The three trees of Drie
Drie is a hamlet on the Veluwe, four kilometres north of Ermelo, surrounded by pine forests and a strikingly broad sand drift that was fixed down in the eighteenth century. On the edge of the old hamlet stand three oaks side by side — the three trees that give the hamlet its name. According to the Veluwe tradition, they were not planted by human hand.
1 The Veluwe plague night
In 1635 the plague crossed the Veluwe. In Ermelo a hundred and twenty people died in two months; in Putten more; in the hamlet of Drie, which then consisted of seven farmsteads and a sheepfold, all were infected save a miller’s son of twelve named Jurriaan Smeenk.
On the third night of the epidemic, when Jurriaan slept alone in the sheepfold — his parents ill, his neighbours ill, all the adults in bed with hot cheeks — he was woken by the sound of digging. Not one spade. Three at once. He looked through a slit in the wall.
2 The three figures
On the clearing before the sheepfold stood three figures. Neither tall nor short. They wore cloaks that looked grey in the moon. They dug three pits, side by side, in a line. Each a metre deep. In each pit one figure laid something Jurriaan could not see. Then they filled them in. In each pit, before closing it, they pressed a single acorn.
The three figures did not look back. They neither dug short nor long — exactly as much as was needed. When they were done, they went off in three different directions: one toward Ermelo, one toward Putten, one toward the sand drift. The wind covered their footprints before they were twenty paces away. When the sun rose, three small mounds lay there, each with a leaf-bud on top.
3 The three oaks
The plague was over in Drie the next day. In Ermelo and Putten it lasted another week, but whoever in Drie was still alive — four people — did not fall ill again, and whoever was ill, recovered. Jurriaan told the sheriff of Ermelo what he had seen. The sheriff left the three mounds untouched.
The three leaf-buds became oaks. By 1700 they were as tall as a house. They are still there. The hamlet of Drie takes its name from them. Anyone who passes by today sees three oaks in a line, all the same age, all the same height against the wind.
The Veluwe tradition is clear: no one breaks a branch from the three oaks. Not for firewood, not for furniture, not for fence-posts. What the three figures buried under the roots in 1635, no one knows. It has been tried once, in 1789: a woodcutter from Putten attacked the southern oak. He fell dead before the third blow. Since then an iron plate hangs on the trunk of the southern oak in Drie with one word: «Silence.»
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