The story that I’m about to tell is a legend. And also it is true.
I first read it in the Next Whole Earth Catalog in one of the giant chairs of my college’s library, the ones by the great windows that looked out over Frenchman’s Bay even when the ice was thick on the trees.
It is a legend because it did not happen quite the way it is told. It is true in the way that legends are, even when they didn’t actually happen quite the way they are told.
The way I heard the legend, goes like this.
New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was founded around the late 14th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top. These might be two feet square and forty-five feet long.
A century ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because they had no idea where they would get beams of that calibre nowadays.
One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some oak on College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked about oaks. And he pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”
Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for five hundred years. “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”
I love this story. I love the jolt of recognition at the end. But my delight at the punchline reveals a cynical expectation. I am surprised … because, unconsciously, I believe that this is not what people do, that we are thoughtless, that it is our nature to use up all good things before we give a care. And I suppose this is not a baseless expectation. Our forebears caught the salmon till they were gone, slaughtering the bison and the whales, leveled the forests, and turned the cradles of civilization into deserts.
But this story reminds us that this is not all we do.
The heroes of this story aren’t named. They are the generations of foresters who kept something alive and kept a promise to future generations, even when the future generations had forgotten it. This story is about how we can look up from our own myopia… about how we can grow something even when the world around us burns.
Look around. The oak beams of new college are everywhere. They are the library that someone started in their living room two hundred years ago. They are the green in the center of town where the people can come together and dance. They are the national parks where you can still find solitude on a mountaintop. They are the old family bible that passed down through five generations that is now in your charge. They are the plays of Shakespeare. And the Pythagorean theorem. And the Greek myths. An oxygen atmosphere. A habitable planet. The very genes in your cells.
All because someone somewhere said, “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”
Someone who didn’t know you … but who knew that you were possible … and that you might need something . . . and so they kept it safe … and ensured that someone else would when they were gone. Like messages sent in bottles across the ocean of time. Hoping to be of use on some other shore.
Look around. You are the college, the beneficiary of your ancestors. But you are also the forester. Look around. What are the oaks in your care? Those who will one day need them–they will not remember your name. But, in their hour of need, they will praise it nonetheless and call you blessed.