I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
If you are a geezer you will recognize the poem and remember the name of its author. Actually, being a geezer, you will have forgotten the name of the author, but you will remember that you once knew it. Close enough for me.
His name is Joyce Kilmer, and this poem was memorized by millions of baby boomers whose teachers spent the war years blowing up trees. Trees are important and for those of us who grew up surrounded by trees there is an affinity. So, when the trees in the Lord of the Rings movie series popped their eyes open, people like me said, “See! See! I told you they were conscious!”
I have a friend who is quite knowledgeable about trees and he one time gave a lecture about how information is passed from tree to tree through their roots. For example, if there is a tree blight affecting one tree, the information will be passed to adjacent trees so that they can prepare defenses. Valentina Lagomarsino of Harvard University calls this the “woodwide web”. Cute. So that is out of the way. I like trees.
But trees sometimes need our “help”. They get sick, they get too big, they block our sun, so they need help. They need to be cut down. Sometimes they need to be cut down to provide heat as the Germans and other Europeans are finding out. In fact, Michael Yon reports that the German government is using the army to protect its forests against the tree haters. This being said, the efforts of trees to block our help is sometimes very funny.
I once had a ringside, from-behind-the-curtains, living room seat to watch my neighbour bring down one of our fibrous friends. I understood his need to remove the tree and I was very curious about how he would do it in the crowded confines of his yard. He wisely, in my view, connected a cable from the top of the tree to the bumper of his truck to control the direction of the tree’s fall. He then cut a wedge out of the tree in the preferred direction of fall. And that is when things started to get interesting. The tree had a different preferred direction to fall. The cable attached to the truck suddenly went taut as the tree leaned away from my neighbour’s preferred direction. He sized up the situation immediately and, throwing the chainsaw to the ground, raced to his truck, and put it in reverse. As the truck tires spun and the blue smoke of the burning tires filled the street, I could just make out the truck being dragged slowly but inexorably in the direction of the neighbour’s house. Mark one for the trees as the heavy trunk nestled comfortably among the neighbour’s roof trusses. The two neighbours looked on the scene of destruction with what I can only imagine was stunned disbelief. My neighbour was out a set of truck tires. Did his insurance cover the cost of a new roof? I had never had the courage to ask.
I was pretty sure that I would never do such a stupid thing, but time was to prove me wrong. It is always bad to combine a short memory, a desire to hold on to money, and a toxic, “can do” attitude. I had two large poplars in my yard that were sending suckers into my neighbour’s yard and when he suggested that we trim the trees I was immediately and enthusiastically agreeable. The idea was to cut the trees off about twenty feet above the ground which meant that the other forty feet would fall into my back yard. A rope was tied high in the tree for my neighbour to coax it into the yard and I set to work with my chainsaw. In my defense, this all occurred before the phenomenon of the You-tube self-help video. If I had been able to reference such videos, I am pretty sure that things would have turned out differently.
The obligatory wedge was cut, and the back cut was most of the way through when the saw started to bind. And by “bind” I mean stuck under a very heavy weight which stalled the chainsaw engine. The tree was falling backwards into my neighbour’s yard and his house was about twenty feet from the falling tree. This was going to be ugly, and I hollered for my neighbour to pull on the rope. He was too shocked to respond and, as I looked down, I could see him skidding across my yard holding on to the rope attached to the recalcitrant tree. For once I showed steely resolve and hollered for my son to come and help. He made it out in time to reverse the direction of fall and the two got out of the way just as the tree crashed to the ground in my yard destroying the smaller tree on which it landed. We agreed to share the cost of a professional arborist for the second tree, and I had to sit through a lecture on how deficient my tree pruning knowledge was.
“Just cut the tree down to twenty feet,” I said. “These things are weeds and we will get a nice popsicle shape next spring.” And we did.
My brother was also an enthusiastic faller and life on a large lot in the lower mainland of British Columbia gave him excellent opportunities for practice. He regaled me with his stories of misadventures and once said that BC Hydro now refused to come to his home to replace downed power lines unless he paid them a fee for service. Apparently, they only offer one mulligan on tree cutting. For those of you who, like me, don’t really understand the significance of polarity in electrical power my brother would like you to be aware that it makes a difference which electrical line from the utility gets connected to which electrical line in the house. Reversed polarity can lead to the immediate requirement to replace all the electronics in the house and it is surprising how many and how expensive are the electronic things in the house. The things we can learn from each other.
