The Beauty Of Nature

Soon after we arrived in Anderson Valley in 1957, my father nailed a couple of elk horns onto the trunk of an oak tree in front of our house. As elk weren’t part of the natural landscape then (though maybe they were in the 19th century), the rack must have been left behind by the previous owners of the property. One of the horns broke off years ago, but the oak is slowly engulfing the other as it deteriorates; the base and most of the first fork have now disappeared into living wood. The tree — estimated to be 300+ years old — looks little different than it did 50 years ago, but the disappearing horn shows how time passes, even in a natural world where change is slow.