The lakes of northern Wisconsin are surrounded by the bystanders of time from the tiny seedling to its cousin the sapling all the way to trees whose growth rings would take days to count to reveal its age.
Trees young and old are subject to the constant forces of nature and time. Drought, ice, snow, lightning, tornadoes and wind shear can bring down one tree or many. The trees along a lakes shore that succumb to these powers and land in the water are no longer living but are still apart of life, they are ghost trees.
In its life the limbs of a tall white pine is where an eagle rests as it surveys its territory or a branch of an oak could be where a squirrel builds a nest. In death the tee that falls and remains near the shore becomes a place for a family of ducks to preen and rest or a spot for a turtle to sun itself.
When I snorkel past these ghost trees they look like prehistoric beings and I recognize that they have become a tangle of life. Frogs, toads and fish use the trees branches to suspend their eggs.
Bass build their nests under the sunken fallen trees and use it as protection while guarding their eggs.
A bryozoan attaches itself to a now leafless limb and begins to form a volleyball sized colony that will be broken apart by the waves of a fall storm to form other colonies next year.
Time, winter storms and shifting lake ice causes the fallen trees to lose their leaves and limbs and they sink lower into the water. The changes to the ghost tree attract new forms of life like the fresh water sponge with tiny green fingers that wave at me as I snorkel past.
A few years ago I came across a long-standing White pine that had sheared off from its base. The tree had been a fixture on the shore of that lake for so long that it would have taken 3 of me with arms outstretched holding hands to circle it.
The great tree now lay from where land met water out into the lake where its crown now reached out with half the tree above the surface half bellow in 20 feet of water. Time had removed the needles, smaller limbs and most of its bark but the larger limbs still held it up on the surface of the lake years later.
I snorkel to it a couple times a year and I try to make my body one with the tangle of limbs and be as still as they are and let my eyes be my only moving function and my mind pauses as I wait to see what might reveal itself. Pan fish are usually the first come out from hiding in its limbs.
Averse to being seen walleyes materialize from the depths and under the crown a musky appears like out of a dream to see what I am.
If light can be both a particle and a wave, lichen are mutually algae and fungus, water can be liquid, solid and vapor and a tree is beauty, home, shelter and food in life as it reaches for the sun and shelter, sanctuary and ghostly beauty in death am I more then I seem?
