One remaining trunk from a pair of ancient giant red cypresses– called husband and wife– which once held hands.
Over a thousand years ago, roughly halfway up what would someday be called Yushan Mountain, a pair of Taiwanese red cypress seedlings germinated within a few decades of one another. Taiwanese red cypress– chamaecyparis formosensis– is a slow-growing tree, and valued for its strong, perfumed wood which is used for building, especially for temples and shrines.
This pair would have watched their high-mountain valley over centuries of farming and village life of the indigenous plains tribes of Taiwan, as well as an age of piracy, a late Qing dynasty gold and sulfur rush by mainland Chinese prospectors, a series of colonial occupations by Spain, the Netherlands, and Japan, protests and resistance by indigenous populations against their occupiers and mainland settlers, and the eventual assumption of the Republic of China over the island after World War II.
These trees would have kept watching, but for a forest fire that killed them both in 1963. But while this fire may have ended the Couple Trees' living vigil, it did not take their bodies. If anything, removed of leaves and bark, their stark shapes became iconic– especially the reaching branches that (from certain angles) looked like nothing more than a pair of hands, gently held.
Still, even hardwood trunks are not immune to the passage of time. Mountain storms, the highway traffic, and simple years had their toll. The trunks bleached to gray-white and the roots began to rot. A lightning strike in 1996 severed the branches of the reaching hands (a helpful guide now suggests "imagining the closeness of the loving couple"), and finally– after a season of rains– the larger of the two trees (the "husband") collapsed in June of 2017.
After some discussion about safety and the view, it was decided to leave the great trunk in place. Now it lays horizontal, half-off the mountain and buried in weeds, while its mate of many years stands over it; watching the valley, and watching its partner, which was– and always will be, even if reduced into the soil– right there.
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