Live-oaks

Ohio axes can’t stand up to local Beaufort live oaks. The first time I tried to split a round slice of live oak, my Ohio ax began chipping. Little flecks of metal came out of the head of the ax with each blow. "Gee," I thought, "the metal must have grown brittle during the move to the south." The face of the slab of live oak barely showed a dent–and I am a fairly accurate, hard-hitting wood-splitter. I went and got another Ohio ax, a newer, better one. The blade of the second ax did not chip, but it turned into a wavy mess. Again, the wood was undented. This was the hardest wood I had ever encountered, in thirty years of splitting. Both axes were ruined. I was impressed.

It turns out that live oak is the densest, hardest wood known in North America–harder than black locust, more difficult to split than ironwood. Three weeks of occasional cutting will wear down the teeth of a chain-saw chain to little nubs . When you do manage to cut off a slice of live oak and put it in a fireplace or wood stove, it burns forever. Among woods, a slice of live oak is the closest thing to coal, in enduring burn and in BTU output. If you lay a fire with live oak in your fireplace, you need to stay around for hours to wait for it to finish burning. If you want an overnight burn in your wood stove, put in a medium-sized live oak log about ten PM and it will still be burning at 8 AM. As far as I can tell, the wood burns without popping; it doesn’t spit coals out on to the rug; it just glows quietly.

I see the local mossy live oaks as a national treasure, as did the outgoing Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, who visited Beaufort in 2001. The oaks are the ones in the pictures of all sea island houses, draped with Spanish moss and covered with lichen, with long and slightly sinister fingers groping upwards. They seem to signify Southern decadence as in Tennessee Williams’s plays or Edgar Allan Poe stories, but they are also eerie and beautiful, as if encouraging ghost story writers and painters at the same time.

Old Ironsides, the U.S. S. Constitution, the historian Larry Rowland tells me, was built of slabs and whorls and gnarls of live oak. The ship-builders had to make a template for the ship they wanted to build and then take their blueprints to the forest, finding the live oak with the perfect bend in its elbow, the one that would fit a bend in the ship’s skeleton. Then they had to saw out that branch and soak the wood in "pluff mud," the yucky mud found out in the marshes next to the channel, to impregnate it with salt and age it at the same time. I can’t imagine how they sawed out the planks, but they probably had to be hand-hewn rather than split. The planks were so strong that cannon balls (like my Ohio axes) just bounced off the wood.

Beaufort has beautiful old houses, but they would be nothing without the complement of live oaks and moss hanging from them. There is even a Live Oak Society, to support their continued existence. The oaks are so important even to local architects and builders that they cause new housing starts not to have gutters. Local live oaks and pines shed leaves and needles timed so as to clog any gutters on any houses surrounded by live oaks and pine trees–which are most of the houses in Beaufort. Live oaks are evergreen, but they shed their leaves. Their name is taken from the fact that they always look alive.

Beaufort might have much less to offer without live oak trees. If you walk or bike or drive down a street in the old parts of Beaufort in the early morning (try Greene Street, aiming toward the water), and you haven’t been here long enough to be jaded by the sight, the combination of live oaks covered with Spanish moss, low country front-porch architecture, and the peculiarly bright light of early morning is enough to stop you in your tracks with wonder at that combination of natural and man-made beauty.

Live oaks can be ancient: they outlive humans by 300 or 400 years. They are so venerable and beautiful that they look as if they should be part of a Japanese painting. They can live right up against the shore line and take all the abuse of the weather, because they are among the few deciduous trees that can withstand salt spray. It takes the most powerful of hurricanes to blow one down, because their root system spreads out to the ends of their branches. Even if you cut them, they come back strong from their stumps, as suckers. Because they are so persistent and even invasive, they are kings of the sand dune and the salt marsh, and they squeeze out longleaf pine. The largest live oak on record is 11 feet in diameter, and 55 feet tall. They protect us and our houses against all but the worst hurricanes. Ferns and lichens grow on them freely, giving the bark varying shades of green and gray. Birds love to live in any vacant knothole: you may even see a bluebird in one. You can picture a colonial panther or cougar draped from one of their fingers, and human-built swings hang from their strong limbs. Today I saw a great blue heron enjoying the hospitality of a gently sloping live oak branch while standing on one leg and itching it with the other.

Humans used to eat live oak acorns and also feed them to their pigs, but deer, quail, squirrels, and wild turkeys eat them still. As climbing trees, live oaks are almost as good as old magnolias. Southern planters used to plant magnolia and live oak in tandem along the stately avenues leading to their mansions.

A live oak is a tree to love. For greenery at Christmas, mistletoe grows in the topmost branches, and boy hunters used to shoot it out of trees with shotguns in order to be able to kiss girls. Perhaps the city planners of Beaufort should hire some latter-day Druids to come worship around some of the most impressive trees of the Low Country. Druids like mistletoe and oak trees.