Twenty years ago, my friend Doug admonished me. “You always speak in superlatives—slowest, meanest, hottest.” He didn’t follow up with any reason why I shouldn’t, so here we are today, the ugliest trees in the world. They sit just outside my neighborhood. Across rural route 116 bordering the Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary. Seven of them line the road. Gnarled trunks reaching up into stubby half-amputated fingers—fat and short, stretching towards God, praying for a merciful death. A million sticks—pencil-thin branches—halo the trees, sprouting out in all directions from the deadish wood of last year’s growth. I suppose it may look nice when spring comes, bright green bushes of fresh, young leaves. But right now, it portrays desolation.
When I became an adult in 1980, I registered for the draft. Only eight years prior, people my age were still called up. They stepped out of their life as they knew it, and went to train for the next war. The war that didn’t arrive for eighteen more years. Vietnam, not even a decade done, was not in my consciousness. Korea, portrayed weekly on my favorite TV show MASH, struck me as a story from another era. When I thought about war, I thought about World War II. My steady diet of war movies from the sixties and seventies and Hogan’s Heroes reruns solidified my belief that real wars happen in Europe.
Hardly anyone attends the Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary any more. When I moved here seventeen years ago, enrollment was maxed, the parking lots brimmed, the clothes lines overflowed with drying laundry. Five years ago, they stopped charging tuition, it’s free. But the school is three quarters empty; it looks abandoned. I guess religion is a dying field. As we drove by the Seminary’s ugly trees this morning, I asked Eli, “Why don’t they just don’t cut those trees down.” Yes, I’m the adult, he should be asking me that question, but he was driving. This gave him an air of authority.
“Maybe they can’t afford it.” He’s an astute kid.
As an adult, my most enduring WWII image comes from the book Slaughterhouse Five. Kurt Vonnegut describes a band of war prisoners (he was one of them) emerging from a mercifully spared basement room into the remnants of firebombed Dresden, Germany—a real-life event that killed almost twice as many people as the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Nothing remained. In my mind’s eye, I envision ottoman sized chunks of blown-up buildings and burned and mangled tree trunks. That’s what war looks like to me.
I drive past those ugly trees at least twice a day and probably up to eight times on a hectic Saturday afternoon. I never focused on them before. They look like death, or in the final throes of life, just prior to death—the death-knell, if you will. They look burned up and bombed out. Death was on my mind this morning. My father gave me a call, as he does pretty much every time something astonishing happens in the world. “The TV news reminds me of the war reels we used to watch at the movie theater when I was a kid.” He referred to the way people got visual news before television was common in most households. “This looks just like the bombing of London.“
I wonder about Putin’s aggression, his end-game. I don’t understand his motivation, and what he hopes to achieve. He sees himself as a macho-man, and such men like to flex their muscles and show off, but this show is murdering innocent people and upending the delicate world balance. I can’t guess how this will end. It’s one more event to be added to the extensive list of recent happenings that I don’t fully understand.
Already, it turned into an us versus them American political standoff—that happened before the first bomb dropped—so you can add that to my list of confusion as well. But the most baffling part of the whole episode is it looks like Putin might get away with it.
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Previously Published on jefftcann.com
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Just Click’s With A Camera on Flickr Public Domain
