'Oaks That Were Acorns That Were Oaks'

We hear acorns hitting the roof of the house and the cars. It makes the cats nervous and sounds like slow hail. The crop this year is prodigious. The patio is covered with them, more than the squirrels can keep up with. Stomping on them makes a satisfying crack/pop sound. I’ve watched the dog try to eat them but the tannin in acorns is bitter and his limit seems to be one. As a kid I tried eating an acorn that had fallen from the black oak in the backyard – once. 

In our yard are three water oaks, each about seventy-five feet tall. They’re at least as old the house, which was built in 1962. Houston is a city of oaks, a dark green carpet when viewed from the air. Our neighborhood is called Oak Forest. Ten years ago, the late Helen Pinkerton wrote to me about the oaks that grew near her home in Northern California:

 

“One characteristic of a Live Oak, growing over our swimming pool, was that it dropped its leaves on the hard surface of the pool surround, which when dry were very sharp, as the Latin name indicates. When small bare feet emerged from the water, they often were distressed by the very sharp dry leaves as they stepped on them. [Yvor] Winters refers to all three types [live, black, valley] in his elegiac nature poem "The California Oaks”.” He is, I believe, prematurely anxious about their survival, when he writes:

 

“Then the invasion! and the soil was turned,

The hidden waters drained, the valleys dried;

And whether fire or purer sunlight burned,

No matter! one by one the old oaks died.

Died or are dying! The archaic race--

Black oak, live oak, and valley oak--ere long

Must crumble on the place which they made strong

And in the calm they guarded now abide.”

 

“The California Oaks” seems not to be available online. You can find it in The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1999), which has a wonderful introduction by Pinkerton; and in Yvor Winters: Selected Poems (ed. Thom Gunn, Library of America, 2003). In the poem, Winters speculates on the possibility that Chinese explorers visited California late in the fifth century A.D. Here are Winters’ first four lines:

 

“Spreading and low, unwatered, concentrate

Of years of growth that thickens, not expands,

With leaves like mica and with roots that grate

Upon the deep foundations of these lands . . .”

 

Helen continued: “Thousands of all types growing in the hills around Woodside and in the Stanford hills, and elsewhere on the SF Peninsula are still flourishing as far as I can see. However, Winters might be even more pessimistic about their future had he known about the recent epidemic of the fatal ‘sudden oak death’ disease, Phytophthora ramorum, which has spread like a plague through the oaks in San Mateo county (where we lived). Nature is never done changing, is it?”

 

Some of us feel a peculiar kinship with trees; in my case, oaks, with their strength and vulnerability. A character in Walter de la Mare’s novel The Return (1910; rev. 1945) says:

 

“After all, what is every man? A horde of ghosts – like a Chinese nest of boxes – oaks that were acorns that were oaks. Death lies behind us, not in front – in our ancestors, back and back until . . .”