People
are always asking me: Hey, Jon Spruce, do
you wanna hang out?
Sometimes I take the bait.
Contrary
to popular belief, sometimes I do enjoy the sights and sounds of polite
society. It’s fun, sometimes, to take a
break from the solitary sport of tree-hunting, to spend some precious moments,
inside, deep in conversation and company.
Sometimes even the lone wolf comes in from the cold.
But
not today.
No
time, my friends.
Hold
the calls and get out of my way, it’s that time of year again.
According
to the scuttle bucket, the ballots are counted, the results are in and, sure
enough, there it was, waiting for me when I got home.
The
annual best-of issue of Tree Hunting Magazine.
No. Not again.
What
kind of cruel joke is this?
Our
2013 champion? None other than my old
nemesis, Giovanni Arboles, also known as Joey Trees, the self-proclaimed Master
of Disguise…
…but,
sometimes behind his back, we call him King of the Selfies.
It
just ain’t fair.
He
already won last year, for that time he caught both a champion ponderosa pine…
…and
a bristlecone pine, what’s known as the oldest living thing on the planet.
All
in the same hunt.
Yeah
right.
Boy,
this magazine is really going south.
It
used to really be about something. It used
to really be about tree-hunting.
Now
it’s all about selling more issues. It’s
all about who you know. It’s all right
place, right time.
Joey
Trees? Two years in a row?
Say
it ain’t so.
According
to this issue, he won the 2013 title because he caught, all the way back in
February, the biggest blizzard to hit southern Arizona in the last ten years…
…one
full inch of snow.
Lucky
skunk.
And
another thing, when was the last time an urban
tree-hunter was named the champion? I
can’t even remember, it’s been so long.
Every
year, the title ends up going to some bumpkin in a Jeep.
It’s
the same old story: the country mouse versus the city rat.
It’s
not a fair fight.
Country
yokels like Joey Trees already have the advantage.
It’s
a simple matter of geography.
They
get all that open space and all that open road.
They get to go hunting in all that dramatic nature.
Every
tree out there is at home and native, nothing planted by some City Planning
Bureau or through some nameless Street Department, no trees selected by
committee.
Nothing
but country.
Look
at that. No one-way streets. No parking tickets. No infrastructure. No traffic.
No loud music or angry crowds scaring away all the good trees.
Well
shiver me timbers, Joe, there sure are a lot of big trees out there in the
country.
Whatever. Don’t stop the presses.
Man,
I was fired up.
Normally,
I’m calm and collective, cool as a cucumber, but at that moment, I was engulfed
in fit and fury, that old mule kicking in my stall.
I
had just about enough of all the Joey Trees out there, living it up on easy
street, basking away in the wide open country life.
Bunch
of peacocks.
It’s
not hard to catch a good tree in the country.
Takes about as much skill as catching a suntan.
Bunch of tenderfoots.
Only
one thing left to do.
Get. Me. My. List.
Like
most tree-hunters, I keep a list of trees handy…
…a
wish list, really, of all the trees that I’d like to catch one day.
Let’s
see what I haven’t crossed off yet.
There’s
the hemlock and the holly, two evergreens that I’ve always pushed off till
winter. Still got time for those.
There’s something called the bladdernut but I’ve never been able to
track that one down.
There’s
the black locust, but darn it, that’s always been a spring tree for me.
Palm
trees? But are there any palm trees in
Philadelphia?
Hold your horses…right there on the bottom of my list.
The
pawpaw.
The
largest edible fruit native to Turtle Island.
The
only tropical fruit that grows this far north.
It
goes by many names: the poor man’s banana,
the prairie banana and, in some deep
corners of the continent, it’s known as the banango…a
favorite dessert of George Washington, a manna in the wilderness for Lewis
& Clark, as they wrote in their journal: subsisting on poppaws.
The
pawpaw is no stranger to these parts.
Supposedly there’s a pawpaw patch right here in Philadelphia, in the Northeast, right
along the shores of the Pennypack Creek.
This
is it…a tree-hunt that would rival any adventure out there in the country…fire
up the engine and eat my dust…
…Jon
Spruce is on the move, fame and fortune and all that jazz just one autumn
afternoon away…to the largest, most storied stretch of woods in the entire
city, to the Northeast, to the Pennypack Creek…
…like
the old folk song says, way down yonder
in the pawpaw patch!
