In this short documentary, filmmaker Jen Proctor tells the story of the Tappan Oak, a tree that predated white settlement in Ann Arbor and the campus that grew up around it, and the human actions that marked its last decades of life.
From Filmmaker Jen Proctor:
Trees are one of our world’s most mysterious and ineffable beings. They inspire wonder, wreak destruction, and live longer than our mortal human minds can fully fathom. They bear quiet witness to the subtle changes and rapid evolution of the environment around them, recording wet winters and dry summers, lightning strikes and bug infestations, air pollution and scars inflicted by people seeking to mark their place on this earth.
German writer and poet, Herman Hesse, captures the remarkable ability of trees to record history in his book Wandering: Notes and Sketches.
“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”
When the University of Michigan’s Tappan Oak - an ancient, wizened tree named for the university’s first president in 1858 - came down in 2021, it revealed the stories it had recorded in its 350 years of life.
As Hesse describes,
“When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured…
…A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
I was drawn to the stories that branch out from the Tappan Oak because of their connection to a longing for home. The stories contained in this film, fundamentally, are about a need to belong, to put roots down, to finally find sanctuary in being nothing but what we are.
This film represents both singular and collective stories. A lone undergraduate student communes with a tree to help him feel connected to a college campus from which he felt alienated. A professor collaborates with students to create a sense of belonging to Michigan’s natural environment. A society of students fosters belonging by performing a ritual around the tree to induct members into their community. In creating belonging for a select few, however, the society excludes and demeans others who similarly seek to belong. An activist collective responds by effecting change over decades to create spaces for belonging for all people on the campus.
All of these stories bear a relationship to the great oak, an unwitting but central figure in their narratives.
A final word from Hesse:
“In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree.”
Like trees, these stories share the desire for their subjects to “fulfill themselves according to their own laws,” to feel as at home on campus as the Tappan Oak did, and to create that feeling of home for future generations.
