The Giving Tree

THE BLUFF ABOUNDS with beautiful trees. More than forty species of them are rooted here, which makes for an impressive and mesmerizing roll call. There are maples, pines, lindens, and firs. Cedars, sycamores, hemlocks, and sequoias. There are pear trees and cherry trees and strawberry trees. Madrones and catalpas, basswood and ash. Together they help create a year-round feast for the eyes, with an astonishing spectrum of green in the spring and bright, candy shoppe hues come fall. But among this motley bunch of flora, one particular tree stands out for its size, beauty, and placement on campus: the mighty oak between the library and the Pilot House.

In a time so bent on dividing us, it’s refreshing, and maybe even subversive, to focus on the things we have in common, like this tree, which has stood on this spot since before the invention of the steam engine, thermometer, and piano, long before the Founding Fathers inked their names to the Declaration of Independence. It’s a thought that can short-circuit the mind: everyone who has graduated from UP, alive and dead, has spent some amount of time under this tree.

“You get a lot of interaction here,” Nathan Hale, the senior grounds manager, told me. We were standing under its generous shade, and he pointed out how it forms a kind of frescade or covered walkway that opens out onto the quad. “It’s a hub and point of reference. And it does have a room feel to it, under this massive canopy. But it tends to play second fiddle and fade into the background.”

Like a parent’s love or your own good health, the tree is easy to take for granted. Given how central it is to life on campus, though, it deserves to be seen, deserves to be named. So grab a branch, shake hands—reacquaint yourself with the Pilot Oak. It’s an Oregon White Oak (Quercus garrayanna), the primary native species of oak in the Pacific Northwest, and they can be found from Southern British Columbia all the way down to the hills above Los Angeles. Its bark is the color of newspaper print and it’s as deeply furrowed as crocodile skin. The rounded lobes of its leaves look like itty-bitty mittens. In the right conditions, like the well-draining soils of Oregon and Washington, they can grow to over ninety feet high, with a spread of over 125 feet, and live for more than 500 years. They evolved millions of years ago to be resistant to both fire and drought and are the cornerstones of incredibly diverse habitats.

“Once these are established, there’s not a next phase to the development of the ecosystem,” Hale said. “They’re the ultimate level of tree evolution.”

The Scottish botanist David Douglas (of fir fame) gave the tree its scientific name back in the 1820s, but Indigenous people had lived alongside them for thousands of years before that. They relied on native plants, like camas bulbs, for food and medicine and these flourished around groups of oaks, called savannas. They also support an array of wildlife like deer, bison, and other smaller animals, and because they don’t grow on top of one another, they leave open sightlines for easier hunting. For these reasons, tribes cultivated oak savannas through periodic burning. As often as every three years, they would light controlled, low-level fires, a practice that suppresses the growth of invasive species, revitalizes the soil, encourages seeds to germinate, and reduces the possibility of catastrophic fires. During the nineteenth century, explorers took note of this sophisticated landscaping during their surveys of the area.

A journal entry from the time records a characteristic impression, as well as the time’s prevailing prejudices: “The smooth prairies, dotted with groves of oaks, which in the distance look like orchards, seem so much like old farms that it is hard to resist the illusion that we are in a land cultivated for hundreds of years, and adorned by the highest art.” As Euro-American colonists established themselves in the area and manifested their destiny, they thinned the oaks in favor of arable farmland. They also suppressed fires, which allowed faster-growing species like Douglas fir to flourish. In so doing, they forever changed the area’s prevailing ecosystem.

“This tree and others on The Bluff appear to be what remains of an oak savanna,” said David Taylor, associate professor of biology and UP’s resident botanist. When I asked him to age the tree, he estimated that it’s around 300 years old. “The farmers who developed the land seem to have left a row of them, probably for shade.”

And sure enough, in the earliest pictures we have of The Bluff, you can see the Pilot Oak and a couple others forming a line off to the north. They’re already mature in the pictures and you can see rows of crops growing where the Buckley Center and Shiley and Dundon-Berchtold now stand.

