It’s time to grab your hardhat
To the Editor:
As yellow falling leaves and cool, dry air are floating into the mountains, it signals to knowledgeable residents that it’s time to look up.
The calendar reminds us to pay closer attention to what’s overhead and underfoot as we move through the hills for our own safety. It’s walnut season and you can learn a lot this time of year. All you have to do is forget once and chances are good you’ll remember to take note.
The black walnut (Juglans nigra) is a stately, deciduous, nut-producing tree native to eastern U.S. forests from New York to Florida and west past the Mississippi River. These large trees can grow to more than 90 feet and have long been prized for their rich, dark wood in furniture making, gunstocks and veneers.
The husks surrounding the nuts have been used to make a black dye by crafters since Native American times and are still used today. The 1.5-inch-to-2.5-inch green rough nuts form all summer and contain rich, sweet meat hidden within the hard inner shell. They are an important food for wildlife during the winter and some dedicated people take the time to clean the meat from their hard covers enjoying a tasty treat for their efforts.
I give you this information so that you may recognize the tree this time of year and take precautions against gravity-driven pain and injury to yourself or your property. If you’ve ever been nailed on the noggin from a walnut from 50-feet overhead, or wobbled through a few dozen walnuts scattered across a dark driveway, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, you’ve just been warned.
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Another thing you need to know about walnuts is how they work in collaboration with metal roofs. It’s pretty exciting.
When I built my barn in the spring of 2007, the property was heavily wooded and required some clearing. I tried to be very conscious of the visual aesthetics of how the building would fit in the native landscape upon completion. I hoped to make it appear as if it had been there many years with a classic, integrated timelessness. I chose colors, materials and a basic design you would have seen 100 years ago, and when clearing the site left a large straight tree with a wide canopy in the front and another one in the rear to provide summer shade and help the building to blend in.
I adjusted the size, shape and placement of the building and its doors to protect the roots of the tree in front despite the suggestions from the equipment operator. We finished installing the roof by mid-summer, completed the finish grading, cleaning and landscaping around it and stood back to admire our handiwork. It really did look much more than four months old nestled in the embracing shade of the big trees.
Each day as I walked up the drive, the barn seemed to grow more naturally into the landscape. It provided me with shelter from the summer rains, respite from a scorching sun and a place to comfortably orchestrate the madness of farm and construction projects … with electricity and refrigeration. Yahoo!
As fall crept in I was standing one day in the doorway soaking up the valley view with a frosty reward for a job well done enjoying the peace and quiet of the afternoon. WHAM! … WHAM-WHAM! I jumped — “What the heck was that! Gunshots? An explosion? A logging truck backfiring?”
I stepped outside to look for the cause of this Zen-busting ruckus. Standing in the drive viewing the entire the building I watched a green globe fall from the top of the tree I had painstakingly saved behind the barn. Plummeting from the heavens it hit onto the steel roof at God knows how many miles per hour with a mighty KAPOW! Then another, and another. As I stood there mesmerized, one of the three-ounce bombs fell to the ground two feet from me with a meaningful thud. I realized that the two majestic specimens gracefully arching over my new barn were black walnuts, armed and ready for combat. I watch for a few minutes when another fell and hit two more on it’s journey earthward with a triple rapid-fire report. A good stiff breeze and I would have been carpet-bombed.
Each year since, I have relearned where it is safe to walk and park this time of year. Unless you are incredibly lucky, I suggest you learn the walnut tree and act accordingly, or prepare to bear the pain of non-chalance in the mountains in the fall.
John Beckman
Cullowhee
