Three large trees in our front yard, mature red oaks, died this year. They had been going for some time, I suspect. The one closest to the house didn’t leaf out at all in the spring; another leafed out lightly but was bare by the summer solstice; the third—standing between those two—started out the spring well enough and lasted through mid-summer, but was nearly leafless by Labor Day, and, anyway, it had to be taken down in order to safely fell the other two.
The one that was closest to the house, and the largest of the three, was the survivor of a pair that had flanked the front porch when we bought the place seven years ago. Three feet in diameter at the base, this pair of oaks towered over the house. Red oaks have a solid, straight main trunk, with limbs starting twelve or fifteen feet from the ground and branching off at three-or-four feet intervals, all the way to the top. The largest limbs, of course, are the lowest. Some of those can be a foot or more in diameter. We lost the first of the pair that flanked our front porch two years ago. It was a sign, I suppose.
Another sign was dead limbs. The trees seemed to die from the bottom up, leaving the lower branches bare and brittle. These dead branches became enough of an eyesore that when we had the first tree taken down two years ago, we asked the tree service to cut them out, as they were too high for me to reach with a chainsaw, even on our tallest ladder, the very thought of which terrifies Vanessa. And me, when I let myself think about it. The young men from the service gladly obliged, strapping spikes on their boots and clambering up the trees with their ropes and chainsaws, very possibly hastening the trees’ demise.
Yet another sign, I think, was the presence of suckers—that is, small limbs sprouting around the trunk, underneath the lowest branches. These suckers grow quickly—three feet or more in a season, and they are thickly lined with leaves, trying, I suppose, to make up for the loss in the upper branches. I’m not certain that suckers are a sign of trouble, but I have noticed the healthier-looking oaks don’t seem to have them. So, I have come to think of them as the trees’ last wheezing gasp.
The size and variety of trees was one of the things that attracted us to this property in the first place. There are hundreds of trees—large, mature maples, shagbark and pignut hickory, a variety of oak and ash, towering white pines, gnarly-rooted hackberries, scattered willows, a cottonwood or two, groves of young black walnut and native persimmon. Cedars line the south fence row, shielding us from the neighbor’s cattle. We hear them low across the green.
On the Friday morning the tree service came to cut down the trees, I woke up early, made coffee, and settled in to read the morning news. The main difference between that morning and a few thousand that preceded it was that Vanessa was not in bed beside me—she had gone to visit her parents because her father was in the hospital with pneumonia. I opened my iPad and pulled up the weather. I have a very specific morning routine: Weather.com to NPR to the New York Times to The Atlantic to Facebook. I think of it as moving from general to specific. I want to know the temperature and rain chances, then I want an overview of events (NPR), then more in-depth news and opinions (NYTimes), then some analysis and longer articles (The Atlantic), and then I check out what my friends are up to. I think of it as inward motion. Another way to look at it, which is how Vanessa sees it, is that I don’t have to actually respond to anything until I’ve had a cup of coffee. She’s probably right. I am slow to wake.
On that Friday morning, my routine was disrupted when I opened my iPad and a headline jumped out at me: TRUMP CONTRACTS COVID-19!
Holy Shit! I was jarred wide awake. I was elated. I’m not proud to admit it, but that was my first reaction. My second reaction was a pang of grief that Vanessa wasn’t here. For months, one of our first questions each morning, after, “Did you sleep okay?” has been, “Is he still alive?”
For me, Trump had become an avatar for all that’s wrong with America in the 21st Century: greed, corruption, incompetence, inequality, bigotry, “alternative facts,” racism, lack of principle, general distrust, reversion to tribalism, a hollowing out of any sense of civic responsibility…. The list could go on, but it’s not the point.
We have arrived, I can’t help but feel, at the culmination of a movement that began in the 1980s when so many members of my generation—apparently weary of VW Beetles, free love, and pot—took a hard right, both socially and politically, started drinking wine and driving minivans, and began accumulating wealth, property, and gadgets at rate previously unimagined in human history. And we did our share to wreck the planet on the way.
And now we are staring in the face of chaos. Should he lose the upcoming election, Trump will not willingly submit to a peaceful transfer of power. In fact, he has done everything within his considerable powers to ensure that he can raise a stink if he doesn’t reach 270 electoral college votes, including hobbling the U.S. Postal Service, lobbing a constant barrage of tweets about voter fraud and rigged elections, and suggesting that right-wing militias should “stand by.” All this while we all know, of course, that the election will be rigged—he’s rigging it. And now he’s set up the Supreme Court to give him a hand.
So, when I read about Trump’s case of COVID, I felt more than a little relief. For the first time in weeks, I saw a glimmer of hope. With Trump out of the way (if he was on a ventilator or even just quarantined in some presidential wing of Walter Reed) we might have an almost normal election.
