The Big One

The tree’s trunk stands between the root-cracked sidewalk and
seed-covered streets. Its leaves fall on the rooftops of parked cars.
When you open the car door, branches reach into your vehicle and
coarsely brush your face. They are curious; they are feeling things
out.

The other day, under the branches of this massive tree—at the
corner of East John Street and 11th Avenue—a rather handsome
young man approached me. He was walking a white bicycle; he was looking
at me with mild curiosity. He said: “Enjoying the tree? Isn’t it
wonderful? I live over there and see it every day, and I still can’t
get enough of it.” He was as in love with this tree as I am. I asked if
he knew its type. “It’s an alderwood and probably 150 years old. I
can’t be sure of that number.” I asked if he was an arborist. “Me? No,”
he said adjusting his helmet, his face brightening, his eyes somewhat
dreamy, and a branch dipping toward his back. “I’m a natural scientist,
so I do have some idea about plants. But I’m not an arborist.” I
thanked him for the good information, and he said it was a pleasure to
share it.

All trees aspire to bigness. Bigness is their
gaudium—the characteristic pleasure of a particular form
of life. Chenjerai Hove writes: “I used to watch cattle chewing lazily
under the shade of the musuma trees, chewing as if to show me that I
was not able to enjoy what they enjoyed.” When we see a big tree, we
see this enjoyment, this gaudium. Little trees do not have this effect;
their lives are small and stupid. The lure of big trees is that they are heavy with life and are deep in thought.

The Slender One

This tree in Magnolia Park, one of the
most beautiful parks in the world, is very tall and close to the
Magnolia Bluff. I always imagine that sailors can see it from their
bay-bound cargo ships. There it is for them, the slender and
sophisticated tree that excites their sea-numbed senses. So much water
has made them dumb. Wave after wave after wave. The monotony empties
their eyes—out goes other humans, lush hillsides, rocks, animals
with legs, plants that are not slimy. Above all, their eyes miss the
sight of trees, the kings and queens of the land. When a returning
sailor sees a tree, his eyes cling to it the way Homer clung to that
fig tree as his raft was sucked into the violent whirlpool. How lovely
it must be for the sailors to see this tree on the bluff! Its
skin-smooth bark, its high top of leaves. And to the west: the
sparkling glass towers of the city that is the point of a sailor’s
destination, the end of his long journey.

Cities that do not have trees are damn depressing. In Gaborone,
Botswana, a city in a desert, there are almost no trees. What thrive in
Gaborone are the bitterest bushes. These bushes make no effort to be
attractive (even their flowers are ugly), and their tough stems are
armed with thorns. It is impossible to walk without shoes in Gaborone
because the ground is covered with the sharp weapons of these bushes
warring for resources. They are not capable of love, those bitter
bushes.

The Voyeur

On Queen Anne Hill, at the corner of
Crockett Street and Taylor Avenue North, there is a trunk with a human
face: a nose, a pair of eyes, and a mouth. We already feel close to
trees, and this face, this humanness about it, helps us feel even
closer. Trees have seen many, many things. What sins has that face seen
in the concealed patch between it and the flowering rhododendron?
Bodies twisted by lust—hands groping this, lips kissing that. The
tree watches the sex sheltered by its branches. It watches humans lost
in their electric land of flesh. Fucking is never more magical than
when it erupts under a tree. Why is this so? What kind of spell is
this? The most desirable thing I ever saw in my life was a pretty woman
sitting in a tree. The vision unlocked another animal in me. The tree
was big and supported her easily. Her ass was on a thick branch, long
legs hanging, hands holding a slimmer branch above her head, her chest
out. She wore a black bra and a white T-shirt. She laughed in the light
that flickered in the leaves. I wanted to climb up and hold her. But I
could not find a way to her. I was stuck on the ground, looking up at
the most desirable thing in the world.

The One that Scares Me

This tree is in the yard of a home on
South King Street and 31st Avenue, in Leschi. The tree rises up into
the sky and looms over the street. It is a beautiful tree in a
beautiful setting. The house is old and handsome and looks out at a
valley of other homes and trees. Lake Washington and Mount Rainier are
in the distance. Here is a peace that is only disturbed by the
thump-thump of passing cars blasting crunk. Here, people are mostly
happy. But one day, many, many years ago, things went very wrong at
this location. A rabid squirrel ran down this tree’s trunk and charged
at some girls having a birthday party on the lawn of the house. The
squirrel ruined the event. Kids were screaming, parents panicking, the
squirrel snapping its sick teeth—it managed to bite one of the
girls. How horrible it must be to feel the teeth of a squirrel in your
flesh. You will never forget that feeling for the rest of your life. A
man put the injured and crying girl on the back of his motorbike and
rushed her to the emergency room at Harborview. This tree was like a
beautiful lover with a
venereal something or other.

