The Ballad Tree

Day 16 - June 6

Here’s a bittersweet memory...

The Ballad Tree rises from Chapel Hill, a majestic live oak whose spreading green canopy shades nearly half the hill’s flattish summit. It is older than Texas, older than the most venerable musician who ever played the Kerrville Folk Festival, older by far than the rustic wooden altar that nestles under its sheltering branches.

There are bells on the hill: a tuned pipe wind chime of monumental size, suspended from a strong oak limb. Across the way, a brush arbor shades several rows of plank benches.

From Hot Jams & Cold Showers, © 2000 Dyanne Fry Cortez

We still have Ballad Tree sessions at 3 o’clock on weekend afternoons, but the tree itself is long gone.

When my book rolled off the press in 2000, the big oak was already in trouble. A lightning strike in 1993 sheared off a massive side limb, exposing heartwood in the main trunk. When it came crashing down, the limb smashed the altar and a section of brush arbor. And the wind chime went tumbling.

Kerrverts saved the wind chime and built a new redwood altar. Tom Frost agreed to underwrite a restoration effort. A plan was made and a crew of volunteers, headed by Nancylee Kennedy, went to work to try and save what was left of the tree.

... and found themselves battling not only the injury, but also the disease known as oak wilt, which was spreading across the Hill Country. Kerr County was one of the hardest hit. Staff worked through the summer, dragging hoses up the hill to supply water and nutrients to the Ballad Tree. Ranch maintenance nursed it along for years, shifting song circles and church services to different parts of the hill to avoid trampling the root zone and give the tree some breathing space.

I’m not sure when they gave it up as a lost cause. But one day I climbed the hill and found nothing but a dead, grey stump where the Ballad Tree used to be.

It’s an impressive stump, to be sure. A couple of feet across, maybe 15 feet tall, chopped off just above the point where it started to divide and form a crown. On the left side I can see a stretch of white plaster where the big limb came off, where a tree surgeon tried to patch the trunk back together. The grove of smaller oaks on the downhill side of the altar, where they hung the wind chime after the lightning strike, isn’t looking too good either. Oak wilt is bad stuff, and drought has done its damage, too. What used to be the coolest, shadiest part of the campground, that zone along Sudden Creek that I called The Grove, is now called the Argon Forest, because those giant oaks, too, Are Gone.

On Chapel Hill, time has moved on. The ranch hosted a Sustainable Building Colloquium here in 2003. Participants built several interesting structures, including a small stage up here with a whimsical living roof held up by limbs of old trees. A new arbor has gradually taken shape, with wooden benches and smoothed-off sitting stumps. It looks nice, but to me it never feels as cool and shady as the old arbor did. I find it difficult to stay through a whole ballad tree session in the heat of the afternoon. Even the Sunday morning services can get awfully sweaty.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I don’t take heat as well as I used to. Maybe it really does get hotter than it used to: we've had several record-breaking summers in Texas this past decade. All that may be true, but I also suspect the old Ballad Tree to some extent made its own weather. Trees are great natural air conditioners, better than any shade structure humans can build. I think it gets hotter on this hill because that giant oak is no longer here.

There’s a new tree growing between the stage and the seating arbor. A chinkapin oak, planted several years ago. I came up for a ballad tree the first weekend of this festival, and noticed how all the singers stood under that tree and ignored the stage. Clearly, this oak is the new Ballad Tree. It’s already taller than the leftover stump of the old one, but it’s got a long way to go before it can change the weather on this hill.

It’s fun to wonder if people will still be playing and singing under that tree when it’s big enough to throw a major patch of shade.