The Sycamore Tree

YOU FIND the sycamore tree in our state in the washes and creeks leading from the mountains to the desert and in the valleys among the hills. The sycamore will lead you to water and for that reason is a friendly sign to the prospector or cowboy traveling through the hills in summer.

The sycamore grows up crooked and twisted as if it suffered torment in its youth, but as a tree it is placid and calm. The bark is white and in the fall when it sheds its leaves its framework is a thing of delicacy and beauty, an exquisite pattern against the sky.

You appreciate the sycamore tree most of all in summer, especially if the sun is hot and the hills are parched and you have ridden a horse all day and the horse is tired and sweaty and sweat trickles down your face and the sun whips your back like switches. Your horse will spot the clump of green of the sycamore trees before you will.

No tree in the West gives off such friendly shade and is so cool and comforting as the sycamore in the summertime. Its leaves are big and dark green and about as big as your hand. To stretch in the sand under a sycamore tree, after a hot ride, is sheer enchantment. The sand is cool and the shade cast by the sycamore is cool, too. The leaves of the sycamore catch even the slightest breath of breeze and the music they make seems to be taunting laughter at the sun. Surely, no tree serves its purpose so well.

Every small boy growing up in our broad land, on reaching the whittling age, soon learns that the sycamore is about the best tree possible in which to carve one's initials. The wood is soft and easily cut. And, too, the sycamore, because of its shape, is fine for climbing and if a boy grows up without having carved or climbed about a sycamore tree his youth has been neglected.

Because the sycamore is found in higher elevations, its leaves do not last long after the first touch of cool weather. Its leaves turn from green to gold and fall away quickly but if you happen along before the leaves fall, and just after they have turned, you'll find autumnal beauty as great as that of the aspen. When you look down into a canyon where a whole group of sycamores are wearing their autumn garb at the same time, you'll get the impression of a canyon floor painted in gold.

In the old days, when the law was laggard and the good citizens were forced to take the law into their own hands, the sycamore tree was a very handy instrument from which to hang various and sundry evil-doers. Many a desperado had his story come to an abrupt finish from the convenient limb of a sycamore tree.

Personally, we know of many ways of going to our reward more unattractive than to be hanged from the good limb of a sycamore tree. R. C.