How a great oak dies: the Lone Oak of Edwin Way Teale's Dune Boy

The naturalist Edwin Way Teale grew up in Joliet, Illinois, but spent his boyhood summers with his grandparents on their farm at Furnessville, Indiana, in the dune country at the south end of Lake Michigan. The farm was called Lone Oak, after a great white oak that had stood west of the farmhouse for two centuries or more. In his memoir Dune Boy (1943) — more than 100,000 copies of which were printed for American servicemen in the Second World War — Teale gave a chapter to the death of that tree. What he described, in effect, is how a big tree dies, and how much life its dying feeds.

Dying from the top down

Nobody on the farm knew what killed the oak. Looking back as an adult, Teale suspected the drainage ditches cut through the dune-country marshes a few years earlier: by lowering the water table, they may have damaged the tree's fine root tips, and with them its ability to lift sap to its crown.

The death followed the classic pattern:

1. The crown goes first. Sap stops reaching the topmost twigs. The last leaves to open are the first to wither, and death spreads back along each twig and down from branch to branch.
2. Bare limbs stand for years, bleached grey and smoothed by wind, until storms bring them down one by one and the bark begins to break away.
3. Decay moves in through the wounds. A white fungus threads down through the dead wood, following the sap channels just behind the retreating sap. Soft enough to crush between two fingers, it can still work through the hardest wood, because it digests it with enzymes — much as the microbes in a termite's gut do.
4. Each stage brings new tenants. Flickers ("yellow-hammers") chisel nest holes that let in more decay. Bark beetles feed under the loosening bark and leave branching galleries engraved on the wood.
5. The trunk breaks. In a violent Great Lakes winter gale when Teale was twelve, the weakened top snapped off about seventy feet up. After that, the end came quickly; the last leaves and acorns stopped.

A wheel of life

A dead tree, Teale saw, is not an ending but a new habitat — "a wheel of life", in his image, that grows larger as the tree decays:

Underground the same thing happens unseen. The root system — nearly as much wood as the tree above, spreading as wide as the branches — goes brittle and splits as fungus works down into it.

The end of Lone Oak

When Teale was fourteen his grandfather felled what was left, cutting a notch to drop it exactly where he wanted, then working through it with a crosscut saw. His grandmother, who had known the tree since she came to the farm as a bride of sixteen and raised her children in its shade, went indoors with her apron to her eyes. For two winters the seasoned oak fed the kitchen range and the dining-room stove, burning cleanly and long.

A dead tree, the chapter concludes, goes on giving: it enriches the soil and, through the things that grow from it, rises again.

Sources

Written from "Dune Boy: The Early Years of a Naturalist," Indiana Dunes National Park, National Park Service, which presents the chapter "The Death of a Tree" from Edwin Way Teale's Dune Boy (1943). The book is not reproduced here; this is an account of it in our own words.