The Humming Tree

A short essay on a tall tree

“I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow,” Thoreau once wrote, “to keep an appointment with a beech tree or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.” I smile to myself cranking the bow of the Little Dipper east around the tip of Basswood Island for no other purpose than to say “hi” to one of my own favorite trees, an “old acquaintance” in the Apostle Islands.

It is a White Pine, perched almost defiantly at the island’s very northern edge, too tall, too big, too proud to be so close to the edge but there nonetheless. Once the monarch of the northwoods, the white pine whispering its song on a windy lakeshore seems quiet and peaceful but it is the tree that began a revolution.

Before the Boston Tea Party, before the Declaration of Independence, American settlers were angered by the British government for their habit of claiming all the largest and best white pines, emblazoning them with a mark known as “the King’s Broad Arrow” claiming them for use in making the masts for the tall English war ships. It so angered the Americans that, although few history books remember it today, one of the very first flags of our Revolutionary War bore the symbol of a white pine as its crest.

Illustration of the flag, Chase & Sanborn Coffee Company American history booklet, 1898

But it is not revolution that draws me to this tree, or even its defiance. I come to listen. Situated on the point, this tree is exposed in all directions to the wind, an instrument of the breeze. And so, when there is a breeze, any breeze, the tree literally hums, yes hums. There is no other way to describe the music of the wind through its long, slender needles: a sound like the vibration of harp strings: “Aeolian” from the Greek god of the winds, Aeolus.

If there is such a thing as celestial music, a universal soundtrack of the heavenly bodies whirring through space, this may be as near as us earthbound creatures will ever come to hearing it, and could it be more beautiful than this - cut the engine, open the coffee and slow myself enough to hear it: the music of the spheres, the orchestra of the air, the simple beauty of a white pine humming along at the edge of an island.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted).