If a Tree Falls in the Valley, We All Hear It

During the storm the old tree died, and on Sunday the people came to mourn.

It was as if a relative or close friend had passed away, suddenly, unexpectedly.

Onlookers stared in disbelief and some cried at the remains of the Lang Oak--the grandfather of the city’s oaks at seven stories high and 1,000 years old--which toppled to its death Saturday night, a victim of pounding rains.

An adored botanical treasure lovingly preserved off the busy concrete strip of Ventura Boulevard in Encino, the majestic tree in recent decades had escaped a developer’s plans to bulldoze it, survived the seven-year drought and, with the help of nearby residents, appeared to be fighting off a deadly bacterial infection.

And that doesn’t include the wildfires, earthquakes, floods and other events witnessed by a tree that probably took root before the Crusades.

“We fought all that time to keep it, and now it goes because of nature,” one woman said, weeping. She, like many other visitors Sunday, took away a small branch as a memento.

“In all the years, we felt this would not be the way it’d fall apart,” said Bob Kennedy, chief forester for the Los Angeles Public Works Department. For 23 years he had cared for the California live oak, which was declared a state historic and cultural monument in 1963.

He stepped over yellow police crime-scene tape separating the public from the workers to speak to a reporter and was almost immediately encircled by the crowd.

“What are you going to do with it?” asked Dorothy Lombardo, an English transplant living in Encino who for 20 years has brought visiting relatives and friends to marvel at old Lang.

“We’re thinking about maybe leaving the whole buttress there as a monument,” Kennedy said, referring to the tree’s trunk. “We don’t know if we can do it because of the weight.”

“How much does it weigh?” another resident inquired.

Kennedy laughed. Tons, he was sure, but how many?

He was struggling with that question when someone else asked the tree’s age.

“It’s age is estimated to be 1,000 years old,” Kennedy said. “Now we’ll know.”

In the next week, he said, biologists will slice a piece of the trunk and count the tree’s rings.

As he spoke, a team of workers, one in a cherry picker, used power saws to hack away at the Lang Oak’s branches as tractors hauled off people-sized pieces.

Those chunks would be going to storage, Kennedy said, to protect them from thieves while bureaucrats and residents figure out what to do with the tree’s remains. Kennedy thinks some should go to schools for educational purposes. But all that will be decided later, he said, “when things calm down.”

On Sunday, it was enough to remember the old giant that had been a constant to so many people. Perfect strangers reminisced.

“I remember when I was 4 years old and saw it for the first time. It was staggering. It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen that was alive,” said Encino resident Jim Newcom. That was in 1940.

“It’s hard to believe it’s gone,” he added. “But all the people who brought me here and showed me this are gone too.”

Many shook their heads as they spoke about all the Lang Oak had been through. A developer wanted to bulldoze it in the 1950s to make way for Louise Avenue, but residents rallied and the road was built around the tree.

A car ran into it in the late 1980s, said Kennedy. The car was demolished, but just a little bark fell off the tree, he said.

The oak became terribly sick in the early 1990s and residents feared the worst.

They banded together to save it. How could they not? Encino was, after all, named for the oaks that once covered it, many residents pointed out. And Lang Oak was by far the oldest, said to have been named after a rancher who owned vast holdings.

The country’s leading tree biologist was called to check the ailing oak and, following his recommendations, workers tore up wood decking that used to cover the ground around the tree.

They pruned its branches, which spread to form a canopy 150 feet across, and secured them with cables to keep the tree in balance. The massive oak was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence to keep people and cars at a distance.

“We didn’t want any stone unturned to extend the life of this tree,” Kennedy said.

The Lang Oak had come back from the brink and was “holding its own,” he said. But Mother Nature had other plans.

Punishing rains weighed down the oak’s branches and softened the soil around its trunk. The combination proved deadly, making the beloved oak too top-heavy to stand. It fell onto the northbound lanes of Louise, smashing into two parked cars and narrowly missing an apartment building Saturday night.

City workers and residents soon gathered round the felled tree, awe-struck. They closed the street and began the task of taking the giant away, piece by piece.

“Some of these guys have been out here all night, they’re so into this tree,” Kennedy said.

Among the constant stream of onlookers were parents who brought small children, some in strollers, to say goodbye to the Lang Oak.

Among them was 8-year-old Sarah Tamir. “We always used to play here,” she said looking up at the ancient tree, its 24-foot diameter trunk ripped from the ground. “Now it’s gone.”