March 22nd-Trail Wood

Trail Wood #36 by Earl Plato

Writer’s note: We four Canadians entered Teale’s Trail Wood’s home through the kitchen door that summer a few years ago. We spent several minutes touring the rustic building, The guide said, “essentially it is as they left it.”
We continue on quoting from Teale’s log- Match 22nd.
“we shut the kitchen door and walk past the lilac bushes and long the line of sheds across the Starfield, rising to the elevation we call Nighthawk Hill and then descending to the edge of the woods and the beginning of the Fern Brook Trail.
Only a few steps along the trail before the stepping stones carry us across the brook we stop for a thousandth time to gaze at a double tree rising on our right. Two red maples lift side by side. The diameter of the trunk of one is twice the diameter
Of the other. Fifteen or twenty feet above its roots the smaller one makes a bend like a stovepipe entering a chimney and disappears into the larger tree. What happened to produce so abnormal a circumstance? Nellie and I puzzled over that question many times. Then a forester friend of ours gave us the explanation, He said that among fast growing soft maples a smaller tree sometimes tilts or is blown over so its top lodges in the crotch of an older maple. The latter grows around it. Then the top dies and falls away. Only the lower part of the trunk is left with its upper end disappearing into the wood of another tree.’’
Writer’s note: Thanks Ed. I have seen these anomalies. Now I know the cause.