#19 BURNING
The great oak at the town-square burns a deep red dappled with shades of orange and the occasional streak of yellow. Bills have been passed to make sure that buildings around the square are nice and low – so that the sun can light up its wine dark leaves into a proper autumnal fire every year. It burns, a colossal, heatless pyre, from September to mid-November when its foliage dies off, only to return in late spring. Like a phoenix.
Which is why the town built around it is called Phoenix. Not the Phoenix in Arizona, mind you. The heat there would have stumped its growth as to make it a sad, unremarkable, displaced thing. No, this Phoenix is in northern Winsconsin, nestled in a crook off the Walloch River. It was first built after the man Gavin Walloch himself discovered that the river’s waters were great for the brewing of hearty winter ales, and the leaves of the local oaks would do fine as bittering, back in the early 1800s.
Walloch was struck by the beauty of the biggest of them oaks, and had the first settlement built around it. He was Phoenix’s first mayor, and the name was voted on by the people themselves. Walloch family’s brewery, to this day the biggest one in what became a proper brewing town, is called Fire Tree Ales because of it — not because of the Bible story. The oak is on the town’s flag. Some people wanted a proper magical bird, but old man Walloch had to draw the line somewhere.
Most people in Phoenix, Wisconsin, have memories of playing under the great oak’s boughs as kids, or having picnics there. The 12th mayor was shot dead under it, but the people don’t talk about it, save for those looney local historians. Many first kisses were had under it too, and many beer festivals were planned around it, with it’s great spread of just over 19 meters providing shade in the warmer months when it’s still light green.
When thunder roars and lighting unexpectedly smites it one fateful October evening, turning it into a proper pyre, there’s panic, and running around with buckets, and crying. A little boy has to be held back, screaming bloody murder that his big tomcat cat Monster is up there (it’s not, but they only find out after many hours in which the boy appeared catatonic).
So sudden was the fire and so complete it’s onslaught that the firemen of Phoenix can’t really save the oak. Dry foliage catches fire much too easily. When they are done and the town-square is a awash with ashes, the lighting-split trunk further breaks at gravity’s behest and a good chunk of charred oak falls off to the townsfolk’s horror.
Current mayor Jemima Steenkamp is at a loss for words that night, and no one really expects her to do much. She disappears into the back-lanes in her truck. A spontaneous wake is held, one with without candles, around it. People shout their stories of good times under the oak’s shade. The local historians take pictures in-between sobbing. The Wallochs bring a truck of ale and serve it for free to whoever will have it, and many a crafty person comes to offer up a piece of art featuring the tree or made with bits taken from it. It’s a sight to behold. It’s a mess of ugly-crying and booze and song.
Jemima has to push her way past the crowd, until someone shouts about their chainsaw wielding mayor coming through and the people make way. She takes the blades to the stump, a good meter above the roots, some way below the fuming split. Some oldsters and woodsmen and the local botanics enthusiast nod approvingly and their whispered comments ripple across the amassed townsfolk. Some begin clapping.
It is known that such trees can, and often do, regrow from stumps.
