Ganjy
Kids from Rachmore will tell you the tree with the face is called Ganjy.
Ganjy is on the trail leading to Wellerton Pond.
Kids from Perron Springs, who never went down that trail until Aulang County built a bike and hike bridge over 475, just call it The Tree.
The knot on Ganjy is a lifelike face, the face of a kind man.
Kids from Rachmore have been talking to Ganjy for decades.
The legend is that Ganjy predicted that Alicia Murvello would make the US Cross Country Ski Team in 1964. She sat cross legged and asked Ganjy, and a shadow appeared, making Ganjy look like he nodded yes.
Fred Eschman proposed to Maya Gilbert in front of The Tree,and became the youngest mayor of Perron Springs.
A cynic would tell you that neither of those things is related to the weird face on the old bur oak, and trees don’t make predictions, and naming trees is stupid because they can’t come when you call them.
But people walk or bike down the trail near Wellerton Pond and ask Ganjy or The Tree for advice or predictions.
They wait for a breeze or a shadow or a stroke of imagination or hope, and those people, in those moments and days and months afterward, are the sole arbiters of whether that old bur oak is magic or sentient or whatever.
Diane Baliyan heard all the stories growing up in Perron Springs.
She rebelled and decided to call the tree Ganjy like the Rachmore kids did.
She decided that people demanded too much of Ganjy, and didn’t give enough in return.
So she would take her clarinet and ride over the 475 bridge and down the trail to play songs for Ganjy.
Diane Baliyan went to see Ganjy once a week minimum, around dusk on Sundays.
She was gonna keep coming back until she could play Ganjy Mozart’s Concerto in A. Major K.622. without messing up.
She was gonna keep coming back with her mom and dad’s blessing, as long as she promised not to ride up to Zephyr Lake, where two girls from Caledonia went missing and were found dead near the rest stop on 475, by the weigh station.
Diane thought Ganjy enjoyed the music, she wasn’t sure why she felt that way, and she wondered why someone pulled the clarinet from her hand and threw it deep into the woods, and covered her mouth.
She struggled and bit til she tasted blood and then her pants were down and there was a glove and a bungee cord in her mouth and a weight she couldn’t shake off.
Maria Ryzinski was staring at the tree, but hadn’t asked her question yet, not in her head or aloud when The Tree made a noise, but it wasn’t the tree, it was past the tree, then there was a flash of a color blue that doesn’t belong in the woods, it belongs in a rack in the girl’s department at Gerrano’s, next to Wally’s Arcade, where Wally himself begs you to make sure you lock up your bike, and now Maria Ryzinski is swinging her chain with the Master Lock, and she misses more than she hits but she connects, connects enough that it feels good but nauseous at the same time, and then the guy is motionless and the blood on his head looks like it’s been there forever.
And once the girl’s pants are back on Maria runs back to the trail, pulling the girl, screaming for help, screaming.
Diane lets the girl lead, trying to say thank you but she’s breathless and sobbing and trying to scream help.
They don’t stop at The Tree, they don’t stop at Ganjy, they run toward the road.
Some boys come from Wellerton Pond and they want to help, they really do, they don’t know what’s going on, but they ditch their fishing poles and run to catch the screaming girls.
They run past The Tree, they run past Ganjy, they never think to stop and ask the stupid old bur oak a question.
The boys get out to the road where Maria and Diane stand.
The boys ask what’s wrong but Maria can’t explain and Diane can’t talk at all.
All Maria can say is “there’s a guy back there, make sure he’s dead.”
And then she bites her own lip bloody because she didn’t want to kill a guy but she wants him to be dead and that makes a lot less sense than a tree that answers questions, a tree Maria can’t remember what she was even going to ask it, a tree that might be magic and might be cursed, because that’s why she was there.
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Photo by me 8/26/2025
I remember how I felt reading “To kill a mockingbird”. I was 13 or 14 years old and I knew that something bad was going to happen. And it did.
I had that same sense of imminent danger reading your story, Jimmy. Then a sadness about the loss of innocence. Nicely crafted, and your economic style means the reader is transported on an emotional journey in a couple of minutes.
Loved it, and well done on the story and the photograph, Jimmy.
All of these comments, yet. I was holding off until I could breathe again -and because I couldn’t stop thinking ‘Holy shit’.
What a freaking beauty this story is - brutal but as real as beauty is, J.