Telephone Pole and Oak Tree

In the spring, a new road was built. 

           

Bulldozers and tractors of no small size tore up the prairie grass and wild flowers.  When they were finished, a new patch of bright black asphalt lay, suddenly, sodden and shimmering in the cool afternoon sunlight. 

            A week later, the telephone poles were put in. 

            More tractors, more men with their trucks laden with brilliant orange reflector barrels, swarmed over a road so new, the lines hadn’t even been painted down the center.  They dug at the brown earth with their shovels and steel-toed boots, erecting towering wooden masts as evenly spaced as fence posts; each one still glistening with a sappy, molasses coating that smelt of benzene and pine needles.  The wires went up, and the linemen’s cleats covered the naked poles with a rough bark of soft mud.

            When all the men had gone, the only sound to mark their coming, besides the hum of the Mid-Western breeze blowing over the telephone lines like harp strings, was the occasional gust of a semi moving too fast on too small a road with still no paint to part the way.

             A crow, perched at the top of a telephone pole, sat watching one of those semis come, with a tiny acorn in his beak.  The rush of wind as it passed startled the bird, and he dropped his treasure as he took flight. 

            The acorn fell and settled in the bare groove of a tire-tread.

           

Years went by.

            A tiny sapling began to grow in the thin, sun-dial shade of that telephone pole.  When she was old enough to speak, she asked the trunk beside her if they weren’t, in fact, related.

            “ME?” the telephone pole laughed, “related to YOU?  What ever gave you that idea?”

            The sapling swayed, surveying the vast, empty prairie all around them.  Like a race of giants, the row of telephone poles lined the fantasies of the young tree.  Titans in an arbor mythology, she wanted, desperately, to grow to be just like them.

           

Years went by.

            The sapling sprouted branches and broad leaves, but still swayed, green and pliant as a blade of grass, with the roll of every passing car.  Finding courage, at last, again to speak, she asked the telephone pole, if they weren’t related, then where had she come from?  There were no other trees there besides them, and, certainly, the sapling reasoned, we must have come from somewhere.  

            “Certainly YOU came from somewhere,” telephone pole sneered.  “I came from a field full of pine trees as tall and straight as I am.  We were planted and tended and looked after, grown and pruned and fashioned by hand to be knot-less and rigid and perfect.  We grew that way, until the plaid-shirted, bearded lumberjacks with their sharp axes chose only the best and the most beautiful to become what we are now; to be cut down, stripped, planed, polished, and replanted exactly here, for a single purpose.  To do a job.  I hold these lines, and these lines, in turn, allow the twitter of human conversation to transcend this vast land.”

            “YOU,” he said, “have no purpose. You are an accident!”

           

Years went by.

            The sapling had grown into a thick oak tree, just tall enough to reach her branches up and touch the wires; to feel them tickle the leaves in her lush, green foliage. 

            In autumn, she turned a beautiful, sunset shade of burnt-umber and orange, and then, to a crisp, clean brown, before all her leaves fell and danced in the whipping prairie wind.  Squirrels had burrowed homes in the knotted, twisted spaces between her thickest branches, nesting in stockpiles of acorns gathered from the grassy floor where they fell.

            “Look at you,” telephone pole said. “All you’re good for is making a mess fit for a vermin.”

           

            That fall, the linemen returned.  They came wearing bright orange gloves and helmets and carrying chainsaws.  Hardly the bronzed-god lumberjacks the oak tree had long dreamed of -- rather than come to bring her to a higher purpose -- they instead hacked off her topmost branches. 

            When they were done, the oak was a stunted, bald version of her earlier self.

            Telephone pole looked on and smiled. 

           

            That very night, an ice storm came.  The usually calm Mid-Western breeze became a swirling black monster.  The wind howled and lashed at them; steely icicles formed and the lines snapped under the weight.

            The entire row of telephone poles were pulled from the ground, yanked by their wires like a sea anchor; flattened like a collapsed fence.

            Telephone pole screamed as he fell. 

            Oak tree caught him. 

            All night, she held him by her shorn branches.  She hugged him to her trunk through the storm until it was over. 

            The linemen came back the next morning; ice, everywhere, sparkling a kaleidoscope in the cold, calm light of sunrise.  All the other telephone poles around them had snapped and broken. All except for one:  the men gently lifted telephone pole from the oak tree and righted him, set him back in his place. 

            When they’d gone, the telephone pole turned to thank the oak tree for her help...

            ...But she hadn’t survived the storm, either.  Her trunk was split down the middle by the added weight from all the ice and shock of catching telephone pole.

In the spring, five new saplings sprouted.