Life After Nexcom

Garry Oak

One of the first things I fell in love with when I stepped foot on Whidbey Island was all the TREES! There were trees everywhere, and it reminded me of the mountains where we went camping. I had not been here until I was 8 years old, but as soon as we moved, I felt like I was home.

We lived in a 1 bedroom apartment over a garage, while we looked for another place to live. This garage was on land covered with Fir and Cedar trees, and you could not see the road from the house. I loved it! We only lived there for about a month before we moved even deeper into the trees. We next lived in a 3 room log cabin way out in the wilderness about 10 miles from Oak Harbor, and down a long un occupied road. There were trees everywhere! Dad took us out that Christmas to chop down our own tree. Can you imagine! Walking through a forest full of trees all so tall you could not see the top, and the woods so full of the smell of Christmas, all the time. That year we brought home the scrawniest Charlie Brown tree, but that is because we found it and we liked it and we were excited!! Just Dad and 2 little blonde girls with long pigtails wrapped in plaid wool coats and scarves, dragging home this scrawny tree proud as peacocks. It was heaven.

After about 4 months we moved back into town to be closer to school and to work for Dad, And I expect to be closer to people for Mother. Oak Harbor was just a tiny little town of about 4000 people at that time, and the area where we lived was FULL of big huge Garry Oak trees. They were MAGNIFICENT! We would ride our bikes up and down the streets, looking at the big Oaks. The park was just across the street and down the hill a block, and it was solid Oak Trees! We played on those trees by the hour! We picnicked under them, and we were happy.

Time passed and we again moved out into a new development called Penn Cove Park, and into a 3 bedroom house right on the beach. Trees all around there too, Tall Fir trees that we could climb and play in. And trust me we did. We would climb clear to the top of the fir trees and swing back and forth to see how far over we could make the top go. We had no fear then, and did not even think about the top breaking off and throwing us the 50 feet to the ground and certain death. Nah would never happen.

As the years passed, I grew very fond of the big Garry Oak trees in the old part of Oak Harbor, and grieved every time one of the big old ones would fall in a windstorm. The Garry Oaks don’t sway in the wind like the firs and alders do, they just snap off a branch or two, or split and fall.

The Garry Oak is not a native species to the Island. They were brought here by the Haida Indians hundreds of years ago. There is a big spring on the Navy Seaplane Base that once was part of Oak Harbor, and the Indians would use that as a camping place and eat the acorns brought with them from Vancouver Island. The acorns were roasted in an open fire and then cracked open. The ones that were not eaten grew, and spread outward from the Big Spring, and Up the hill and over the top into the place now called Oak Harbor.

Through the years, the founding fathers have died off and sold their land to new developers and most of the Garry Oaks were cut and removed to make room for the town. Houses were built around the remaining ones, and through time people have cut them away thinking that the old brittle wood would fall during a storm and destroy the houses they so carelessly built in their shadow.

There are still a few Garry Oak trees in Oak Harbor, but not nearly as many as there used to be, and the ones that are there are usually the really old, big ones. The giants that people have left are truly awesome. Their big gnarly spreading branches making great dark skeletons in the winter sky. I love them so. They have been there for hundreds of years. Not many things any more can hold that honor. The fir and cedar trees were cut for lumber, and firewood, but the Oaks are too tough to chop.

One of the oldest Oaks is the one we now call the Post Office Oak. It is at least 300 years old, and has cracked and lost so many of it’s branches. Some of the town Council people want to take it down before it falls and hurts someone, and have hired an arborist to tell them that it has heart rot and does need to come down. There are others on the council that have listened to the same hired arborist tell them that the oak is diseased, but can survive many more years yet, if the roadway over it’s roots were to be removed and allow water to get to it like it should.

People have talked about what should be done with the wood once it is removed. Some suggestions were to cut the oak into giant slabs and hire a wood carver to carve historical scenes into it to be placed about town. Not a bad idea, but surely a final one for said Oak tree.

Lastly it has been decided that the Oak will be saved as long as it can, and the road re-routed around the tree, and a park like atmosphere be placed around it. I like that. There are so many old things that we have destroyed in our few hundred years on this continent. There are no more HUGE fir trees, no more 10 feet in diameter trunks to remove; No more trees so big you could cut a tunnel through them and drive through and still not destroy it. No more trees so big that you could raise a family in it’s stump. All that is gone. We need to try and save what we can. We need to preserve what is left of these rare Garry Oaks, and try to encourage them to reproduce, and hopefully our future generations will be able to see why this town was called OAK Harbor.