Louis Roney: A timeless wonder gone

“Time is the fourth dimension,” said Albert Einstein. Slide the hand of time back and forth and see whole civilizations come and go. Europe 1500 B.C. was replete with Bronze Age farming cultures. In Greece, civilization had arrived with its ancient cities and empires. Egyptian culture reigned. Stonehenge was new in England. Across the great ocean to the west lay the immense body of land we now call North America. In the middle of a southeastern peninsula, now called Florida, sprouted at that time, a small cypress tree.

In the 21st century A.D., “The Senator” — as the 3,500-year-old cypress was called — flourished on a short road off the highway to Sanford. Remember, “The Big Tree” was 1,500 years old when Christ walked the earth.

When we had out-of-town guests we often drove them out to view this marvelous spectacle whose age dwarfed almost every other living thing in North America.

I have seen the Redwood Forests in California that contain other trees of great age and distinction, the oldest being some 2,220 years. Once or twice in the ’30s, when I was a kid, I rode my bike from Winter Park out to the Senator and sat down on the ground beside it, feeling an awesome insignificance in the presence of something that had survived a virtual eternity. It occurred to me that the house where I grew up was only a few thousand yards from one of the oldest living survivors of life on this Earth. The Big Tree was sacred in the eyes of most of us Floridians who knew it and loved it. Florida’s Senator was, after all, the most venerable living thing any of us would probably ever see.

Every earthly scene of natural tranquility and reverence, unless protected by law, seems fated to destruction by the crassness of the human animal.

And so, as was reported on Jan. 16, a harebrained female whose name is known confessed to starting a fire at the foot of the Senator in order to help her see how to use her drug paraphernalia no less! With her cell phone, the woman took a picture of The Senator burning, perhaps as a souvenir of the one consequential thing she had done in her life. She departed as the fire was burning the 3,500-year-old helpless monarch to the ground.

What can you do with a person who has destroyed something of unimaginable value, something irreplaceable? A national treasure! The historic tree was a worthy possession of all humanity — the guilty woman? Don’t ask!

What would you suggest doing to someone proven to have destroyed the Pyramid of Giza or the Sphinx? I wonder what was in that woman’s mind as she watched her evil work destroy a unique piece of world history.

If she were to be punished in a way commensurate with the terrible wrong she has done, what could her rightful punishment be? Her lifespan is at best a mere 100 years — what is that in comparison to the Senator’s 3,500? The woman’s court date is “pending.”

Trees have always played a special role in the life of mankind.

“God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but in trees, flowers, clouds, and stars,” said Martin Luther.

Joyce Kilmer wrote, “Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.”