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Health & Fitness

The crazy trip to Gettysburg

There’s no point to an obsession that falls short of being a magnificent obsession. Passion without emotion is silly.

Perhaps the word obsession itself is a shorthand signature to describe ideas we won’t quite understand and appreciate even less.

So I likely was obsessed last weekend, and I might as well accept the term and take pride in it. Or maybe I was just committed to a good Idea I couldn’t shake.

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You judge.

I drove 1,400 miles to find a tree. Seven hundred miles there on Day 1., 700 miles back on Day 3. One day in between to collapse in a hotel room.

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The object of this quest wasn’t even a complete tree, just a tiny sapling barely three feet tall. But there might be only one of them now, and the frail mother tree is located in one place and one place only.

The 300-year-old honey locust overlooks the site in Gettysburg, Pa., where Abraham Lincoln delivered the Address. The Witness Tree has been battered by weather and time, but still hangs on. It overlooks the graves of 3,500 Union soldiers who died only yards from where they are buried.

Over the years, the local historical society in Gettysburg – specifically forester and organization president Bruce Kile – raised saplings from that tree to sell as a fundraiser. There are 1,600 of them sprinkled around the eastern United States. But the National Parks system eventually frowned on the initiative and suggested strongly it end. So the historical society stopped. They don’t want people profiting from items taken from the grounds.

There likely will be no more saplings from the old tree, the last living creature from the battleground where the nation was preserved in 1863. The towering honey locust literally is the last witness, and no one can tell how much longer the tree will live.

So I called and found Bruce Kile. Finding people is one of the things I know how to do.

Are there any saplings left?, I asked in full expectation that he would say no.

One, he said.

Could I acquire it? The answer to that would likely be no, as well. But it wasn’t.

Yes, he said. You can have it. But I can’t ship it. So you have to come and get it.

So I did.

But an obsession is thin and unappealing if it’s not interesting enough to inspire allies. Mine were good friend Jennifer Evans, who gave up a free weekend to help with the driving. The other was Kile.

And a third was Clint Bull, the manager of the Enterprise car rental franchise in Libertyville. When I described my plan, he thought it was such a good idea that he donated a new car for the weekend.

His staff designated me as the official Crazy Tree Guy, a title happily accepted because you can’t fight facts.

I stood beside the Witness Tree last weekend and touched the bark.

Just down the hill was the spot where Lincoln spoke. Visitors gather there. No one pays any attention to the tree, which is just as well. The local historians know the tree well and are not anxious to make it a national celebrity, even though they could.

Celebrity is an ugly burden of our era, and the fascinations of 21st century life are untempered by restraint and wisdom. Better to let the tree live in gentle obscurity than be swarmed by sightseers. The ground around the tree is open and untrampled. The ground needs to breathe freely to keep the honey locust alive.

Children and adult visitors stroll past, most of them only vaguely knowing what happened here, or how we are touched and shaped by legacies we hardly know exist. They visit the cannons and statuary, but they leave the old tree alone in its anonymity.

So now the sapling has been placed in the hands of the scientific staff at the Chicago Botanic Gardens. They will plant it, and raise a new honey locust in my family’s name.

Theoretically, I own the tree, but that’s a description with little meaning. No one owns history. We all are caretakers of the little tree and the memories of what Gettysburg means. Can the nation endure? Can the little tree?

The little shade tree is a gift to the people of Illinois from me and the friends who shared in the weekend obsession.

If you are going to be a Crazy Tree Guy, there might as well be a point to the craziness.

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