Some neighborhood landmarks are intentional. Others simply happen.
On a quiet residential street in Upper Nyack, a large wooden bear rises from what was once the trunk of a towering pine tree. The bear stands in a Tai Chi pose, balanced and calm, as though it has emerged slowly from the wood rather than having been carved from it.
Years earlier, during a violent storm in the spring of 2018, the 60 foot pine tree split high above the ground and crashed into Tom and Lisa’s driveway. The massive tree narrowly missed Tom, who had been standing on the porch moments before. Instead, the trunk crushed their Subaru beneath tons of wood and branches. The tree had stood there for decades. When they first moved into the house, a swing hung from it.
“We were both in shock because it missed me by 8 feet, and we hugged and lisa said something like, ‘you’re here for a purpose”” Tom recalled.
The destruction briefly turned the property into a local news scene. Cameras arrived. Insurance adjusters arrived. Tree crews arrived. Once the fallen sections were removed, a tall stump remained in the yard like a monument to the storm itself.
For most homeowners, the story would have ended there.
But Lisa’s father Dave saw something else inside the remaining wood.
Dave, who spent his career as a draftsman at Ford after serving in the Army during Vietnam, has been making sculptures since childhood. During the war he created tiny carvings from toothpicks. “With Exacto blades he made the tiniest little sculptures. I still have a container with these. All sorts of little animals, a giraffe, I think there might even be a bear in there,” Lisa said.
Retirement allowed the scale of his work to grow larger: eagles, parrots, bears, and other figures carved from fallen trees and salvaged timber.
During a summer visit to Nyack, Dave transformed the stump into a bear over the course of a week. Tom had sent him a reference photo of a bear standing in a martial arts posture, and slowly the figure emerged from the dead pine. Today, the sculpture appears less like decoration than reincarnation.
Trees have life cycles. So do neighborhoods.
What began as a living pine became storm debris. The debris became a stump. The stump became a sculpture. Years later, birds burrow into the weathered wood while the bear continues its slow return to nature.
The sculpture feels perfectly suited to Nyack because it blends catastrophe, creativity, improvisation, and community memory into a single object sitting quietly beside the road. People walking past may only see a whimsical wooden bear.
The sculpture contains an entire history: the storm, the near miss, the crushed car, the craftsman from Michigan who started out with tooth picks and graduated to trees, and a family unwilling to discard what nature left behind.
Like many things in Nyack, the bear is both artwork and survivor.
An activist, artist and writer, Bill Batson lives in Nyack, NY. Nyack Sketch Log: “The Bear” © 2026 Bill Batson. Visit billbatsonarts.com to see more.
