I never thought much about trees until I visited what was once determined to be the oldest tree in Lake County.
Ever since, I’ve been looking at trees across Northwest Indiana with a deeper appreciation.
“I can’t imagine not having that tree in my life,” said Becki Richards, who lives on 57th Avenue in Merrillville.
She lives next door to a bur oak tree that could be up to 500 years old, according to an expert from the Indiana Department of Natural Resources. In 1991, that tree measured 145 feet high, nearly 18 feet in circumference, and a limb spread of 101 feet, according to news stories at the time.
Going back decades, an artist’s rendering of the tree once graced National Geographic magazine, in November 1955.
“It has been a landmark for as long as I can remember,” said Richards, whose family has lived in the house next door since 1953. “Since I was a child.”
She grew up with that mighty oak in her life. Through childhood, into adolescence and adulthood, and now into her senior years.
“I’ve tried to climb it with no success,” Richards told me Friday, on Arbor Day.
There is no better day to write a column about this old tree, I told her after walking around the massive tree near her busy street. I’ll bet tens of thousands of motorists have zoomed past this tree without knowing they’re driving past a piece of living history.
Well, living at one point.
“The tree has been dead for over 10 years,” Richards said.
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It looks dead, especially this time of year with no leaves or foliage of any kind. Just bare twisted limbs jutting in every direction.
The property owners, who asked to not be identified, are working on plans to have the tree cut down and donated to tree farms, they told me.
The couple doesn’t have the same kind of intimate relationship with the tree that Richards has had for more than 65 years. As a girl, she played around it. As a woman, she sat underneath its sprawling shade. As an older woman, she uses it to offer directions as a local landmark.
“I’m very proud of her,” Richards said, routinely giving the tree a female pronoun.
A man named Barney Golkowski once owned the house on the spacious property where the tree has lived for centuries, she said. He died in 2001.
“Shortly after Barney died, the tree started to die as well,” Richards said.
In the 1950s, Golkowski co-developed the Bon-Aire subdivision in that area. That old bur oak tree has been a conversation piece for neighbors ever since.
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I rode my bicycle to find it, so I could stop for a few minutes to admire it.
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Like I said, I never much thought about trees and their meaning in our lives. Not until Richards shared her story with me. But, I later learned, it turns out that many of us have had a connection to a special tree in our lives.
Mary Schmich, my columnist colleague at the baiduhai, recently wrote about an Arbor Day online project hosted by the Morton Arboretum and Openlands in Chicago.
It asks residents to share their favorite “Tree-mendous stories about the trees that define our communities, our memories, our landscapes, and our lives,” its website states. (For more info, visit www.mortonarb.org.)
“We love trees for a lot of reasons,” Schmich wrote in her column. “They’re living calendars, a means of tracking time.”
After visiting that oak tree next to Richards’ home, I flashed back in time to a colossal willow tree in the back yard of my childhood home in the Miller section of Gary. It was my favorite tree that I would play on or around for hours at a time.
That poor tree was split into a V, which I used as a makeshift football goal post to practice my field goal kicking. It also served as an automatic double in pickup baseball games in my backyard. And as badly needed shade on hot summer days.
I forgot all about that weeping willow tree until I visited the dying oak tree in Richards’ neighborhood. All those recollections came rushing back to me, rooted by fond memories from childhood.
After I snapped back to present time, I did some research into trees. Not from a sentimental perspective but from a practical one.
“Trees add value to your home, regulate the temperature of your neighborhood, and provide food for wildlife,” states the website ArborDay.org. “Trees have been called the ‘low tech’ solution to energy problems. Wherever you plant trees, they help fight climate change.”
I also found out that the net cooling effect of a young, healthy tree is equivalent to 10 room-size air conditioners operating 20 hours a day. And one acre of forest absorbs six tons of carbon dioxide and puts out four tons of oxygen, enough to meet the annual needs of 18 people, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
If you plant a tree today on the west side of your home, in five years your energy bills should be 3 percent less. And in 15 years, the savings will be nearly 12 percent, according to the Center for Urban Forest Research.
Also, a mature tree can often have an appraised value of between $1,000 and $10,000, according to the Council of Tree and Landscape Appraisers.
Who knew? Not me.
Plus, America’s official national tree is the oak tree.
“Having oak as our National Tree is in keeping with the wishes of the hundreds of thousands of people who helped choose this striking symbol of our nation’s great strength,” said John Rosenow, president of The National Arbor Day Foundation.
For Richards, that mighty oak has been a striking symbol of strength for most of her life.
“Thank you for helping give her a proper goodbye,” she told me.
