The Angel Oak

If you take the James Island Bridge out of downtown Charleston, you can pick up Maybank Highway. It will leap frog to Johns Island and if you follow Maybank to Bohicket Road, you come to a sharp switchback of a dirt road. The road is thick with clay and rutted in areas but a quarter mile of fish tailing and sliding and you come to a magnificent, majestic and ancient live oak call The Angel Oak. I visited this ancient tree this weekend.

I have been in Muir woods among the sequoias. I have canoed down the Suwanee River among the cypress. But this live oak is something wholly different. The way its ancient limbs touch the earth and root again, like an elbow set upon a table’s edge.