A few years ago I dated a girl and we had both really gotten into smoking weed - very original, I know. We would spend a lot of time in the park, just passing a pipe back and forth between each other. In particular, we would do this a lot sitting on a big rock in front of an old, gnarled pine tree that stood off to the corner of the park.
We had dozens of deep, personal, even ugly conversations under that tree. We apologized and forgave each other for a dozen things. We were at home in the nature together. We would often veg out for twenty to thirty minutes under this tree’s shade that summer, listening to the tik-tik-tik of the squirrels and other unidentifiable critters on and around the tree, storing and eating nuts and who knows what else. I would often whisper out to them pst-pst-pst, like you might to a neighbourhood creature you’d like to feed bread scraps and/or pet, but the animal noises always stopped after that.
One night when she brought me there I checked out the tree in detail. It was pretty beautiful - admittedly I was stoned, but I’m also just one to enjoy a simple slice of nature when I can. The tree had, all around its lower half, a series of holes and stumps where limbs used to be and were, over many years, removed by park landscapers. Some of the stumps were fresher and I could see the inner wood of the tree branch that’d been severed. The older stumps had grown over – have you ever really looked at a grown-over branch stump? The way it grows over, it starts looking a bit like a pimple. The rim is raised and swollen. Then over time more rings grow over the stump from the outside. It ends up looking like some kind of gross ragged wound, or a very wrinkled eye. In some of these grown-over stumps, I couldn’t see inside them. They just looked like holes, leading only to black. I sat back down, patting myself on the back for learning how trees heal, apparently.
A couple months before she and I broke up, we were sitting in front of the tree getting high again. On this particular night the street lamp nearby us in the park was turning on and off every few minutes, and it seemed to be flickering a bit as well.
When the streetlamp was out, the night was pitch black. It wasn’t scary - we both were comfortable in the dark, finding it less stimulating and more relaxing than bright daylight. We both had smiles on our faces as the only light in front of us was the dull orange of glowing embers in our pipe. I could tell because for a split second, both of our faces lit up in stark white light. Just a flicker of light in the blink of an eye: it could have even been from the broken street lamp, but we both could tell from the shadows it cast that it came from behind us.
We immediately stood up and yelled. “Who’s there?” Our phone flashlights came out of our pockets just as fast. We scanned the area, paying particular attention to searching behind the tree. We checked in the bushes nearby, and we even checked in the tree branches. Nothing but a couple startled squirrels. We walked home early that night, but we didn’t think much else of the incident. I talked myself into a cope explanation like “must’ve been a trailcam” or something.
Around 3 months after the girl and I broke up (unrelated to the tree; we loved all of our time spent there.) I went back to visit the tree in the daytime. Not for any particular sentimentality; I just felt like stopping in the shade on my walk back from the grocery store. Because we didn’t want to attract cops, that girlfriend and I would only smoke under this tree at night. So when I stopped at the tree in broad daylight, it was the first time that I could see all the color and detail on it. A beautiful tree still, sure, but I noticed something else: Within one of the deeper cracks in the tree’s bark, a rusted metal hinge. Sure enough, a meter or so below it was another hinge. A door! I couldn’t find a handle but that rough bark was knobby enough to pry open. What I saw inside completely changed how I will remember my summer under that tree.
Stood up inside the tree, in a rugged carved hollow, was the mummified corpse of what looked like a person. Their naked grey skin, stretched over emaciated bones, was covered in acne, weeping sores, and pressure ulcers. A putrid stench wafted up from the cavity near their feet, and countless hardened, soiled rags stuck to their body and the wood around them. I couldn’t see their face; they had died facing away from the door, looking at the screens of half a dozen portable cameras, each mounted to and pointing out of a different hollow, overgrown branch stump. Still recording.
I ran away as fast as I could and never came back. But now I’ll always know that we really did make a lot of memories under that tree. All three of us.