Point Reyes Schoolhouse Compound

Today is a day of mourning at our house – not the Point Reyes Schoolhouse but the cottage in town, in San Rafael, California. A dear and venerable family member died today, leaving a large hole in the complex web of life that has thrived there for easily one hundred years.

When we first arrived in the neighborhood, over seven years ago, she had already been an elder for over a century. Possibly the eldest of the neighbors in the old Forbes area, named for an estate established in the 1800’s and developed over a south facing oak land savannah criss-crossed with many streams that ran along it’s steep slopes. There is a spectacular southern view of Mount Tamalpais just up slope from our place that must have taken in the full panorama of San Pablo Bay to the east and the coastal ridge to the west before development grew up.

I’m sure that spectacular view was still open to every creature who perched in the towering branches of this venerable valley oak, (Quercus lobata Nee), that was anchored in the back gardens of my neighbor to the east. It is clear that when the house was built in the 1930’s the builders planned around this majestic oak whose branches arched gracefully over both houses and back gardens until today.

As we lived through the seasons under her arbor we marked them by the browning and loss of the leaves in winter that left a stark sculpture of forked branches against the night sky; the bright green of newly sprouted leaves and catkins in the spring that dusted the windows in yellow pollen and kept the air alive with the buzz of bees at work; the rich dark green leaves with newly forming green acorns at the twig tips in summer; and finally the fall of thousands of burnished bronze acorns dropping to the ground or harvested by the wildlife that lived in her branches. Red and gray squirrels made their nests up there along with a few song birds every spring.

In winter, I admired the moon and stars through the bare branches, heard the deep rumbling hoot of the great horned owls roosting high atop the arbor, the soft, mellow chirping of the nesting screech owls in the early morning, the rattling call of the acorn woodpeckers harvesting and storing the nuts during the day. Red shafted flickers, rosy breasted nut hatches, blue jays, scrub jays, and a large raucous colony of crows inhabited the oak’s trunk and branches. When the large flocks of cedar wax wings and robins came through the neighborhood on their southerly migration in the fall they stopped to roost in the upper branches to get the lay of the land and spot the gardens that offered up cotoneaster, pyracantha and english ivy berries for gorging before heading on their way.

There was an entire world established in that oak tree that had thrived for generations. Now, the branches are lying cut and neatly stacked in piles on the sidewalk for pick up to the landfill. By tomorrow morning it will all be gone. As it turns out, incredibly, the town of San Rafael has no tree ordinance, no ‘Heritage Tree’ designation to honor and protect these mothers of us all. Instead, the grating whine and stink of those chain saws will be with me for a long time to come.

Revered chronicler of America’s trees, Donald Culross Peattie, wrote of the Valley Oak in his A Natural History of Western Trees, “To say that the Valley Oak is the monarch of all the deciduous Oaks of the West is almost enough to identify it. For you take one look at an old specimen’s great bole, its magnificent crown, the width and the depth of its pool of shade, and you realize that it is king in its class….They grow tolerantly with Live Oak and Sycamores, the three trees forming beautiful harmonious contrasts, like notes in a sweet chord.” Its natural life span is 300 years. Peattie writes: “The acorns…meant a great deal to the California Indians…Naturally many animals beside man eat the sweet acorns –the gray squirrel, for one, and the California woodpecker. An epicure for the mast of this tree is the band-tailed pigeon…”

“Throughout the season this Oak presents a gentle drama which evergreen trees do not offer – the tender haze of color when leaves and catkins first appear in late spring, the beauty of the long summer shade, which is not dim and stuffy like that in a dense growth of young Redwood, Douglastree and Laurel, but luminous and breezy – letting in the light but not the full heat of the day. The trees hold their leaves until December and never turn any gorgeous colors, but while the bare trunks and limbs in winter stand naked their grand, beauty of form comes out, the bark pale against the clouds filled with the promise of rain….”

“The bare boughs have let the sunlight freely through, and the dark loam absorbs its warmth swiftly. Then the year brings forth its sweetest children, those displays of wild flowers that are the singular pride of California….At such a moment one can behold California as it was in its primeval innocence and dignity, before tractor and realtor, fool’s oat and filaree altered so much.”