This past week, a friend, who is a lover of trees, butterflies, hummingbirds and all things in the natural world, asked if I knew anything about the live oaks lining Airline Road near the Humane Society.
You might have driven through them on the way to Fairview Baptist to get the COVID vaccine.
The half-mile-long rows have merged to create a tunnel, as live oaks are wont to do. The effect is dramatic. For the 30 seconds or so it takes to pass through them, you are enshrouded by nature.
Another such environment can be found in a remote corner of Noxubee County on Boswell Road off Magnolia Drive. That gravel way is thick with arching bodocks (Osage Orange, Bois d’arc). These strange, gnarly trees with their thorns and bright-yellow heartwood have a gothic spookiness in contrast with the more finely textured quercus virginiana, or Southern live oak.
As it happens, Beth has a vivid memory of the day the Airline Road live oaks were planted.
It was 1973 and she was working as a picture framer at Backstrom Glass, which was about 150 yards east of the oaks.
She had run into the late Bill Backstrom at a dance at the Trotter, possibly the annual Greek Festival. He’d asked what she was up to, and she told him she was waiting on a response from the federal government to a job application to teach art at the high school on the Choctaw Indian Reservation in Philadelphia.
“While you wait, why don’t you come frame pictures for me?” Bill said. Bill was like that, a maverick.
At the time Beth was running around with a guy who had just taken up photography, and when Bill asked his new hire for a picture to use in a newspaper ad announcing her arrival, a picture taker was close at hand.
Beth put on a long dress, and the photographer posed her in a rocking chair next to a wall in his grandmother’s house. A small framed picture — the photographer’s baby picture taken when he was 1 year old — hung on the wall.
I was mimicking the pose James McNeill Whistler used with his mother. Whistler called the painting, his best known, “Arrangement in Gray and Black, No 1.”
Bill, without comment, used the picture in his ad.
In those days, Beth rented the cottage in the backyard of the home of Jane and Goodwin Myrick (now owned by Katherine and Michael Kerby). As it was then, the yard is dominated by a gigantic umbrella magnolia.
Beth remembers Columbus in those days lush with azaleas, dogwoods, wisteria and large, old trees.
I’d go out of my way to drive down Seventh Street, she remembers. Ridge Road, College Street and Waterworks, too. Much of that beauty, the trees especially, has fallen victim to storms, tree cutters and indifference.
All was not beautiful, however. Bleak is the word she used to describe the strip of Airline where Backstrom’s Glass was located.
Then, one morning on the way to work, she saw city workers planting shoulder-high trees along the road’s right of way.
“That’s going to take a lifetime before they get any size at all,” she remembers thinking.
The best part of a lifetime has passed and those small trees have become a natural wonder.
Beth says she thinks about those young trees of long ago every time she drives through the oaks.
“It’s one of the lessons of life,” she says, “how a small act can, with time, grow into something magnificent.”
Do yourself a favor and drive out Airline Road and go through “the tunnel.”
It might make you want to go home and plant a tree.
You’ll enjoy watching it grow, and chances are it will be a thing of beauty in less than a lifetime.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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