Your's Sincerely

by John Fiske

I've had a struggle preparing my little column this month. Nothing went quite as planned. It all started with the elm tree, a magnificent one, without a doubt the best one I've seen since my boyhood in England. It stands at the corner of Main Street and County Road, one of the major intersections of seventeenth-century Ipswich, but now safely in the historic district, away from the bustle of the shops and restaurants on Market Street.
Because of its prominent location, I wondered if it might be as old as the town - elm trees can certainly live for 350 years. If so, that would have meant that my local hero, the joiner Thomas Dennis who lived three houses away, had seen it as a young tree. Dennis and I, looking at the same tree - oh, the romance of it!
So I thought I'd try and determine its age, and while I was about it, its height. Google was my first step, and right at the top of the search page were a bunch of scientific sites that solved my problem instantly. To determine the elm's age, all I had to do was bore into its center with a hollow drill, extract the core and count the rings, one for each year of its life. I must complain to Black and Decker: their comprehensive drill kit is not actually as comprehensive as they claim. This was already turning out to be harder than I'd expected.
It seems you need a lot of technology to measure a tree. To determine its height, I learnt, I had to use an Abney hand level, a hypsometer, a transit, a clinometer, a relascope, or a laser. I searched my desk drawer and the back pocket of every pair of pants that I own, and guess what...
Scrolling down the search page I came to sites giving advice to elementary school kids and boy scouts. Relief, my level at last! To measure my tree's height, without any instruments at all (this cheered me up a lot,) all I had to do was to bend down, grasp my ankles, look between my legs and shuffle along the sidewalk until the top of the tree emerged from under the drooping outline of my buttocks. Dream on!
I did, however, find a more vertical method that seemed to involve holding a boy scout at arm's length, squinting at him to see which bits lined up with the top and bottom of the tree, measuring lots of distances and dividing them into one another until I reached 51.3, which was the height of my tree in feet. And I'd thought it was well over a hundred! Oh dear. I wondered about measuring it again, using a cub scout this time, but...
What I really wanted to find out was its age. To do this in the proper boy scout manner, I had to find its dbh, which, in case you didn't know, is the technical abbreviation for 'diameter at breast height.' This, let me reassure you, is a measurement used by foresters, not movie producers. By becoming a serial tree-hugger I was able to measure its cmbh, circumference at my breast height, (which I assume differs by quite a bit from cbsbh - circumference at boy scouts' breast height, but I didn't let that bother me, oh no. I pressed eagerly on, doing more math than I've done in years, even including pi(!) and finally ended up at 213 years. Not a bad age, even for an elm, but not exactly a living link between Thomas Dennis's time and mine. As a date, 1795 just doesn't cut it.
To cheer myself up, I went out and photographed a memorial marker on the bank of the river, at the bottom of Hovey Street, almost opposite our house. It commemorated Daniel Hovey, born in England 1618, died in Ipswich 1692. It had been set there by his family in the early twentieth century, and at its base a newer plaque had been added: 'Placed here, across the river from the site of the Hovey wharf and homestead, in memory of Alvin L. Hovey, 1905 - 1999.'
The Hovey family did for me what the elm tree couldn't.

Yours sicerely,
John Fiske