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“Here’s a red oak that’s dropped,” Lindsay Thomas said Wednesday morning as we walked on Capitol Hill near the Taft Carillon.
He bent down and picked up the end of a branch, splaying out its dozen or so leaves. Then he palmed a few acorns. Or, as Thomas says, “akerns.”
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“Akerns” is how they pronounce it in Wayne County in southeastern Georgia where Thomas, 79, grew up. It’s the part of Georgia that sent him to Congress for 10 years, from 1983 to 1993.
“There’s two families of oak: whites and reds,” he explained. “All the reds have a pointed leaf at the end. White oaks have lobes.”
Trees have always been important to Thomas.
“I grew up in the woods,” he told me.
As a boy, Thomas spent countless hours on his uncle’s farm — Grace Acres — and the woods around it. These woods weren’t composed of the original longleaf pines of an ancient, old-growth forest. Instead, they were a second forest that grew after the first had been cut. It had been allowed to come back naturally. Rising above the Georgia landscape’s tar-black creeks and still ponds were a diversity of trees — pine, oak, cypress, swamp chestnut — and the animals that lived in them.
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It was a place for walking and hunting and thinking.
After studying English in college, Thomas moved to Savannah to work as a stock broker.
“It was the only job in all of my life that I did not like,” he said.
When his uncle died and left him Grace Acres, Thomas stopped stockbrokering and started farming: tobacco, soybeans, corn. The 1970s turned out to be an awful time to be a farmer. High fuel prices, high interest rates and low crop prices had farmers like Thomas against the ropes. An open seat in Congress saved him. He won the Democratic primary and then was elected to represent Georgia’s 1st District.
“I was young,” he said. “I was tough. I was willing to work. We literally outworked the other opponents. That’s how I wound up in Washington.”
Washington was very different from Georgia, but he found reminders of his youth.
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“I walked across the Hill every day,” he said. “I’ve always been a bit of a romantic and a daydreamer. I’d wander around under the trees, and it made me feel at home.”
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Some trees he recognized. Some were new to him. Many had little explanatory tags placed by the Architect of the Capitol’s office noting what species it was or to whom it was dedicated.
Then as now, politicians would give their constituents U.S. flags that had flown atop the Capitol as souvenirs. Maybe, Thomas thought, he could do the same thing with trees. He decided to plant acorns from Capitol Hill oak trees on his farm, then give away the saplings.
“What you do is put the acorns in a Ziploc bag when they fall,” he said. “You put them in the refrigerator — not the freezer — and let them go through a simulated dormancy period. And then you plant them in the soil in the spring.”
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Thomas gathered acorns near the Rayburn Building and near the Grant Memorial, bringing them home and dibbling them into the Georgia earth.
One day a group of Republican lawmakers walked by as he was out harvesting.
“Lindsay,” one said, “you better leave the squirrels’ acorns alone. They’ll get mad at you.”
Thomas was in Washington this week to be honored by the Congressional Sportsmen’s Caucus, a bipartisan group he co-founded with Pennsylvania Republican Richard Schulze in 1989. While he was here, he prowled the Hill, looking for more acorns.
Some trees he remembered from his time on the Hill are gone. Other things have changed, too. The tone of politics is different: meaner, stunted like a tree grown in poisonous soil.
None of the acorns we came across Wednesday morning were quite right for planting on Grace Acres Farm, Thomas decided. They were either red oaks, which he doesn’t need, or cut by squirrels. He has started taking acorns from the 30-year-old Capitol Hill trees on his farm to plant a second generation.
“I’ve got some planted in a few special places,” Thomas said.
Like a squirrel who has misplaced a nut, he has forgotten where some of his Washington acorns were planted. But they still stand strong, on his farm and elsewhere.
“Every now and then somebody will call me and say, ‘Remember that oak tree you gave me? It’s really pretty.’ ”
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