Great Barrington — It was John Wheeler’s luckiest lunch break.
In early May, the carpenter left a job to go to his North Plain Road home for lunch. He parked his pickup truck in the driveway, and went inside to make a sandwich. While he was enjoying his meal, a 200-year-old maple tree crashed down onto the truck, crushing the cab.
“It fell right between the power lines and the house, and knocked some trim off,” Wheeler said.
The tree laid its considerable weight on the horn, which wouldn’t stop; Wheeler had to disconnect it. His tools, inside the cab, were mostly destroyed, though he salvaged a few.
Did he feel lucky? He was grateful, he said, not to have been “turned into pink slime,” referring to a repugnant meat industry practice.
The sight of the tree trunk, cradled in the truck’s cab, was, for about a week, an attraction, mostly for children and teenagers who wanted to take a North Plain Road detour.
For two weeks, it took Wheeler about four hours a day of cutting and splitting to take the tree apart. Wheeler had the time; he was between jobs, and besides, he said, had no way to get to one since the truck was totaled. So he set himself up with firewood for next winter. Verizon came and helped, leaving him “the big stuff.”
Neighbor Sean Stanton offered to help take the piece off the truck, and Stanton’s friend, Iovan DeRis, seeing that the tree was hollow, realized that it would be a magical addition to the playground at the Great Barrington Rudolf Steiner School, where his daughter is a student. “I told them to go for it,” Wheeler said. DeRis estimated the tree to weigh about 3,000 pounds. The three men managed to load it onto a trailer, and DeRis and Stanton took it away.
Wheeler, a self-proclaimed “mushroom fanatic” who is president of the Berkshire Mycological Society (which holds mushrooming walks every Sunday at 10 a.m.) said that the tree came down because it was hollow due to spring polyvore, a fungus that takes hold usually in the spring, but is generally found to live all year. He said there was almost no wood left on the tree because of extensive infestation from what is also referred to as tree bracket fungus that attacks the heartwood of a tree, harming its structural integrity. By the time one can see the fungi on the outside of the tree, it often indicates that the inside is in trouble.
“If you have mushrooms growing 20 feet up in a tree, have the tree taken down,” Wheeler explained. All it takes is a good wind, as it did in this case, to knock an internally damaged tree over.
Wheeler said he estimated the tree’s age to be around 200 years old, given that his home was built in 1814.
Hollow trees yield interesting secrets. When Wheeler cut open the tree, “a three-and-a-half-foot ball of guano from bats and squirrels rolled out, frozen solid.”
The demise of the tree also displaced a nest of wood ducks, and Wheeler said he was surprised to learn that these ducks lay eggs in trees. Someone set him straight, he said. “That’s why they are called wood ducks.”
And what of the truck? “Totaled,” Wheeler said, adding that he had comprehensive insurance that covered the truck in the event of storm damage. “I got some money.”
