There once was a tree, a massive cedar. It stood for generations on the eastern shore of Lake Roesiger. Leaning over the lake, it lent shade and beauty to one family’s summer place.
Better than any jungle gym, the strong tree supported daredevil kids and their parents, who would swing out over the water on a rope.
Kaye Hegerberg spent childhood summers on the property where the tree stood. Her grandparents first bought the land, and in 1950 her father and uncles built the house that’s now hers.
There once was a boy, Don Hegerberg. When Kaye Latimer was 14, she and a girlfriend were at Seattle’s Northgate Theatre. And there he was, a friend of a friend. Don was 16.
“He was handsome and blond, with the bluest eyes you’d ever seen,” Kaye Hegerberg said. “That guy was for me.”
When he was 21, they married. He was drafted and served as a Marine in Vietnam. The couple had two sons, Paul and Kirt. Throughout their marriage, each summer they returned to the lake house of Kaye’s family in eastern Snohomish County.
In 1986, after Kaye’s mother died, the Hegerbergs fulfilled their dream of buying the place at Lake Roesiger. Most of the year, they lived in Bothell, where Kaye still lives. Summers, they were at the lake. Don Hegerberg, who had been a fisherman in Alaska with his father and brother, worked most of his life as a commercial refrigeration journeyman.
“He was an old-fashioned working man,” Paul Hegerberg said recently. “He was just a great guy.”
Don Hegerberg, who suffered from lung disease, died Nov. 19. He was 65.
At a memorial service Dec. 2 in Lake Forest Park, Paul Hegerberg spoke with eloquence of the old tree and of his father.
“Children play under it, swing off of it and marvel at the majesty of the mighty cedar,” Paul Hegerberg said. “A man is born, and like a cedar tree grows old. We watch it lean and believe it can’t fall. Through all the storms, it survives in strength and beauty. One morning, on the edge of winter, he falls.”
“When my son Paul wrote this, he didn’t know the tree had fallen,” Kaye Hegerberg said Wednesday.
A day after the service, Kirt and Paul Hegerberg drove to Lake Roesiger, which was partly iced over in the cold snap after Thanksgiving. They called their mother with startling news.
“The tree had fallen into the lake,” Kaye Hegerberg said. “I just couldn’t believe it. My sons have told me they’re going to handle it,” she added.
Howard Toler, a summer neighbor at Lake Roesiger, was a close friend of Don Hegerberg’s. “The tree was basically a monument of that lake,” said Toler, who also lives in Bothell.
Toler said when his friend’s widow called to tell him about the tree being down, she likened it to “an omen of some kind.”
“Maybe it’s him telling her goodbye,” said Toler, who at 71 has memories of jumping off the rope swing.
Kaye Hegerberg said she’d heard from a cousin who hadn’t been to the Lake Roesiger house in years but planned to provide a new tree. “We want to replace it with another cedar,” she said.
As for the grand old tree, “we’re talking about having some shingles made of it, or having a rocking chair and a couple of little end tables,” she said.
What remains, besides an old tree in the lake, are memories, so many of them.
Some date to Kaye’s childhood, when a gentler style of swing hung from the tree. “There used to be a swing you could sit on from the ground,” she said.
The later version, made with thick rope her husband had gotten from a lineman, “took a bit of nerve,” she said. You had to climb partway up the tree and jump off. “It would seem like you were going to come back and hit the tree, but you didn’t.
“You’d go out over the lake. You could swing way back, partway over land, but most people would jump off into the water,” she said.
In later years, her husband preferred quiet pastimes. “He liked to look at the lake,” Kaye Hegerberg said. “He knew what time the eagles came, and what time the raccoons came.” Paul Hegerberg recalled his father sketching plans for remodeling the house and handing out red licorice to kids in the family.
When summer returns, they won’t have their rope swing or their big tree. The place and the memories endure.
“Memory is kept in the brain, they say,” Paul Hegerberg told those gathered at his father’s service. “The fondest memory is kept in the heart.”
Columnist Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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