Oregon Myrtlewood Tree: The Ent of Agness

Up the Rouge River there is the "town" of Agness(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agness,_Oregon). It is small and apparently half of it is on one side of the Rouge River and half is uphill on the other side. It does have a post office that is served by the jet boat mail service (http://www.mailboat.com/) more for the benefit of the jet boat trade than for the necessity, in that there are roads leading to both halves of the "town".
We drove up one of those roads to the more remote upper Agness( yes it has two 'ss's) and stopped at the Agness Store. Now that was an adventure in cultural abrasion all by itself, but that is not this story.



East of Agness Store was this rather large Oregon Myrtlewood Tree (http://www.myrtlewoodgallery.com/what_is_myrtlewood.htm).




It seems that this tree had grown from a very large stump of a tree that was no longer there.
This picture is of the inside of the tree's trunk the level of debris and soil is about two feet higher than the outside ground. Based on my best estimate the tree was eight to ten feet thick and over 25 feet around.



For what ever reason the tree felt, well, different. Maybe spiritual, or something encompassing.
Also I kept getting these flares when I took a digital picture, I have a Zeiss lens on my camera and I cleaned it but the flares persisted regardless of from where I took its picture. I had not had such a problem before, and I have not had such a problem since. What a wonderful tree for a tree house I thought, and although there were kids playing just down the street there was no tree house, nor rope swings, nor toys, nor other evidence that the kids played here at all. The ground was covered with a large undisturbed amount of the tree's fragrant (smells like a mixture of camphor and bay) leaves. The lone picnic table nearby, where we ate our lunch, was covered with the leaves as well, as though nobody had disturbed the area in a long time.




I took this picture by holding the camera inside the tree through a space between the trunks. There are 19 separate "trunks" making a circle but all are joined into the one tree, for the first two or three feet from the ground. This shot took several tries as well, due to the flares.

This is a very old tree. How old would be impossible to tell, in that the original tree itself, which was maybe as much as four feet thick, is long long gone.. If there was ever a tree I thought might have earned the title Ent, then this one fits the bill. Thus I name this special tree:
The Ent of Agness.