July, 1943. The Leopold family, after a thunderstorm the previous night, comes upon the wreckage of a lightning strike on the sandhill by the Shack: “a great slab of bark freshly torn from the trunk of the roadside oak.” A fortuitous black oak acorn, dropped upon the soil in the era of covered wagons, was lucky enough to survive the ferocious appetite of rabbits and “garner eighty years of June sun.” But that summer storm has left exposed “a long spiral scar of barkless sapwood, a foot wide.” Taking stock of the damage, Aldo confesses to the journals that he “fear[s] the old tree will not survive.”
The following winter, as the family pull their saw through the trunk of the oak, they peel back the chronology of Wisconsin's evolving landscape and environmental history, embodied in each of the tree’s rings. Leopold's reflections are immortalized in the February essay of A Sand County Almanac: “Good Oak.”
August, 2024. Leopold Foundation staff trade small talk around the freak storm the night before. With no indication of it in the forecast or on radar, the unexpected booms of thunder jolted some of us from sleep. A few folks report hearing an unusual crash, as if something exploded.
Not long after, Foundation site manager Arik Duhr informs us that an oak was struck down by the Shack. Just 50 feet from the old chicken coop’s front door, a tall bur oak has been stripped of almost all its bark, wood shrapnel shot up to 80 feet away, ground littered with debris of the tree’s outer skin. Fissures run up the length of its slender trunk―standing just so, you can catch the sun glinting through, a mere sky sliver.
We circle like vultures, mapping the carnage; like planetary bodies caught in a supernova’s orbit. The Shack, itself a lightning survivor, bears silent witness to our open-mouthed awe. In this strike it was spared electrocution, but was pelted with flying fragments. Hunks of bark lay scattered on the doorstep; a wood chip sticks to an exterior wall.
A tree’s conspicuousness as a tall, free-standing vessel of moisture makes it a magnet for lightning as it seeks the path of least resistance to the ground. The electrical charge surging through water and sap heats it to steam in an instant, creating pressure enough to trigger an explosion. Trunks can split, bark can fly off, and the tree can suffer unseen internal damage, weakened structural integrity, or zapped roots. Death, too, can be instant, or drawn out over a matter of months as pests and disease take advantage of the tree’s vulnerable state.
While a tree can sometimes recover after a lightning strike, on its own or through human care, the near-total loss of bark and deep-set cracks spelled tragedy for this particular oak. The bark is not only a protective outer skin; its innermost layer, the phloem, is a critical tissue that transports nutrients like sucrose from the leaves down to the roots. If a tree can resprout below its bark wound, the roots―and tree―can survive. In this case, however, the girdling is too severe.
Its proximity to the Shack means we have to act quickly to prevent the weakened tree from falling. Less than 36 hours after the bolt hits, a far-off chainsaw whine cuts through the air, over a mile of prairie and marsh, across a morning of twittering bird song.
~
When we share the news of the lightning-struck tree with our tour guides, most of them respond by asking: “The Elton oak?” They are referring to one of a smattering of oak acorns planted near the Shack in 1938 by famed animal ecologist Charles Elton.
Leopold first met Elton in 1931, at the Matamek Conference in Labrador, Canada. Scientists in a variety of fields, from entomology to meteorology; legislators; journalists; and others came together to exchange information on all things cyclical and understand how the earth’s diversity of repeating patterns interacted and influenced each other. Charles Elton, an Oxford graduate of zoology, had penned the book Animal Ecology a few years prior. The work proved foundational to the field as a whole, introducing important concepts like food chains, population cycles, and ecological niches.
In their expertise and approach Elton and Leopold differed greatly, but complemented each other well. Elton was a man of theory; Leopold lived by field work. Their convergence was that of principle and practice, thought and action. Elton’s ecological theories greatly shaped Leopold’s own ideas of conservation, wildlife management, and his eventual idea of a land ethic. While the conference didn't yield much in the way of particular insights on the planet’s periodic fluctuations, it did gift Leopold a valuable colleague and friend.
In September of 1938, Elton and his wife traveled from their home in England to visit the Leopolds, and they joined them on a weekend trip to the Shack. The Eltons planted a handful of bur oak acorns near the chicken coop to mark their visit. Some of these seedlings met their end between the teeth of rabbits; others were cut down by the Leopolds themselves. Only one remained, and lived to garner eighty-some years of its own June sun.
Much like the memorialized Good Oak, the Elton oak also lived over eighty years before meeting its fate. This tree saw a completely different environmental history―including a very special local history. The sandy, farm-worn soils of the Shack replanted to pine and prairie. The Leopold family returning again and again to this place, for work and research, play and leisure; large gaggles of students and friends brought along, or quieter visits by Aldo, Estella, and the family dog. This tree grew alongside Leopold’s field notes, expanded toward the sun as those notes expanded into essays back in Madison. Could it detect the smoke from the grass fire down the road that tragic day in April 1948? Did it know A Sand County Almanac was finally being published, though without its author in the world?
This oak saw the return of the Leopold family―of Nina and Charles leading the first Shack tours, of the siblings coming together in 1982 to create the Foundation. Early cohorts of fellows, continued field research on the landscape. Was it grieved by the thinning of its brethren pines? Hopeful, even uplifted that they lived on as pieces of one of the greenest buildings in the world―the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center―where people would come from all around the globe to pay homage to Leopold?
What will become of this good oak? To our eyes now, it’s something more than wood. And unlike its predecessor, it has a lengthy right-of-first-refusal list and many interested claimants. Perhaps it will live on as a historical relic, an interpretive accompaniment to the Shack’s storytelling. Perhaps it will be transformed into art by a craftsman’s hand. Perhaps, somewhere down the Leopold family tree, it will be laid down to flame and returned to the earth in ash.
Ten days later, we return. At first glance, it seems little more than a denuded trunk―amputated of its upper limbs, its sprawling, verdant canopy. Its honey skin is graying, its remaining leaves gone brown and brittle. Yet even still, it’s an embodiment of history, much like the lightning-struck oak from eighty years before. It’s a symbol all its own: of partnership, between people, and with the land; of environmental impacts and the changing world around us; and of legacies―Elton’s, Leopold’s, and so many others’.
It invites us to tell a new story, to imagine what the next eighty years could look like―and what the next Good Oak will see.
Historical photos sourced from the Aldo Leopold Archives. All other photos taken by the author.
The Aldo Leopold Foundation was founded in 1982 with a mission to foster the land ethic through the legacy of Aldo Leopold, awakening an ecological conscience in people throughout the world.
