A Guardian's Last Stand

Chainsaws awoke me this morning, and a wood chipper. They were loud enough to be in the back yard, but as I padded into the kitchen for a cup of tea, I saw the Tree Service truck parked across the street. They were cutting branches from somebody's lone, towering Douglas fir. A similar tree in my old neighborhood was nearly four stories high, planted fifty years ago the day after Christmas.

Although all trees have an energy - a profound presence - these sky-scraping firs seem to radiate a wise elder spirit that watches over time and change, holding the ground and sense of place steady amid surrounding developments.

As I watched through the window, with rain and wind pummeling the workers, more branches came off than was wise for a simple pruning. (Rule of thumb: don't take more than a third of any plant.) The crampon-clad worker climbed higher and then even the skinniest limbs began to fall. My heart sank: the whole tree was going to come down. The thought of this old but robust beauty being sliced to pieces and stuffed in a shredder made me sad. It did not seem to be diseased, or split-trunked (dangerous in high winds). It was simply blocking light from the west-facing windows of a newly-sold house.


"Well," I sighed to my husband, "if they're going to do it, I want to see how it's done." (I wish I could say the same for watching a blood sample being taken, but so far I just pass out.)

The process was careful and systematic. Each branch was stripped from the trunk and carefully guided on a rope down to the ground crew. The smaller chunks were chopped, dropped, and landed with a thunk on the lawn below. The trunk soon resembled a bumpy phone pole. "I wonder if they'll make a totem pole from it," hubby mused. Crampon Guy dug in hard with his feet, herringboned to the top, roped himself around it, and began to slice away at the apex. When the trunk got too thick for his chainsaw, he descended the tree to fetch a bigger one, climbed back up, and started anew.

Roaring like a jet plane engine, the wood chipper had been churning for two hours, recycling the tree into compost and mulch. It finally stopped. Thick slabs of trunk too large for the chopper were hauled away and seasoned for firewood. Soon the stump grinder demolished any above-ground evidence that an old, majestic life had been there. Only sawdust remained.

As in the forest, the fallen tree will go on to support other life, just in a different form: the mulch will help grow stronger gardens, the wood will heat somebody's living room. There's no right or wrong, no good or bad here. When whole tracts of them are razed, the picture changes. But the demise of the noble tree that watched over our corner for fifty years is just another reminder of life's essential dance of dark and light, of letting go of the old to make room for the new, of reconciling nostalgia and potential.

At the moment, the space where the tree lived feels like the scene of a fatal accident, a place of stunned limbo where the old energy form (and our perception of it) needs to disperse and neutralize. But soon the neighboring shrubs and trees will sense new space in which to grow, to strive toward light that once eluded them. And next spring, their branches will bud with new purpose and energy. Round and round it goes. It's all good, isn't it. It's all good.