Up Moses Creek: A bumper crop
Chestnut oak acorns on the top of the pile show their colors. All of them will age to a rich brown.
Burt Kornegay photo
One of the earliest signs of fall comes in late August, when dogwood and black gum leaves, green since spring, begin to show the salmon and maroon colors they are soon to be, and when Virginia creeper vines, hidden in the canopy all summer, suddenly redden, revealing their upward windings through the tallest trees. But the surest sign of fall for me lies not overhead but underfoot, in the form of acorns lying on our trails.
The acorns of chestnut oaks, to be exact. They are the first to fall. They’re also the largest and, in my eye, the most beautiful acorns produced by our different kinds of oaks. In shape, they vary from pumpkin-like globes an inch in diameter to elongated ovals tapering gracefully to points. In color, their shells range from walnut brown and tan to lime green, lemon yellow and orange. One acorn might be painted with all these colors, while another lying next to it is pure yellow all over. The rarest are glossy ebony. I found two of them this fall.
Whatever their color palette, many of these acorns also show a rosy aureola around their tips. With a round belly full of life and a nourishing breast all in one, each acorn looks so beautifully fertile that Becky calls them my “girls.”
These first-of-fall acorns draw my ear as well as my eye. I hear them plummet from the treetops through the leaves below and then hit the ground. They fall to rise. And I feel them too.
Where the nuts cover the trail, it’s like walking on marbles. It almost hurts to hear them crack.
The chorus of a Three Dog Night song from 1969 goes, “One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever do.” Lucky me to have Becky with whom to “do” these beautiful acorns. I seldom come back home from a walk without a handful to show her. Sometimes my pants’ pockets look like a chipmunk’s cheeks after they’ve been stuffed with Becky’s sunflower seeds. This tame man goes to the woods to bring home wild seeds; the wild chipmunk carries store-bought seeds home from our yard. The chipmunk adds the seeds to its winter cache. We pile the acorns on a plate, where they slowly turn a rich brown all over. As the harvest goes on, the rising pile spills onto the kitchen countertop.
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The cup of the chestnut oak’s acorn is as distinctive as the nut itself. You can identify it blindfolded. If it feels deep and has high, thin walls that are porcelain-smooth inside and rise like a teacup to a clean, sharp rim, it’s from a chestnut oak.
Chestnut oaks earn their scientific name “Quercus montana.” In good ground, they grow as straight and tall and with as clear a bole as the scarlet, red and white oaks around them. But when the going gets tough, this tough tree gets growing. The other oaks cede the high ground.
By high ground I mean literally the ground high up on the spine of the ridge, there where the ground is more stone than dirt — and where summer droughts are severest, winter winds are cutting and where lightning strikes. In the Biblical parable of the sower, the unfortunate seed that lands on a rock sprouts fast only to wither away under the scorching sun. That doesn’t hold for the chestnut oak. Its seed, dropped into a boulder pile, can put down a lasting root.
It’s true that when sprouting in such adverse conditions, chestnut oaks grow no more than a few inches a year. But their slow-to-go is large-to-grow over a span of three to four centuries. The wood is close-grained, heavy, hard, rigid, strong. The lowest limbs on old trees are almost as thick as the trunks. These oaks are made to endure.
Still, centuries do not add up to forever. A survey map references a chestnut oak on a knife-like stretch of our ridge as being a boundary tree: “48-inch found marked oak.” An oak of that size must have sprouted when Moses Creek was unbounded Cherokee land. The first time I saw it, my eye was drawn to a ring of big rocks that stuck up on end around the trunk like a crown. I wondered if the tree had pushed them up in its growing. Because large oaks can produce thousands of nuts in a mast year, think of the hundreds of thousands of beautiful acorns this boundary tree must have dropped over its long lifetime — most of them eaten by the birds and beasts of the mountain. But now, instead of spreading out into the canopy of its acorn-producing prime, the old oak I saw had just one limb left. It was still green, and it stuck out horizontally from the trunk. The limb was so long and thick that the next day, when I was standing a mile away across the valley, I could pick it out.
That last limb gave way and fell down the slope a few years later, leaving the tree to stand as a hollow snag. Now an understory grove of witch hazels has grown up, forming a kind of bower or shady walkway leading to the decaying trunk. No acorns lie on the ground.
(Burt and Becky Kornegay live in Jackson County.)
