Bike-Eating Tree

Day 153: You encounter the strangest things when you're out in the woods in the Pacific Northwest, but this is one of the odder finds of my career. I've seen choker cables embedded deep inside shattered stumps, nails and spikes largely grown over with bark, and even a steering column complete with wheel seemingly piercing a tree like an arrow, but this is the first time I've run across a rare Bike-Eating Fir. A more distant view would reveal that the bicycle is up about nine feet from ground level, and from the looks of it, it was probably left propped up against the tree back around 1950 or so. Maybe little Johnny Jones forgot where he'd parked it. There's a story here, giving rise to dozens of theories with no possible hope of validation, and one wonders if perhaps that's not for the best. It is good to have an unsolved mystery or two rattling around in your head, something which makes you puzzle over just how it came to be. Some things are simply meant to be unknowable.