TERRE HAUTE —
Not long ago, while I stood alongside our country road waiting for traffic to pass me by and leave me to my walk and my thoughts, a perfect-looking couple in a perfect-looking blue convertible stopped to ask, “Do you happen to know how to get to the tree in the middle of the road?”
Indeed, I did, I told them, then proceeded to give them step-by-step directions, that if misinterpreted by a single turn at a single stop sign would have led them toward Bridgeton and Mansfield and places unknown. I am presuming the explorers eventually found their destination, or simply gave up and made their way home, perhaps mumbling as they watched their gas gauge fall, that they shouldn’t have asked that simpleton standing in the roadside weeds to point their way.
The tree in question, a huge oak, sits, as my grandfather would have said, “smack-dab” in the middle of what is known as Greencastle Road, a mostly paved strip of blacktop that runs along the northern edge of Vigo County on its way through the woods to Clay and on into Putnam. Put more succinctly, it stands about two miles north of Fontanet, a town once named “Fountainette” for the springs that flowed out of the hillsides to its west.
I’d like to believe that the tree is still there because one lone farmer, armed with a shotgun, stood decades ago to protect it against a crew of men holding an impressive cross-cut saw. It was his tree on his property, and he’d be hanged before he let any township trustee or county councilman order it cut and cleared for the sake of progress.
In reality, no one probably knows the whole story why the oak remains where it is. It has been bypassed by countless other road crews and utility trucks and tree trimmers in the many subsequent years, a pleasant green, growing relic surviving for tradition’s sake in an age when so many bits of custom and history and culture are being bulldozed and paved over without protest.
Just a few weeks ago, I drove past the tree on the way to a family reunion in Knightsville, the little burg that sits just east of Brazil. That town was once bustling with storefronts and railroads, and we meet there each year at its community center, all of us Lunsfords and Sneddons and Risslers and Herzogs, as a family that was once mostly Woods and Kendalls. We all sprouted out of Clay County a century ago to head to farmsteads and small towns in surrounding counties and to work and build and marry and change names. So, on what is usually a scorching August Sunday, we load our cars with potato salad and fried chicken to spend the afternoon together.
For my family, that means passing the tree, just as some of us did when we drove toward Fontanet with our grandparents years ago, my Grandfather Roy at the wheel. He never failed to act as if he had suddenly lost control of the car and would narrowly miss it on one side or the other, although probably not as narrowly as we imagined. His need for speed, which he shared with my otherwise benign grandmother, also meant a brisk drive across the hills and humps of the Rio Grande Road, the windows down, our hair blowing in the backseat breeze. It was tradition.
I asked Joe Koch about the tree. Joe is 82 years old and lives in Brazil, and he just happens to have written a book about places like Fontanet and Sulfur Springs and Coal Bluff. A photo of the oak is in his “Nevins Township: A Historical-Pictorial History of Her Towns, People, and Happenings.”
“I've talked to a lot of people about that tree,” Joe said on what was yet another hot August Sunday afternoon. “I've come to the conclusion that people started going around that tree when it was too wet on the other side of it. It was a good place for shade in the old days, and I heard that farmers would rest there when they drove their livestock toward Terre Haute.”
Joe told me that turkey farmers used to pass by the tree just to let their birds roost in its big, spreading branches.
“If you look that area over, you'll see that those hills and hollers end right in that area. Raccoon Creek used to actually run a lot closer to that place before it filled in with wind-blown sand. The tree just became a good place to stop,” he says.
An undated article that Joe scrounged up for me about the tree was written by Beatrice Biggs, who hailed from the Fontanet area herself, and at one time worked for our own Tribune-Star — well, for one paper or the other, anyway, before the merger. Biggs wrote that a good friend of hers, Beatrice Collier Pefley, recalled a time when her father, Dave Collier, saved the tree from being cut down.
