It’s sunny in South Georgia. I am standing at the corner of Monroe Street and Crawford Street, in Thomasville, staring at a very big tree.
Trees do something to me. Something profound. Don’t ask me to explain this. I can’t.
I have seen the Grand Canyon at sunrise, I have hiked in southern Utah and dehydrated beneath a Western sky, I have ridden Highway 190 across Death Valley in an Isuzu Rodeo with a bad transmission, and do you know what? There were no live oak trees.
And I don’t want to live in a world where there are no live oaks.
The first time I saw this oak, I was a kid with a bladder the size of a teacup. I was every parent’s worst night terror when it came to road trips. I had the urinary system of a gerbil and I required potty-breaks every one to three minutes.
During one childhood trip across Florida, for example, I remember bouncing in the back seat of the family Ford, gyrating my hips, grabbing my
bladder region, and shouting, “I gotta go!”
“Can’t you hold it?!” yelled my father.
“I really, REALLY gotta go!”
My father pulled over immediately, tires screeching on the pavement, a plume of burnt-tire smoke trailing behind us. Transfer trucks honked. Speeding vehicles swerved.
I leapt out of the car and traipsed through an overgrown highway ditch, but it was too late. The Spirit of the Lord had already moved upon me. I was standing beneath a road sign which read THOMASVILLE—28 MI, and thoroughly peeing my pants.
When I got back to the car, my pants were saturated, and my parents were about to die of cardiac infarctions from laughing so hard.
So we stopped in Thomasville to purchase a new pair of trousers.
That day, we kicked around town, eating ice cream, and seeing the sights. The main attraction I remember was the Big…