Holy mother of God, there are two brand new trees on campus.
Right in front of Nassau Hall, smack-dab in the middle of a chunk of dirt I walk on everyday, is a humongous oak. First of all, it’s fucking huge, and second of all, it’s never been there before. At first I thought maybe it had just been planted, but the soil around the trunk hasn’t been recently dug-up. This thing looks a hundred years old, and there’s an entire colony of well-established squirrels’ nests in its branches. This is no fresh spring sapling you guys—this is a tree-sized glitch in the Matrix.
Now, if you’ve ever taken a look around campus, you’ll know Princeton has a shit ton of trees. We’ve got your regular-old Dutch elms, a smattering of Atlantic white cedars, a few waxy-fruit hawthorns, and of course the ever elegant bristly locust. I could go on. But I know these trees like the back of my hand and there has never been a big-ass oak right in front of Nassau. And it’s scaring me shitless.
If a single mystery tree wasn’t panicking enough in itself, buckle up—just across the lawn is another one. This unwelcome bastard is a sugar maple, but otherwise exactly the same: huge, old, and definitely has no fucking business being on my campus.
These two trees have somehow sprouted overnight as if Jesus himself zapped them into existence, and yet I seem to be the only person disturbed by this. When I first discovered them, I kept asking people walking by if they’d noticed the two completely unaccounted for trees on the loose, but no one seemed to care. One student only said “Huh. That’s weird,” before trotting off, and another man responded with “Bitch, they’re just trees. Who gives a damn.”
Why is no one else terrified by this David Blaine bullshit? Where the hell did these trees come from? What the fuck is happening?
-LH ’19