The end tree.
The end tree.
Next to a graveyard, just south of the shopping center in Shelbyville where McDonald's and Paradise Liquors are located, is the end tree.
It's been there as long as I can remember. Growing up, I rarely saw it. Before KY-55 was joined with KY-53 at US-60, my parents would never have need to drive that way to take me to school, or to Roses to shop for toys. We would always take Cropper rd. to school, or just go through town to get to the west side. The occasional trip to McDonalds, however, would bring us there.
Long before I could see the tree, I would see the hordes of buzzards alight over the roof of the shopping center. If we happened to be headed towards I-64, for a rare trip to Louisville to see a movie, we would pass the tree. Crossing the bridge just past the fish market, you could see the tree on your right.
Dead amongst living. In the spring, all the trees around it were in full bloom. Vibrant green leaves danced in the late-march wind, seemingly attempting to conceal the vestige of death hidden within the grove. The sharp contrast between the green of the living trees and the ghostly-white grey of the end tree was, however, perfectly evident. It couldn't be missed.
The freshly-picked flowers gracing the headstones in the nearby graveyard offered and even more stark contrast. Living amongst dead.
If, somehow, you managed to miss the tree, you most certainly would not fail to notice the buzzards. By the tens and twenties, they circled the tree constantly in the early evening hours, cawing at their comrades, thrice their number, perched on the end tree's brittle dead branches.
I don't know why the buzzards favor that place. There doesn't seem to be any plentiful source of food for them nearby, like a grain mill or a....dead rodent depository. But every evening, without fail, they roost...standing vigilant watch over the dead in the graveyard. While fifty or sixty stand at lookout in the tree, twenty or thirty patrol the air above. I haven't stayed to watch long enough to see if they work in shifts.
The strange thing is, even though it has been here for at least 20 years, nobody in Shelbyville seems to talk about it. It's impossible to miss, yet nobody mentions it. It seems like it would be the perfect subject for an article in the Sentinel-News...possibly producing something much more engrossing than anything I've ever read in there (I'm already sick of hearing about the water commission.) It's almost as if it's too morbid a subject for a newspaper article, or even barber-shop banter.
I have seen this all my life, and I have never heard any other person, friend or family, make mention of it. I almost feel as if I'm the only person who can see it, and that makes it all the more eerie.
I wish I could have taken a better picture of it, but the private-property sign stopped me short (I'm square, I know.) The best way I could describe it, the feeling of looking at it, is as the polar opposite of the beginning tree. This is the image you see, in movies and music-videos and the like, most often following some kind of apocalypse or war or what-have you. It's the tiny sapling sprouting too-quickly from the scorched soil...first stem, then a few tiny leaves. The video most often ends, leaving you with the promise that this sapling will grow into a tall, proud Oak.
If that sapling symbolizes the beginning, then this symbolizes the end.
The End tree