A little description, perhaps. This is a dead cedar tree, rising from the waters of the full-pool lake. Unlike yesterday’s tree, this tree has no hope of surviving now. Even though the lake is likely to recede and leave this cedar back on dry land, it’s run its race.

This cedar began growing on the hillside below the shelter not long after the lake was originally built. This bit of hillside was bare rock, part of a broken ledge that was scraped clean by the bulldozer and that I was certain couldn’t support any plant life. (It’s covered with grass and blackberries now. You can see a bit of it in this photo.) The cedar can’t be much more than three years old, but it was already about four feet tall, growing in what has to be the thinnest of soils.

Something about this tree — perhaps its tenaciousness or its nice shape — kept me from cutting it down. I thought about festooning it with ornaments for a future holiday picture but never managed to get the job done.

Now, as you can see, the full pool that the lake has achieved (twice!) this year has lead this tree to its end. Were the water to remain at this level, the dead cedar would provide shade and shelter to small fish, but I would never be happy seeing something like this breaking the surface of the water. (The dozer man had suggested leaving several standing dead trees in the lakebed since they would provide habitat for the fish as well as water birds, and while that was a tempting argument, I opted for the clean, unbroken expanse that I have actually seen once or twice.) So the next chance I get, I will cut down this tree and carry it deep into the forest where it can live on for all time as a skeleton and perhaps provide shelter for the forest critters.

And so, change continues at its slow and sometimes surprising pace at Roundrock, and every now and then I get a chance to document it.

Missouri calendar:

• Fall webworms begin web building.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 1:01 am and is filed under Green Things, Lake & Pond. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.