“No one knows the history this tree has seen,” said Larry Scruggs, who worked at UP from 1975 to 1996. As the director of auxiliary services in 1994, he filed an application with the city for the Pilot Oak to become a Heritage Tree. This municipal program recognizes remarkable trees around town with a commemorative plaque. There are now 400 trees on the list; the Pilot Oak is number twenty-seven. “By preserving the tree, we’re preserving this history. It’s important to take care of the old things.”

Scruggs was part of a team that oversaw significant changes to UP’s campus, including the building of the Chiles Center, Franz Hall, and the new entrance. As the school’s footprint expanded, the tree went from marking the edge of campus to being at its heart.

“It’s really the long-term vision,” he said, marveling at the campus now.“We needed something the campus rotates around.” That vision took a lot of hard work to realize and was never guaranteed. When he started working here in the seventies, the school was in a state of “financial exigency” and was on the verge of closing. But the community, like the tree, had the strength to weather adversity.

“There was a collective spirit of ‘We’re going to do whatever we can to keep this place going,’” he said. “That deep sense of camaraderie, that’s what this institution is all about.”

Given the oak tree’s resilience and its ties to the distant past, it’s easy to understand why so many ancient mythologies and religions used them as symbols of strength, nobility, and wisdom. The word “druid,” for example, roughly translates to “oak-knower.” Those that remain on campus are the descendants of trees that once presided over a vastly different order of life. They’re great repositories of memory, and the Pilot Oak’s ongoing presence here can inspire a dizzying wonder.

“I think wonder is a powerful bridge between science and faith,” said Shannon Mayer, associate professor of physics and new co-director of the Garaventa Center for Catholic Intellectual Life. “But it takes intentionality to be present with yourself and the world.”

For the past several years, Mayer has developed the habit of paying attention by taking long walks with her dog through North Portland. During these constitutionals, she tries to remain open to unexpected gifts, like encounters with a red-tailed hawk, a raccoon, or the knotted whorl left where a tree has lost a limb. On these walks, she formed a bond with another Oregon White Oak that was also on the Heritage Tree list—there are eight of them in St. Johns. She’s drawn to these trees, in part, because of the ways they change throughout the year.

“It’s a reminder that there are seasons designed to be fruitful and flourishing and others that are of loss and letting go,” she said. This is true down to the way oak trees reproduce, through a process called “masting.” They might kick out a modest number of acorns for several years in a row, but then they’ll generate a massive crop, according to some signal we don’t have the ears to hear. It’s hard to resist the metaphor: don’t we, too, go through lean years? Aren’t we sometimes overwhelmed by a sudden and surprising bounty? Don’t our spiritual gifts bear fruit according to an unknowable schedule?

“A lot of the structure of the tree, a lot of its growth is hidden work,” Mayer added. “It’s like that in our own lives, a lot of our own growth is hidden work.”

Technically, the only part of a tree that’s alive is the outermost ring under the bark, called the cambium. During the spring, the cells inside the cambium carry water and nutrients throughout the tree, but as the growing season ends, they shrink and harden into wood. This wood, the embodied past, then supports the tree as it continues to grow into the future. This hidden work mirrors the life of a university, where current students and faculty are sustained, directly or indirectly, by the past. It’s impossible to calculate the number of friendships that have started under the Pilot Oak, the number of couples who first met under its generous canopy. What joy, what heartbreak it must have eavesdropped on.

“Buildings come and go,” Nathan Hale said. “But this tree’s still here.”

With the right care and the proper stewardship, it could live for another two hundred years. Time! It branches and ramifies—constant dropping wears away a stone. Every hundred years, they say, all new people. What will those people, who are starlight and quantum foam now, make of this tree? As the soil of our culture continues its relentless turnover, as souls come into the world and go out of it like great tides, traditions are supplanted and replaced. During the pandemic, for example, Hale and his team stocked up on Christmas lights. Figuring everyone needed a little extra cheer, they strung them in the Pilot Oak. They’re now four years into this new tradition. The way the trunk twinkles and the spectral branches glow can astonish you, like a vision. It’s a reminder that, while we can and no matter the season, we should be reaching for the sky and feasting on light.

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CHESTON KNAPP is Portland magazine’s senior writer and associate editor.