My last dismal experience upsetting the Ents was with a pair of blue spruce trees located near the height-reduced poplars. In their case I was only going to reduce their height by about twenty feet. Being kinder to these trees was my way of hoping for a better, less blood pressure raising outcome. I climbed to my perch and cut the first wedge. The back cut brought the tree down perfectly into my yard missing other trees and assembled people. I was less fortunate with the second tree. The same approach, wedge cut, and back cut were employed but the tree leaned back and the trunk broke off in my arms. I gripped the broken stump with scissor-locked legs and only the flexibility of my back allowed me to bend over with the falling tree and let it go into the neighbour’s yard – fortunately a different neighbour. But twenty-foot tree trunks that are ten inches in diameter are surprisingly heavy and the falling timber made short work of the underlying mountain ash tree. It seems there is a tree hierarchy and blue spruce will take out a mountain ash every time.
I was still sitting in the shortened tree rubbing my back when the neighbour came out and, surveying the damage with arms on hips, let me know the penance for my tree cutting sins. She let me off lightly and the embarrassment of cleaning up the results of my hubris was penalty enough. And her mountain ash bounced back. It took a few years… well quite a few years… but it did make a comeback.
My last encounter with the world of photosynthetic flora was another blue spruce that had been planted by the daughter of the previous homeowner to reduce global warming. The tree had obviously done yeoman work because it was now over fifty feet high, and its roots were destroying my concrete driveway. Perhaps because it was in the front yard, I remembered my tire burning neighbour from so many years earlier and determined that this would not happen to me. Now in the age of You-tube, I could educate myself on tree falling and not provide mirth for those of my neighbours who were sure to be watching my folly from behind their curtains.
I spent three or four hours per night for several weeks watching videos of tree falling gone wrong (some of which are very funny) and the proper way to get the job done. I saw people flatten their cars under the weight of a tree falling in a lonely field and others who dropped the tree in a three-foot gap between houses. I even started to speak with a Swedish accent because apparently the Swedes are the world’s best at dropping trees.
As an aside, from a religious and anthropological perspective, this is a fascinating phenomenon. The close cousins of the Swedish Vikings were the German Franks and both tribal groups worshipped trees. In fact, Charlemagne conquered the Saxon tribes by cutting down the magic oak tree which was central to their worship. And today these folk are the world’s best tree cutters. That is pretty ironic.
Equipped with newfound knowledge, I was ready to drop my fifty-foot tree across my front lawn, missing the house and avoiding landing it in the street. It would be a tricky operation, but I spoke with a Swedish accent and that is a necessary part of the training. The other part of the necessary training was to employ a device called the wedge. It is driven into the back cut in increasingly larger sizes as the back cut advances such that the tree must fall uphill to fall backward. Trees are like me in that they prefer to take the path of least resistance, so the wedge prevents the problems of an errant and inexplicable direction of fall. Who knew? I boldly put a piece of wood on the ground and explained to the dubious onlookers that I would drop the tree on top of the piece of wood. And then with heart racing and sweat forming I started to cut.
Throughout my life I have found it comparatively easy to make bold predictions and claims about things but when it was time to flip over the cards, I would always regret having run off my mouth. My record is closer to bad than to good, so I was characteristically nervous as the chain saw dust flew around me. I checked to see that the rope was being held tight by my helpers and that it would pull the tree in the right direction. I refused to notice that my neighbour’s house (a different neighbour) was only fifteen feet behind me. And then I continued to cut.
The tree landed right on top of the stick I had previously placed. No nest of robins in that tree’s hair. I thanked my Ent friend in a Swedish accent and have never cut a tree since. It is always best to quit when you are ahead remembering that only God can make a tree and He hears when they fall in the forest.
************************************ A MODEST PROPOSAL ****************************************
Writers on Substack are sent a lot of emails about how to convert freeloaders into paying readers. I will never ask you to pay for what I write because that would make this an even bigger vanity project than it already is. I am just grateful that others appreciate my take on life under the sun.
But if, by reading what I have written, you feel an urge to send a donation to a favourite charity that would be a good thing to do. In the event you don’t have a favourite charity, I will offer suggestions for your consideration.
Why not check out Light Up the World and watch their very cool Amazon video.