A Heavy Metal Tree

Trees are capable of weird things. They’re also capable of thriving in the harshest of conditions. One way or another, they find a way to survive: from low, heat-warping deserts to high, blizzard-wracked peaks.

Here in Montana, trees must endure radical swings in weather. Some thrive in poor soil and dry, windswept environments. It’s not uncommon to see a pine tree growing straight out of a rock face. Ponderosa pines have learned to survive where wildfires regularly sweep through the understory.

And trees will find a way to work around all manner of obstacles.

I have a section of a fir tree in my cabin loft that grew around and nearly encased a long-dead three-inch lodgepole that had been blown over and caught up in nearby trees before reaching the ground. Early this spring, we felled a tree near my cabin with strands of barbed wire embedded deep inside it. Somewhere in the early 1900s, the tree had served as a living fencepost.

Yesterday, while splitting the last round of fir I brought home from the cabin, I came across a piece that refused to split. After several minutes of me “going at it like a one-armed man killing snakes,” as my friend Kenny used to say, I finally broke it apart with a wedge and sledgehammer. Inside, I found a hook of metal nearly a half inch thick, likely part of a giant broken nail.

I’m sharing two photographs of the metal. In the second, I held a Cold Smoke beer beside it for a sense of scale.

Freshly Split Wood with Embedded Metal

Cold Smoke and Metal

—Mitchell Hegman