It was 1918, Biggs said, and the Colliers, who had at one time lived in Bridgeton, occupied a home near the tree. A road crew had been instructed to remove the oak, and Collier “convinced” the crew that no one was going to cut it down as long as he lived. Years later, during the Great Depression, another crew — this one laboring for the WPA (the Works Progress Administration) — was put to work taking the tree down. The Colliers had been replaced by the Johnsons, and George Johnson “convinced” that crew as well — this time with his scatter gun — that the tree was going to stay put a while longer.
Families have come and gone to the houses along Greencastle Road, and that narrow path has been paved and patched time and time again. The tree now bears the garishness of nearly a half-dozen yellow and black traffic signs for safety's sake, and even the winding creek that used to run near it has turned itself around and headed north, with a little help from a steam shovel in about 1875.
But the tree remains, a testament to persistence and luck and stubbornness.
Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail c/o the Tribune-Star at P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. Read more of Mike’s stories at http://tribstar.com/mike_lunsford, and visit his website at www.mikelunsford.com to learn more about his books.
Mike Lunsford
The Off Season: A lesson on stubbornness from the tree in the road
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Raising a flag for my father, veteran or not
My daughter, Ellen, and I stood at my parents’ graves on Mother’s Day a few weeks back and talked about how it couldn’t possibly have been so long since we lost them. My dad, for instance, has been gone for 16 years, and that is nearly unimaginable
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Time to become one of the boys of summer again …
Besides writing for a living, I teach school, and I’m not ashamed to tell people that I still love my classroom. I’ve been a teacher for 33 years, all of them in the same school district, and virtually all of them in the same building. But I also have to tell you that if the next few weeks don’t slide by pretty quickly, I may just let loose of the last thread of sanity from which I have been dangling for a while now. There are a lot of teachers out there who feel the same way.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: It’s time for us to get the real lowdown on dirt…
I have had my hands in the soil as of late. Two Fridays ago, I planted a viburnum bush, three chrysanthemums and a yellow poplar, not because it happened to be Earth Day, but because it was sunny and warm, and I had the whole afternoon to myself. The dirt I scraped out of and back into the shallow holes I dug near a backyard picket fence smelled good, and when dampened with a few sprinkles of water, it soon found its way into the deep wrinkles of my knuckles and under my fingernails. For the most part, I have nothing but good things to say about dirt.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Make big money: Raise worms at home for fun and profit…
When I think about all of the crazy things my brother and sister and I did just to make a few dollars when we were kids, I can’t help but feel a little sorry for teens this summer as they try to find jobs in what is supposed to be a very tight market. Money, to say the least, was a rare commodity when we were growing up, but you have to at least give us credit for trying.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: ‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d…’
Had white lace curtains been hanging in the west window of my cabin, I would have had a perfect Wyeth painting to watch last Thursday. A gentle breeze was wafting through my screens, and the sunlight of a warm late March day was fractured by the window sill as it poured onto my legs and feet. I could catch the scent of lilacs as it was carried in by that wind, and it and the subtle melody of the chimes that hang just outside made me as lazy as an old cat.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A report from the country as a new season brings sense of renewal
Regardless of what the calendar may yet say, spring has happened. It couldn’t have come too soon, and it wasn’t just last week and its windy 70s that have convinced me. I have been keeping a journal of sorts in my head for a fortnight now, stashing away reports of birds and buds and sounds in the crammed cabinets of my mind, all in a file marked, “The New Season.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Feeding time at the homestead draws a host of new guests
I stepped outside into the warmth of an unusually mild early March morning last week to do what I always do just before I grab my briefcase and book bag and lunch bag and head off to work. It’s nearly always dark when I leave, even as the sun gets up earlier and earlier in the late winter, so I often go about the business of feeding our cats with porch lights on and a flashlight in hand.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Taking a road less traveled in this illogical life
If you can still recall reading the poetry of Robert Frost in your high school English class years ago, I imagine that you can conjure up a line or two from his “The Road Not Taken.”
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Raising a flag for my father, veteran or not
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Obama Pays Tribute to Vietnam Veterans
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