A Tree Grows...

If you travel southbound on Interstate 5 through Seattle there is an exit from the right lane at the south end of the Duwamish valley that crosses back over the freeway and joins Martin Luther King, Jr. Way as it cuts across the Skyway hill into Renton.  The exit lane becomes the left lane of the overpass, and curves into its junction with MLK on an arc from east to south, leaving a narrow median strip on the left shoulder that disappears as the two roads merge.

Almost every day, for twenty seven years, we traveled that road, singly or in carpool combinations that included my wife and I.  And almost every one of those days, on the southbound trip, I would be eating the apple from my lunchbox as a snack on the road home.  And almost every time, I would open the driver’s window as we passed that narrow strip of land at 50 miles an hour, and throw out the apple core, aiming for the vegetation beyond the railing.  My wife would criticize me for littering, and I would respond that apple cores are organic, and I was feeding the critters that undoubtedly lived there.  Each day they would huddle by the rail and wait for the manna to fall from heaven, I theorized.  This went on for years.

One day, about spring of 2008 or so, my gardener wife spotted a new plant growing in the median strip.  Sure enough, it was an apple tree!  Over the next several years we watched it struggle to survive in an environment heavy on fumes and road dirt, and grow large enough to bear fruit.  I kept waiting for it to be whacked by a mower, but to date that has not happened.  It’s still there, you can see it on your left as you cross over the freeway, or as you drive north on MLK from Renton in the left lane, if you know where to look.

One of these days, maybe, I’m gonna stop by and pick an apple off my tree.  I’m not sure how to do that without getting run over, but it’s a thought.  Another thought that occurs to me is that, if you do something good for the environment every day, even the smallest thing, even if there are no obvious short term results, your actions in the long run can surprise you.  I suspect there’s a moral to this story, but I’ll let you supply your own.  :-{)}

Edit:  The tree in the story lasted until sometime in January of 2016, when a county road crew came along with a brushwhacker mounted on the side of a tractor and wiped out everything on that little spit of land.  As luck would have it, the above story was published in the ARSCE newsletter the following week.  :-{)}