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By: Jim Fitzpatrick |
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Email: jim@nunica.com |
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Local Farmer in Polkton Township writes for the Coopersville Observer. |
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Along Brandy Creek By Jim Fitzpatrick
The Coopersville Observer April 2, 2007- - No. 88 |
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If there is one thing that a young fellow can't pass up, that is if he spends any time out in the woods at all, is to carve his name and date in the bark of a big ol' beech tree. That is what pocket knives were made for; along with a multitude of other uses of course.
Beech trees have nice smooth silvery-gray bark. They grow very slowly, live for a hundred years or more and become very large over time. Most family farms have at least one or two standing tall and strong somewhere on the place. Beech trees, more than any other species of tree, keep the written record of passers-by that sometimes span generations.
In a little woods to the north of here, initials and dates go back well into the 1930's. Down by the culverts at the edge of the pond below the old railroad right-of-way, Paul L. left his mark in the early 1970's. To the southwest on a flat above Brandy Creek, you can have a look at several large beeches with initials and dates at eye level from the 60's, 70's, and 80's. Some of those initials are in pairs with a plus between them; indicating the inclusion of a real or imagined girlfriend of some love struck young guy from days gone by. Herb A. was well into his 70's when he put his initials along with his wife Mary's inside a pleasingly shaped heart on a pretty nice beech in their woods. Up in the far reaches of an overgrown gully bottom to the northeast about a mile, some young fellow left a record of how he "trapped two fox near this (beech) tree" in the late 1950's. Surely that boy was aware of the legend of "D. Crockett"; how that famous backwoodsman left a record of his exploits lettered in the bark, "kilt a bar near this tree", down in Tennessee. Could it have been a beach tree that Davy left his carving in? |
