I climbed it once as a boy. A grapevine as thick as my scrawny bug bit arms seemingly dropped from the clouds and made a vertical trail that came close enough to the first fork to give a child a seat in the sky. Something grew in an accumulation of generations of raccoon shit- I don’t recall what, raspberry or mulberry- but I do remember marveling at the arrangement, thinking it must be the biggest tree in the world that it grows things in its branches.

The settlers called them pigeon oaks- their great wide crowns and sweet acorns making them a favorite of the passenger pigeons, the last of which died alongside the last Carolina parakeet in the Cincinnati Zoo while the world filled trenches with mustard gas and the bodies of boys.

What it must have been like to come across a flock of parrots half again bigger than blue jays, adorned in emerald cloaks and rainbow helmets. No one alive can tell me.

At best, I can say I rested once in the branches where once they perched- several centuries of light and air and water accumulated into limbs closer to stone than the things from which they are made. Today, in this old shade, it is as clear as creeks following gravity and leaves reaching for sun that nearly all of human progress is hubris, or something worse.