It should no surprise that the eastern hemlock was my favorite tree growing up. It ALWAYS provided shade for those trout streams that I fished with my father, ALWAYS embraced the cold and deep swimming hole where I swam as a kid, and ALWAYS with verdant comfort dotted the winter landscape scenery of the Blue Ridge Parkway. When they began to die off in my backyard of Haywood County, I felt for the first time my own impending mortality. What I had expected to be an ALWAYS in my life, was now an unsettling ponderance.
For any of you – and there are many – who have been a guest of ours at Big East Fork Camp, you have ritualistically been shown the champion hemlock in the front yard and by the creek. Measuring over 16 feet in circumference, it exceeds the recorded state champion in Macon County.
A photograph can be for ALWAYS, and this I did last year knowing one day, the tree would be no longer. At 7:14 a.m., Saturday September 8, 2012 (my wife K.B. and I were asleep on the front porch) and after several days of steady rain, the champion succumbed and fell into the river with a crack and a thundering crash.
Our tears fell into the yard with the rain.
