The Dying of the Trees

Dean Ohlman

“Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands…”

“O no, Dad, not again!”

That was my youthful reaction to my dad’s quoting of the one poem he remembered from eighth grade, the last grade he attended as a farm boy shortly before the First World War. It was the beginning of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s classic, “The Village Blacksmith,” a poem I eventually memorized myself in a time of nostalgia long after my dad’s journey to Glory. He’d quote it whenever any of us kids came home and recited poems we’d learned in school—and then he’d go on with, “You’re a poet and don’t know it; your feet show it—because they’re long fellows”: long feet being something that could be said about most of us boys of Dutch stock.

Making a Hiking Staff from an Ash Sapling

If you’ve been hanging around WOC for a while, you’ll know that one of my hobbies is making hiking sticks (“staves” to be proper, I guess). I make them from several tree species: maple, oak, hickory, white cedar, white pine, alder, aspen, and ash. Ash and hickory are favorites to make out of freshly cut saplings, in part because in the spring it’s a breeze to strip the bark from them—which is really just for aesthetics, not for any structural purpose. In fact, leaving the bark on makes them a bit stronger. Yet ash and hickory are still tough, stripped or not.