Fandancer From Swiftwater Valley Stories Joseph Kantor   © Copyright 2026 by Joseph Kantor

Photo by Eugene Golovesov at Pexels

In early autumn, barely a dozen days after a brief cold spell, the weather turns brilliantly sunny with cloudless skies, sometimes for as long as a week. Balanced between warm days and cool, dewy nights, the autumn mountainsides, earlier and earlier each year, begin to change from verdant green to vibrant colors blazing in the sun. As the season progresses, their leaves drift from them in an exquisite ballet until they stand magnificently nude.

But for many years there was one who stole my heart. I called her Fandancer.

She stood at the intersection of Main and Railroad Streets from the end of the Civil War in 1865 until 1996, tucked in the corner of a small field in lower Friendship’s business district. Though the railroad, homes, businesses, and floods encroached and threatened her, she remained strong for one hundred thirty-one years.

She had only two clusters of two-foot branches remaining that radiated like fans attached to either side of her silvery trunk…one arching upward: the other, downward. She appeared to be moving forward as though frozen in dance, her slender forty-foot trunk an elongated ess curve nodding to all who passed.

Fandancer’s bare winter branches would burst with pale yellow buds in spring that opened into shiny dark green leaves dripping with dew in summer. Fall, to me her best season, saw blazing scarlet leaves before they drifted off in the variable breezes. She once housed nests of squirrels in her upper trunk, her branches offering them ample springiness to execute launch trajectories to nearby trees as they raced madly and jauntily in search of food.

Generations of children, I included, used her trunk as a counting post for innumerable games of hide and seek. Her former glory allowed them to swing from her great branches and to climb to heights they saw as the farthest they could ever go. Town picnics and strawberry socials sheltered beneath her canopy. For years, visitors to Friendship’s two hotels lounged there…not a few in a mild alcoholic haze.

The history she saw, was part of, is what made her loss even more excruciating.

*****

It became my habit to greet her every morning sitting in my idling car for a few moments. On many days, I would leave the car in Park to go to her and run my hands over her silky trunk, finding comfort in her early morning presence. I felt her life beneath my hands even though she was the last of what had been a grove of trees…and perhaps because of that. It was an acknowledgement of what she had been and could not be again.

That October morning, I greeted her as I would any human being or other animal friend. It was the familiar comfort of order.

As I watched, a sunbeam broke through the overcast and turned the morning mist to silver, making her scarlet leaves look as though they nestled in tissue paper. I was transfixed….out of myself…instantly connected to her vibrant life. I drank in every bit of that glorious moment until the rift in the cloud closed. I wished her a good day.

I glanced at her in the car’s rearview mirror as I drove away. A puff of breeze softly swirled the fog and lifted the right fan of branches in a strangely human gesture for a tree: a wave. I did not realize that it was her goodbye to me. It has haunted me ever since.

*****

The weather had grown gustier and colder during the afternoon. I left my company’s parking lot shortly after five p.m., rain and leaves racing across the sky in a bizarre, careening dance.

I thought of Fandancer’s scarlet leaves being stripped from her by the wind. For some reason, a bit of portentous nausea twisted slowly, knotted somersaults in my gut, a dark premonition coming over me.

The rain worsened.

Leaves pelted the car.

Traffic slowed and snarled.

Darkness fell before I was halfway home. Sky-wide lightning made searing vignettes of traffic, buildings, and people in a slow flip like the flickering of an old silent movie. Traffic thinned, allowing me to make better time and to temporarily outrun the storm.

Dead-air immanence hung over Friendship when I got there, thin mist hanging under the trees like a skirt. The faces of people I passed as they walked along the street were uniformly immobile under the tonnage of humidity. The thunderous footfalls of the storm rumbled behind me as I turned into my street.

I looked up to greet Fandancer…and saw nothing. She was gone!

There was no stack of cut tree trunk or piles of branches. Wood chips and sawdust littered the ground around a concrete block that had been thrown into the hole left when her roots had been ripped from the earth. Tears started from my eyes as I shouted “No!” and slammed my hand down on the dashboard. My heart ached for her and for myself and for the loss of a thing of beauty, no matter how impaired by age. I sat stunned and sobbed.

Then I raged.

How stupidly, heartlessly human to destroy beauty with such a history that was not hurting anyone only to replace it with cold stone: a sheer disregard and disrespect for nature that cradles us all. It is the same thing as those challenged people who purposely or cruelly or drunkenly/druggily run over small animals with their vehicles to leave them dying on the highways while jabbering meaninglessly into, or playing foolish games on, their devices.

No surprise, the most invasive and destructive species on Earth is man.

To the callous people in life, my feelings seem ridiculous or even crazy, I am sure. But she, like so much in nature, had touched me deeply with her enduring spirit and graceful beauty. My life is still diminished by the loss of her unique presence.

Ah, Fandancer…I miss you, my friend! I can still see you standing there, a thing of beauty forever in my heart.

~The End~