The elm trees in Central Park have a special meaning for me. In ranks of four or five they go from near the band shelter, past the new statue of the pioneers of women’s rights, the statues of poets and Shakespeare. A wide walkway goes down the center. Merchants sell art on canvas and metal, buskers sing, but mostly people stroll. The majestic height of the canopy filters out the harshest sun and mutes any noise from the metropolis just a few blocks away.
I love that these trees still exist and I understand the care and diligence that makes their presence possible.
In our yard there were five elm trees. Two in the front yard joined the elms of our neighbors to make a cathedral like arch over the street that extended over most streets in our little town of 3,800. In the back yard the elms served as handers for the clotheslines. Their canopy was high enough that home run derbies with whiffle balls and plastic bats seldom interfered. Next door our neighbor had the remnants of a well left over from the days when this had been a pasture. Over looking the well was a giant elm. Its trunk was twice the thickness of any nearby tree. Its canopy was enormous, leaning over all the adjacent yards.
The trees gave shade in the hot Kansas summer. We sat on the porch swing in the afternoons in the coolness they provided as the day turned into evening and the fireflies came out.
I was ten or twelve when we took a car trip to New York, and as we came through the midwest, we noticed that the elms trees were dying. Whole parts of tress had brown shriveled leaves and there were crews of men crawling around tress bringing them down branch by branch. Whole towns and neighborhoods were bare of trees. The houses, stripped of the sheltering gothic arches, looked forlorn, poor and shabby.
We were seeing the effects of Dutch elm disease, killing every elm tree in its path. Within one or two years the blight came for our trees. The majestic tree by the well was first followed by the rest. Itinerant tree crews set up in town and started the process of cutting down every blighted tree in town. By the end of fall the crews were gone and so were all the elm trees.
Now our little town looked all the other towns we had seen on our trip. Without the elms we were naked under the beating sun of summer and exposed to the cold blasts from the north in winter As I was coming into adolescence I realized that my town was poor and run down, a backwater that I would leave as soon as possible.
I am grateful that I can see these majestic giants with their corkscrew limbs climbing to great heights above me as I stroll down the path. The last of their kind perhaps but loved more for it.