CATEGORY: SAILING
PHOTO: THE CAMPERDOWN ELM

Friday Harbor on San Juan Island in the U. S. San Juan archipelago was the most important port in all our years of sailing.  After leaving Port Townsend, it was always the first stop.  Often, especially if we only had two or three days, it was our only stop.  It just took a couple of hours to get there on a north flowing tide.  It was the first place we sailed after I met Bob in 1966.

At that time it was a very small, quaint little seaport village.  There was one restaurant and a grocery store.  The restaurant served the best sour dough pancakes in the world; I’m sure of it.  There was also a post office, a ferry dock and a few other commercial buildings.  Just up the main street from the down town was a house that had a Camperdown Elm tree in its front yard.

A Camperdown Elm is a tree that has very large leaves for an elm and has writhing, corkscrew-like branches that come clear to the ground at their outer tips like a cover-you-to-the-toes umbrella.  The first time I walked up that street and zeroed in on that tree, it was about eight feet high.  I had done a lot of studying about plants.  I knew what Camperdown Elms were.  I knew where there was one in front of a restaurant in North Portland that should have been on the National Register of American Trees—trees to be saved at all costs—if there had been such a thing.

I stood on the Friday Harbor sidewalk admiring that tree.  Then I moved so that the tree was between me and the owner’s house and sneaked inside through the hanging branches.  It was like being in a holy place with green stained glass shingles for leaves.  Furthermore, like the one in Portland, it had been grafted in the “old mode”—meaning it had been grafted at ground level, so that its entwined trunks, as well as its branches were writhing, giving it the look of those storm-twisted trees in Japanese wood block prints.

At some unfortunate time in the 1960’s, some nurseryman somewhere, followed by all nurserymen everywhere, decided that more money could be made if a Camperdown Elm could start out six feet high instead of at ground level.  They had started grafting the twisting branches onto straight trunks five or six feet high.  The trunks, which were American Elm stock, would get very big just like American Elms everywhere, at which time it then looked ridiculous as a base for the delicate, twining branches of the Camperdown.  These trees looked like oversized water hydrants that had sprung a leak at the top.  It was the end of the Camperdown Elm as a magical tree.  

The Friday Harbor tree kept growing and putting out new cascading branches.  Every time we went there I would again sneak inside.  Then the house got turned into a restaurant.  The new owners cut an entry in the branches of the tree, built a bench around the inside edge and put three small tables inside.  The trunk of the tree was off-center, so it lent itself to being a single room.  We never failed to go to that restaurant when we were in Friday Harbor so we could sit inside “our” tree.

The last time I was there, the house had been torn down and a new restaurant had been built.  A wishing well had been added beneath the tree in front of it to set the stage for the restaurant’s name: THE WISHING TREE.  The tree had been pruned so that its branches no longer came to the ground, but spread out in a shallow dome, high enough so that patrons would not get leaves in their hair as they followed the walkway under it to the entrance.  It was still a glorious tree, but I missed the delicious feel of being embraced by its encircling arms.