Oak

 

I was thirteen when I first saw that oak standing alone at the corner of Highway 99 and Elkhorn Road. I did not know that it was a last survivor of a forest that had been cleared for farms a hundred years before when frustrated miners found the real value of California was not in gold but in land. The oak looked like a bison running angrily over the dry flat lands of Sacramento. It was the kind of landmark that stamped itself indelibly on me at the start of my adulthood. Within five years, it had disappeared, astonishing me with how quietly it had thundered to the ground. I was left with no clue as to how it came to an end. I only know that I cannot see a lone tree standing anywhere, whether it is a giant fir near Seattle or a spiring coconut palm in Honolulu, without pondering the strength of Nature ruling in such solitude.