The Tree of Life (for Susan)

"Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven." - Rabindranath Tagore.

About This Tree

You already know how I feel about trees. I am a tree-lover from way back. And frequently, on these pages, I share photos of some of my favorite trees.

This is one of them: the red elm that sits behind the pavilion at Penn State's Arboretum. I have only shown it to you once before, on a very cold February day beneath skies that were a bluebird shade of blue.

When I am at the Arboretum, I am usually focused on other things. The lily pond is a favorite. And the new children's garden that opened last summer is pretty spiffy too.

But recently, I've been drawn back to the red elm. I suddenly realized one day last week that I had never photographed the red elm from the side or back, only from the front. So I set about to rectify that!

I've made a few visits to the Arboretum since then, and on several occasions, have stopped to take pictures of the red elm from the side and back. I don't know if other people do this, but I often spend time practicing a shot several times before posting it here.

I go on location in advance and set up the composition of the shot, shooting it six ways to Sunday, reviewing the shots carefully to decide what the best angles are, and then I wait, hoping for an amazing sky to actually photograph the scene and post it here.

On this morning, the sky was blue and the sunlight was coming through diffuse clouds, and I was able to shoot from both a side view and the back view, directly into the sun, without getting those little green sun flares that can ruin a shot.

A large black bird had just been sitting at the tippy-top of the tree, but it flew away. And I had just watched a squirrel speed along the tree trunk, stopping to nibble on the buds that are just starting to come. And I was remembering a friend I had never met.

The Rest of the Story: "That Tree"

I try to keep Blipfoto as my "happy place." I don't usually tell sad stories here, but the time has come to tell this story. So let me begin at the beginning.

More than a year ago, I "met" a young woman named Susan online through a local photographers' Facebook group. I post pictures there from time to time, and Susan joined the group and friended me; through a friend of a friend, I think. In her profile photo, she had red hair, freckles, and a great big smile.

One of her postings asked for recommendations on cameras. She was not a techie and did not want something complicated or expensive. I recommended, as I always do, the camera that I use, the Canon Powershot SX 50 HS, which is simple to use and (if I dare say so myself) takes beautiful pictures.

Susan picked up a model of the same camera I recommended, and began posting photos to the group, occasionally asking for advice on how to do certain things. I remember that she planned to attend a macro photography workshop at the Arboretum one Saturday, and she asked where to find the macro setting on the camera.

I had never used that setting before, but I looked back through my manual and explained to her where to find it. And I began experimenting with it myself, becoming obsessed for a several-week period with making macro photographs of water droplets on flowers. (Yes, I've gone through an extensive "morning bumblebees sleeping under blooms" phase too; that one lasted pretty much all last summer.)

I remember posting albums of large groups of photos, and Susan would sometimes go through and "like" every single one of them. And I learned from her about a wetland along Bald Eagle Creek, near where she lived, and made plans to visit it (but didn't finally get there until the fall, long after she had gone).

I noticed that her postings began to include lots of Arboretum photos and sometimes pictures from Millbrook Marsh. So perhaps she was taking some influence from me as well, as these are favorite local haunts of mine, and I did and still do post photos of them often.

Susan was a lover of beautiful things, and this tree was one of them. A book came out about "That Tree,"  "a lonely bur oak" that photographer Mark Hirsch documented obsessively, on a daily basis. Susan joked that the red elm behind the Arboretum was "That Tree" for her. And she photographed it often.

In late spring of last year, Susan's Facebook postings began to take a negative tone. She stopped posting photos. She eventually deleted her Facebook account.

Then in July came the very bad news. Susan, age 37, had apparently been having some emotional problems. Her mother and father were driving her to a mental health facility on July 4, when Susan leaped from the moving car on Interstate 80 and disappeared into the woods.

While a thorough search effort was mounted, Susan was not located, though her credit card, driver's license, and cell phone were found in a nearby barn. Receiving a report of someone who looked like Susan getting into a truck further west, the family expanded their search, put flyers everywhere, set up a Facebook page for the search. But there was no luck. Susan did not come home.

On this day, the search for Susan ended. The local police reported that they had found Susan's remains not far from the location where she jumped out of the moving car on Interstate 80. The family released the news on Facebook, thanked everyone who had helped to look for her or posted flyers, and asked that those wishing to remember Susan consider making a donation to the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

It seems like an odd coincidence that I was at the Arboretum photographing Susan's tree on the very morning of the day that her remains were discovered. I was standing there, watching the light and the sky, thinking about her, and wondering where she was and if she would ever return to see "her" tree. So Susan, this one is for you.

There is one last little chapter in the story of this tree left to share. I work in Outreach at Penn State, which includes the public TV station, WPSU. Every spring, they sponsor a photo contest, and the winning photo is made into a poster that is given to donors as a thank-you gift.

Two springs ago, a shot of this tree was the winning photograph. It was taken by a local photographer named Kristina Kvasny. You can view it on the WPSU poster contest page. (And yes, somehow I came by a copy of the print, and so that photo sits, framed, in my office at work.) The title of the photograph is The Tree of Life.

And so, somehow, this is how I myself have come to think of this tree, as a tree of life. In so many ways, it is not unlike ourselves, with its feet firmly grounded in the earth, but also . . . reaching for heaven.

The soundtrack for this image is a lovely tune by Toto, called I Will Remember. Farewell, Susan, friend I never met. We who are left will do our best to take care of "your" tree, in remembrance of you.

This post is in honor and memory of Susan Bachman.