The Movie Star

This tree near Lake Washington played a
role in my movie Police Beat. It gave a great performance. Its
moment of indie-film fame: The bike cop investigates a tree that has
assaulted an old woman. She has a cut on her head. She points out the
offending tree. The officer walks up to it and knocks on the bark with
his knuckles. The bark answers with a hollow sound. The bike cop then
returns to the old woman and says: “Your tree is dead, and if you do
not cut it down, it will continue to harm and disturb the living.” The
scene is based on a real police report. A woman called the SPD and
blamed a tree for assaulting her. The report caught my eye because I
understood her confusion. In the way it is easy to believe a tree can
love us, it should be easy to believe a tree can hate us. Dead trees
are most bewildering things because trees are not supposed to die. They
are supposed to live and live and live. There are trees that were alive
when Jesus was alive. Despite its great acting and its beauty, the tree
in Police Beat has so far failed to land another role.

The Crazy-Looking One

We are always trying to imagine what
aliens might look like if they suddenly landed on earth and walked out
of a flying saucer. But the variety of life forms around us is
already bewildering, shocking, alien—even though all of
the animals and plants living on earth are made of the same stuff
(mainly carbon). If there are all of these strange creatures on earth,
like this monkey puzzle tree in West Seattle, how on earth could aliens
surprise us? We have seen life in every kind of shape, texture, and
quality—slim, hairy, thorny, hard, soft, long, short, sharp,
fast, slow, and big. If an alien were to show up today, it would not be
beyond our imagination and recognition. Life elsewhere in the universe
is bound to be like life here on earth: crazy-looking. When aliens
arrive, the second thing that will be on our minds is how do they do
it: from behind, standing up, sitting down, on their hands and knees,
back to back, side to side, up and down. Do they fuck like humans or
like trees? recommended

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...

45 replies on “The Sexiest Trees in Seattle”

  1. Trees have a language. They have a history. The oldest fossils of trees show they play a part in our own evolution. We should not take them for granted, but cherish them. They are the unbroken link that connects all living things in the fabric of life.

  2. Love it. Love that you (presumably) thought to write it, love that the Stranger publishes such things. . . love it.

  3. I was just struck completely smitten with that tree on 11th and John , not 4 days ago… lush, heavy-with-summer-leaves arms dipping down from arbory heights into the realm, the height of humanity. She’s a queen of the local dryads, methinks.

    Couldn’t believe the kismety coincidence of seeing this article so soon after. Going to start me dwelling too much on Magical Thinking or other questionable theories…

    Bravo, stranger & Charles. You went and got all useful and prettied-up all of a sudden, just when I was thinking you were overfull of tripe and overripe angst. Damn you. 😉

  4. omg i’m so excited that the monkey-tail tree made this list! i grew up living down the street from it and it has always been a landmark of my childhood… i loved that tree and its so wonderful to see that i’m not the only one!

  6. i killed a tree yesterday… it was 51 years old and was attempting to drop tonnage on my family and our possessions. so i killed it … some trees just can’t be trusted. This one just had that going-to-let-mayhem-rule look to it. I still feel bad.

  7. Seriously? Only a lone evergreen in your entire line-up? What kind of Washingtonian are you? Not a single douglas fir or western red cedar in the bunch. Unacceptable. Charles Mudede is now officially an idiot when it comes to trees.

  8. Great article! I have a gorgeous fig tree in my backyard that will be ready to harvest in a few weeks. Delicious, fresh figs.

  9. There’s an impossibly twisted and gnarled thousand-year-old Doug Fir at Deception Pass State Park that would blow your mind, Charles. I can also recommend the world’s tallest spruces in Olympic National Park. Thank you for this wonderful article. I’ve loved that tree in Magnolia Park for all of my fifty years; I was taken there as a baby. Trees are wonderful.

  11. What 2 said.

    And, like 4, I’m a huge fan of monkey-puzzle trees too. They were always my favorites when I was growing up in Vancouver.

  13. Trees have a reputation for being some type of noble creature but they are just as vicious as anything in the natural world. Their height is an evolved advantage that they use to smother out the smaller plants below. Their tactic in life is to grow upward and absorb as much sunlight as possible so that other plants don’t do the same to them.

