Good thing Red found it when he did: The 'Shawshank' tree is no more.

Hurry up, Red. That tree isn't going to last forever, man.

Stephen King wrote The Shawshank Redemption as a slice of the Maine prison system, and the movie adaptation played along and pretended it was rural Maine as well.

Except the movie's producers probably realized you never want to visit rural Maine under any circumstances, so they used a great deal of Ohio as a stand-in.

This included the area where Red (played in the movie by Morgan Freeman), once released from prison, seeks out a tree that his former prison mate, Andy (played by Tim Robbins), told him about. The tree was where Andy proposed to his wife--and buried at the base of the tree would be a tin with information and money for Red to come join in a new life with him.

In the book and in the movie, the tree is symbolic of hope and love and redemption.

Alas, Mother Nature doesn't care about your feels and doesn't care about Stephen King stories. Lightning struck the tree in 2011, badly damaging large portions of it. Then, yesterday, not one to wait around for the inevitable, Mother Nature drew up a fury of high winds which caused the tree to keel over.

Which sort of makes you wonder what Red would have done if the tree actually tipped over years before he ever found it in the book or the movie. Andy didn't think this through, did he? He can figure out how to chisel through prison walls and overthrow a corrupt warden--but the man never had a backup plan if Mother Nature went on a tear.

That was the really lackluster alternative ending Stephen King never wanted you to read.