Proposal: Great Oak Festival
Yesterday was a good day. Choosing to revisit the Dick Young Forest Preserve in Batavia, when I arrived my vehicle was the the only one in the parking lot. Following the path to Nelson Lake Marsh I grew comfortable with the solitude. My company was the wind, the brown vegetation, and tender new growth invisibly breaking the earth around me. Reading a Kane County Forest Preserve District placard I learned that the land had been used for row crops until the 1990’s. The land was once an old growth oak Forest. The plan is to transform the 178 acres by conservation and restoration practices to it’s original state, habitat for a variety of animals from pelicans to mink. I read that the restoration will take one hundred years.
A walking path around the Marsh is close to a number of old oaks. They are majestic in height, relative to my modest 6 ft frame. The fractal like branches are the living earth’s response to the non-living caress of heat and light from our star. The great trees provide oxygen for mammals, myself included.
It would please me to declare these giant oaks to be divinities. We could proclaim an annual Great Oak Festival, a day of feasting, with several food trucks parked in the lot. At dusk I can imagine a torch light procession on the 4.1 mile hiking path around the lake, with a pause at 20 minute interludes for reading a poem, or for live music offered by a local musician or musical group. The festival would be produced apart from wide spread media promotion, — we don’t need Woodstock III. Indeed, word of mouth would be enough to attract families and groups of friends that believe Nature was our birth mother, that Nature will be a homecoming for all of us. And I think that June 21st, summer solstice would be the perfect time for the festival.
I captured this photo of an old oak. How old? Perhaps an Arborist could offer an estimate, but I do not know. The sight of this old one, fallen by the marsh signified to me that even gods die. Everything, and every idea has a season…
I must confess as I walked, the war in Ukraine was always a subtext, suspended in the background. The country is under siege. Every hour, every day and night that passes means that they lose more of their community to the missiles, to the Russian artillery that reduces their cities and towns to heaps of ruins. Soon losses will be due to starvation in Maruipol, food will run out for thousands, civilians hiding in basements.
My words would echo those of an unnamed American lawmaker who I saw briefly on television last night. “Give them what they want, when they want it. Not when it is convenient for us to give it to them.” I could not agree more. Ukraine needs the requested planes and tanks now. They must destroy the Russian artillery, the mobile rocket launchers, indeed destroy the Russian army in detail if they are able. They want to live.
It is up to us.