    I see trees as less of a noble plant and more like a giant corporation who uses its sheer size to squash out the life of competitors below it. The trees of course care less about the birds and animals because there is no competition for sunlight and water. They only care to kill what is in their path so i suppose they are noble after all.

  14. There used to be a HUGE monkey puzzle tree on the corner of 22nd and 73rd in Ballard. It was there ever since I was born, it had to be at least 100 feet tall. It got cut down in 2000 or something like that.

  21. The other day I saw a tree that looked just like “The Big One”! Them, I saw one just like “The One That Scares Me”, followed by a “Slender One.” Then I realized they were just regular trees. Trees. On a breeze. Do you please?

  26. Stupid fuckin’ hipster trees, if you really want to know what a hot tree looks like you should go to anywhere else in the country, not look at an asexual plant from seattle.

  27. The Big One is my tree, and it needs to be shaved just a tad, it’s covering up the entrance to my mansion, and that ain’t sexy.

  29. In extreme South-West Washington, there is an island on the inside of the Long Beach Peninsula called Long Island that has original old growth, it has never been logged. It has some amazingly huge old Cedar trees, almost as big as California Red Woods. You have to get to the island by boat, though. Bring a raft or canoe.

  30. Huge Old Alder Trees in a Row.

    Taken down for a six pack.
    In the spring.
    Baby birds falling.
    Mommy birds screaming.
    DPD claims they are ‘trash trees’
    that don’t live long.

    Lies and Murders

  31. i love the big one. i am privileged to live just around the corner from it and have walked past it lo these many decades.

    one night in 1981 when i was walking home at night and passed under the tree some mouth breather grabbed my butt and ran away. if only the tree had had come alive and beaten him to death with one of its branches.

  32. The book Trees of Seattle by Arthur Lee Jacobson is an excellent guide to local trees with many documented examples. I bet some of these are in there.

  33. When I was doing my undergrad at Seattle U, one of the girls in my theology class kept gushing about the giant oak in front of the Admin building. She had named it Barnacle and seemed to have quite the connection with the tree. I was giving her crap about it, because… really, Barnacle? Not a stuffy aristocratic English name? And then she pointed out to me that Barnacle had chosen his name specifically, and was in fact a celebrity that only needed one name, “like Cher, Madonna or Barnacle.” She was completely deadpan the entire time and was totally serious. Only in Seattle… or maybe Portland.

  35. hey!!!you forgot one other tree…the one smoking in your mouth!HA HA HA!!!!GO STICK A TREE UP YOUR ASS!!!GOT WOOD???,GO DIE FROM SPLINTER POISONING,FUCKTARD!!!FUCK YOU PAUL BUYUN!!!

  37. seattle trees suck!!!!!what a waste of paper talking about trees!!!i think the stranger has too much time on it”s hands…any body recycle this paper???no it litters the street!!!

  38. Great article! Thank you so much. I am currently nominating The Big One for heritage status. The Big One is the beautiful tree pictured at E. John & 11th . It was so cool to see it honored in The Stranger. Wanted to let people know about The Heritage Tree Program, which is an important avenue to protect these lovely trees from harm. It is coordinated through Plant Amnesty and the City of Seattle. To nominate a sexy tree, call 206/684-8733 or access online forms @ http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/heritaget…;.
    Thanks again,
    JL Dahl

  40. The evergreens in Seattle aren’t as amazing, they are commonplace. Plus, the most amazing of them were logged long ago by the Maynards and Denny’s and Yesler’s of the city – what’s left, within city limits, are arguably not the best samples of the cedar, fir, etc.
    Not to mention it’s the spring/summer border right now, and the deciduous are in their prime (whereas conifers come into their prime in the snow).

    Honorable mention idea: the odd 2 or 3 non-conifer trees (one was razed recently… *pout*) on the corner of Olive Way and Bolyston that stay green all winter. I love those guys and their misplaced stubborn tenacity.

    troll zelda: it’s nice though to see a paper honor its raw material so respectfully.

  42. oh yeah?than if your paper is so respectful,why dosen’t it go 100% internet like the p-i did???think about that!!!oh and one more thing, i am not a troll,i’m a HYRULEAN,WRONG RACE RETARD!!!

  45. There are two trees in Seattle that always stop me in my tracks. One is like The Big One, but it’s at Aloha & 16th. They extended the corner curb just for it, and I think there are mosaics or some sort of odds & ends in the cement. When the leaves turn, it’s a canopy of color.

    The other one is one mother of a tree right in the middle of a Discovery Park trail. It’s so impressive that the trail splits in two and surrounds the tree.

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