prairie point

It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon and we just felt like getting out of town. I had read about a garden in Weatherford that was open to the public and we decided to drive there and see it. With time on our hands afterwards we drove back through town and found a tourist center at the edge of downtown. It was open and we walked into a small room with a counter and an assortment of brochures and guidebooks.

We found somethng interesting. It was a photo-copied page with a black and white photo of a tree and a brief paragraph headlined “Largest Pecan Tree in the World.” There was a little map that showed it was just 3.5 miles north on Highway 51. The guy behind the counter had never been there, but Highway 51 was right outside the door. I pulled the car out of the gravel lot and headed north through the farmland, measuring the miles on the odometer.

I have always been happiest in the company of trees. When I was a freshman in Houston I used to take my books out to a grove of pine and oak in a forgotten corner of the campus and sit underneath a tree reading in the warm afternoons. Sometimes I would pace back and forth and read my essays out loud. I cannot recall ever seeing another person in that grove. Except for the squirrels and birds I had it all to myself. Years later I think I remember the trees better than the books I was struggling to understand. I would stay there until the light played out and then head back to my dorm along sidewalks set between parallel rows of oaks drenched in Spanish moss. In the waning light the trees seemed dark and mysterious and at the same time compelling.

Maybe my affinity for trees comes from having grown up in a forest. The property I grew up on southeast of Fort Worth was part of the Crosstimbers, once an impenetrable forest of trees with wood so hard that it was called the “cast iron forest.” I did not realize that it was a forest until years later after the property had been sold. The trees were post oak and blackjack oak, what some call scrub oak because they are small and scrawny. Of course they had been thinned out to make room for suburban housing. My parents planted their own favorites - crepe myrtle, redbud and two tall pines in the front yard - but it was the small oaks with lichen-covered bark that I played under and learned to love. I have driven by the property recently. The pines now dominate the street, but the oaks all still seem to be about the same size. They are probably much older than their size would make them seem.

We passed a small sign by the side of the road that said “big tree” and had to double back. We saw a small farmhouse with a driveway, but we were reluctant to turn in there. The paper we had picked up warned that the tree was on private property but said the owners welcomed visitors. A couple hundred yards further I turned the car off onto a dirt road between a ploughed and fenced field and a pasture. The road wound past a barn and then toward a clearing in a line of trees. That looked like the destination.

But as we passed the barn I saw in my rearview mirror a man waving his arms. Apprehensively I stopped the car and got out. It was the farmer who owned the place. He knew we were looking for the tree but sure enough he did not mind. Although it turned out we were heading the wrong way and he would prefer that we park the car and walk before we got it stuck. He pointed the way and we set out across the field. We crossed a dried-up creek on a footbridge and passed into the woods.

The trunk of the pecan was huge and gnarled. It’s enormous branches dipped low to the ground. Tricia and I stood at each edge of the canopy and tried to guess how far apart we were. The literature said the tree was 91 feet tall and over 200 feet across. It was believed to be over 1000 years old. We looked for pecans underneath and found a few but they were old and broken. It was not the right season.

A grove of trees always seems like a special place. Prairie Point is such a place. Over 150 years ago pioneers established a church there in a grove of oaks. The church closed its doors long ago but people from all over still gather there every year in July for a picnic. They bring food and set it out for everyone to eat on long boards nailed between the oaks. After they have eaten and socialized most head for the cemetery beyond the fence where they have friends or relatives.

Groves were some of the earliest sacred places. My ancestors worshipped the spirits of trees in ancient European forests, as have people of many other cultures. Maybe they were on to something. Touching the trunk of the big pecan it was hard not to feel that there was a consciousness there that transcended our own.

We walked back to the car and drove to the farmhouse. We signed the guestbook on the front porch and petted the dogs and then got back in the car and drove back the way we had come. We stopped at a farmers market and bought a watermelon. Weatherford is famous for its watermelon. Back home we sat outside in the warm evening under our own much younger grove of pecans and ate watermelon and spat the seeds onto the lawn.

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