Remembering
I saw this image in the summertime and have been saving it ever since for a special Remembrance Day post. The caption on the photo read as follows: “A boy went to war in 1914 and left his bike chained to a tree. The boy never returned, and over the years the tree grew around the bike and it remains there to this day.”
I was looking forward to finding out the rest of the story – who the boy was, how he died. But as I started digging further into it, I discovered the story isn’t true. The bike is indeed in the tree, and is a popular tourist destination on Vashon Island, in Puget Sound, Washington State. But the rest is made up.
If you’ve ever tied or nailed anything to a tree, you know trees will eventually start to envelop a foreign object. However, since trees grow from the top – not the bottom, it’s impossible that the bike would have been lifted off the ground as the tree grew. There are many legends and other stories about the bicycle tree, but the likelihood is that it’s a sculpture or practical joke, erected sometime in the 1940’s or 50’s quite on purpose.
So there was no boy. Yet this picture is somehow a poignant reminder that there were so many other boys who did leave their families and their bikes to go to war and never came back. Today we remember them and their stories.
Very nice. Thank you.
Well said; each one of us owe our daily lives to each veteran who gave his life for us.
Well done.
i agree, poignant nevertheless.
There was a small bike; ergo, there was a small child.
If there was a boy who went off to war, he certainly didn’t do it in 1914. The US didn’t join the war until April 6 1917.
“If there was a boy who went off to war, he certainly didn’t do it in 1914. The US didn’t join the war until April 6 1917.”
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Perhaps he left for army training? The U.S. could have been preparing for the war years before they joined it.
There were a small number of Americans who entered the war prior to the US joining, flying for the Lafayette Flying Corps, for example.
But since this story is a hoax anyway, it’s an amusing (if not intentional?) error by its inventor.
Well that’s all fine if you don’t think that an object can grow into a tree and be lifted off the ground then explain to me how barbed wire can grow in a branch of a tree and be 6 feet up? my biology teacher didn’t believe me that it could happen, but YES i have a picture of the barbed wire in the middle of the branch more than six feet off the ground. so it does happen