Tree Bones

Tree Bones

From twenty paces away, they
looked like a pile of bleached and whitened bones lying
washed up on the small limestone seawall along the shore
in the Erie Basin Marina on Buffalo's waterfront.
The "bones were splintered and of various lengths. They
lie like a whitened pile of pick up sticks, interspersed
among the various flotsam and jetsam that had drifted
into the harbor washing in with the continuous linear array of
Winter storms that blew in regularly off volatile Lake Erie.

As I got closer, I saw that they
weren't a huge pile of bones, from some long ago
disaster, but whitened and sun-bleached shards of trees
that glistening brilliantly in the afternoon sun. My
mind immediately drew the contrast between the giant
leafy umbrellas of Summer and Fall and their shattered
and splintered remains lying now before me. I wondered
from what shore these "bones of trees had fallen and
drifted here. Are these detritus from the Canadian
shores to the North or wooded remains from Pennsylvania
and Ohio?

A more knowledgeable person could
have inspected the grain of the "bone and deduced the
various types of tree involved. To me however they were
just the dryed-out remains of generic trees. Once they
had stood tall, along the banks of Lake Erie, providing
shade and beauty. Each of these leafy monsters had
probably weathered a thousand storms over the years.
During each tempest, swaying to and fro in that
frightful "oaken ballet of a tree caught in a windy
storm. And then,with time and age, the roots dying and
the pulpy fibre of wood drying out, one of these "arms
had snapped from its juncture to the mighty wooden
edifice, by the force of the wind and waves. It had
then floated off in the raging storm to arrive here on
our shore, desolate and dessicated.

Perhaps some young person will
collect these bones for the beauty of their withered
driftwood form. Others may use them to kindle a blaze
somewhere. Most of the "bones however will stay locked
in their forlorn embrace, decorating the shoreline with
their glistening white appeal until another storm washes
them away to a different shore or drags them to the
bottom of the seething sea.

All of these thoughts passed
through my head in a flash as I walked along this wind-
swept and storm tossed seawall. Treasures like these
arrive daily here and wait for the right pair of eyes to
discover them. Perhaps I should walk this way more often.

-30-

(426 words)

Joseph X.Martin