sawdust on the rutted, tire-trampled spot where I used to stop.

It put me in mind of the crime of St. Boniface, who felled Thunor’s oak in his unchristian rage against the elder gods. I understood why I thought I could see a full body pieta in the gnarl of an oak where I enter that urban forest. I told myself you could kill the tree but not the spirit, that the displaced dryad would find comfort in the many trees that remain.

Then it occured to me. If these two trees could not withstand a thunderstorm because of the killing heat, how long would the rest of the stand remain? Louisiana is a petrochemical plantation that will gladly sacrifice us, trees and all. for someone else’s profit. If the grandfather oaks that follow Bayou Metairie through the south end of City Park are lost, that will be another reason to stay in New Orleans lost as well. And in the spirit of Thunor (who you know as Thor), I have to think what revenge I could take against a state and a city that forgot how to care.