Grove of Tears
By Nicki Huggins
Ten years ago I was driving home, north on Pacific Coast Highway in southern California, when I had an inexplicable urge to turn the car around. Twenty minutes later I found myself turning into the Veteran’s Administration on Wilshire Boulevard, the older part with aging buildings that made me feel as though I should be swinging through in a ’37 Packard. I passed several small chapels, an overgrown Japanese garden only barely revealing what was once cascading waterfalls, a theater with four loudspeakers leering from the rafters. I had an immediate image of uniformed servicemen mushroomed over the grounds, their faces upturned listening to …what? The Andrews Sisters? Bob Hope? Radio programs with news features of the war?
And then I saw them. A grove of the most magnificent trees, massive, perfect, climbing trees with roots that gnarled above ground. Disney trees that any minute would uproot themselves, stalk toward me, their fat round branches shimmering, then scoop me up, trunks heaving in leafy laughter. I had to get to those trees.
Even though I had on my red patent Sunday shoes, climbing was on my mind. Jumping out of the car, I scampered under the canopy of their branches, reached up to grab onto a childhood friend. But something was, looked, different. There were messages in these trees. Gouged, scratched, and scabbed into their flesh were the feelings, hopes, pain and aspirations of a hundred years of VA patients. These trees were also veterans, survivor’s of tattooed fear, insanity, confusion, and yes, “Larry I love,” love. Their branches beckoned to those patients in the adjacent psychiatric unit, just as they had to me…And up they went, just as I did, and the trees took it…Took their feelings, cried, as these trees do, and healed; it seems those of us made of human flesh can take a bit longer.
Over the years I have returned to the grove a number of times. There are always new carvings…new declarations of love or pain, new thoughts for the trees to wear. Sometimes I photograph, sometimes I just visit.
These photos are from a collection of nearly 100 photographs of tree carvings by US war veterans from World War I to the present. Some of the carvings overlap creating an interesting juxtaposition of thought and feelings through times of war and peace. The trees often healed leaving traces of previous messages, only to be carved over again.
The Los Angeles Veteran’s Administration was the first in the U.S. The land was given to the federal government by a Spanish land grant family to establish the OLD SOLDIERS HOME. A condition of the gift was that the land must be used for the purposes intended and can never be sold. The trees are Ficus Macrophylla and were planted as saplings from Santa Barbara in 1897.
Remember The Dreams30” x 40” Limited edition archival color print on art stock |
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Crying Eye24” x 30” Limited edition archival color print on art stock |
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