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Cutting down treesThe chainsaw has been buzzing in the background all day, a whiny, horsepowered drone. It's an early March day, gray, windy, wearing winter's old clothes, when the last snow has retreated, exposing debris trapped where it fell five months ago. A half-dozen hard-hatted arborists with rakes, ropes and a cherry picker on a truck have been swarming my yard and the yard next door all day, taking down trees, three of them, our two slender firs and a stately, spreading maple that was perhaps 70 years old. I hear occasionally crashing thuds as big sections of trunk hit the ground and the house seems to shudder - maybe it's just the windows rattling - ever so slightly. Trees take years to grow but far less time to disassemble. Only God can make one, but it's easy to unmake one with correct equipment. We removed two shallow rooted firs. The two of them leaned seriously into our backyard, pushing on our power and telephone lines. They were thin and tall, maybe 25 feet. Now our two trees are reduced to half a cord of wood for our fireplace. Our neighbors suffered a much greater loss. Their maple tree lived in the midst of a deck and they dined under its shade. The tree was 40 feet tall and perhaps 30 inches in diameter at its thickest. They loved the tree and paid to have it taken care of when it got sick, as you would a child. Tree doctors came and gave it medicine to combat its illness. But its condition went the wrong way, deteriorating. Such an outsize tree naturally benefited us, too, giving us shade in summer and stateliness year round, as well as lots of leaves in the fall that provided mulch and exercise through raking. Good trees make good neighbors. My husband and I debated for a few years whether our pair of leaning trees would eventually topple in a good enough storm, pulling the hot wires of civilization down with them. It could have happened, and we had some evidence for our belief; when we bought our house almost 10 years ago, we bought it at a slight discount because one side of the garage was stove in by a tree that had leaned into it, fallen asleep on its feet and tipped over, like a drunk asleep at the bar. Trees were built to last, but not forever. Anyone who's ever walked in the woods with eyes open knows that. But removing a tree is not a decision made lightly. A tree cannot be replaced easily, much as a landscaper with young trees for sale would like to persuade you otherwise. For us, with our treehugging past, the position is ironic. When a tree is decapitated, its halo of limbs removed, it is rather like seeing a chemotherapy patient whose stark baldness startles. All a tree's outstretch - its yoga-like pose, effortlessly held in the air -- vanishes with strokes of the chainsaw, lop by whack, branches plummeting to the earth, chunks of trunk thudding on severed limbs. What will our birds think? Backyard birds like this area, and we have a large family of cardinals, a flock of goldfinches, mourning doves, and hordes of various sparrows, among other feathered neighbors. We are leaving nothing for the redbellied woodpecker to peck into. When the work crew went out to lunch the goldfinches flew in for theirs - the coast was quiet and clear. Will the doves mourn? Indeed the area is amazingly clear. Things look smaller, closer now that three tall, sheltering objects have suddenly been erased from the surroundings. What remains comes into sharper focus. There is a fence. I can see my neighbor's garage and still another neighbor's house much more clearly. We have hope for the cherry tree that was growing in the shade of the maple. Perhaps our roses will get more southwestern sun on summer afternoons when the sun slants into the yard no longer filtered through droopy fir branches. It will certainly be hotter. It took years to grow, only hours to cut down. A tree is more than the sum of its physical pieces, branches, leaves, bark that was its skin. It was a silent partner in the lives lived underneath its shade. It was a thing of beauty as well as utility, of substance that lasted even while the families it sheltered changed. As losses go, this one doesn't hurt acutely, but the spot where loss lives is touched, and an ache awakened. We will see what growth summer will surprise us with.
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