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I’m not sure why the trees in our front yard died. It wasn’t age. Judging from where they were placed, I’m guessing they were planted around the time the house was built, thirty-five years ago. Counting the rings, which is harder to do than you might think, seems to support my theory. I talked with a neighbor who had recently lost a red oak that was nearly a century old. That tree had been woven into the fabric of his family life, providing shade for barbeques, limbs for swings, a leafy ear, and solace in the demise of aging parents. He wrote a lovely eulogy after having it cut down and removed. “Sometimes the natural world is the best way to make sense of the human world,” he wrote. “Sometimes a tree is more than just a tree.” Our trees weren’t that much more than just trees, though one of them did hold up one end of a hammock for a few years.
Still, I hated to see them go, and I’m worried about the four or five remaining red oaks in the front yard. I’ve heard different possibilities about why they died. One possibility is simply the bad luck of location—there is a lot of limestone buried in the subsoil of this area, some of which could be blocking the mature trees’ root systems. That would explain why some trees die while others not thirty feet away, seem to thrive. Another possibility is pests. A preliminary Google search brings up plenty of opportunity, including the two-lined chestnut borer, the red oak borer, armillaria root rot, and some sort of unpronounceable canker. But after the trees were down, I looked and did not see many visible signs of infestation or disease. The fellow that came and cut the trees down said he’d removed quite a few red oaks of all sizes and ages lately, and from all different kinds of environments. His best guess was weather. A period of late winter warming awakes the trees too early and then a cold snap comes along and puts stress on them. That, combined with the fact that summers are getting hotter and more humid, which encourages the growth of fungus and various infestations. Call it global warming.
Or it could be Voodoo. Our trees are withering because some radical live oak or angry sycamore holed up in some dank corner of Red-State-Nowhere has put a hex on them. Most likely, it’s a combination of environment, location, and pests. When an organism becomes overly stressed, its defenses are weakened which makes it more susceptible to attack by other organisms.
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Like about everybody, I’m pretty nervous about what could happen this fall, which is why I was briefly hopeful when Trump came down with COVID. He’s not the cause of our problems, but he is certainly an irritant. Like the pests that attack a sick plant, he takes advantage of weaknesses in the structure, tearing them down further for his own gain. He has shown us time and time again how much we rely on unspoken, and hitherto unrecognized, norms of behavior—unquestioned assumptions about how people, particularly people in power, are supposed to act in any given situation. We expect the president to tell the American public the truth, especially when it affects the health choices that lie in front of us, but there is no law requiring it. We expect for the losers in an election to concede, to put the will of the people and the good of the country above party and personal gain—they always have—but there is no statute to enforce it. Like Charlie Brown, we expect Lucy not to pull away the football at the very last moment, though we have been shown over and over how foolish it is to maintain that expectation.
When nearly 45% of the voting population continues to support a politician (and he is a politician) that nearly 55% of the voting population sees as a liar, conman, and scoundrel, the problem is bigger than that politician. So, I’ve had a burgeoning sense of dread for some time—a sense that it’s going to take some kind of catastrophe to make us see what so many of us have been ignoring. It could be Covid. It could be rioting and violence in the streets. It could be a complete meltdown of the economy. It could be more flooding, more fire, some unpronounceable canker. Maybe it will be some combination. Likely some combination.
This sense of dread pre-dates the pandemic, though I can’t identity a specific date or cause any more than I can point to a date or cause for the demise of our trees. I think we’ve been sick for some time, though some of us have been asymptomatic. All I know for sure is that three trees are down in my front yard.
I had asked the tree service to get the trees safely on the ground and cut the main trunks into six-or-eight feet lengths. From that point, I figured we could deal with them. My goal was to use as much of the wood as possible for firewood and mulch. Being retired, I thought, I’ll have plenty of time to work on this project. Vanessa’s response to my plan was something along of lines of, “Are you crazy?”
Maybe, I thought, but I couldn’t bring myself to having them chopped up and carted off. I’m conservative in that way.
Until you’ve seen a full-grown, hardwood tree lying on the ground, it’s hard to fathom just how large and complex they are. We get so used to having them tower above us that we mostly stop looking, until they fall. When they do fall, they shatter. Limbs break, crisscross each other, and get caught underneath the trunk, leaving a carcass that’s heavy and dense and tangled. When three large trees fall in the same direction, as ours did (away from the house), they overlap each other, so to heavy and dense and tangled, you have to add matted.
Some of the larger limbs were themselves the size of a small tree, and there were so many on the ground that in some places we couldn’t get to the trunk. So, we started cleaning from the outside. Using large hand clippers to cut the smaller branches and a chainsaw for large ones, we started clipping and cutting and sorting everything into piles. Any branches under two inches in diameter and straight enough to get through the chipper shoot were tossed into stacks, provided there weren’t rotting or diseased. We used the chainsaw to cut the larger limbs to fireplace-length logs, split the ones we could with an axe, and stacked them to cure. Then, there were intermediate stacks—six-or-eight feet lengths of limbs under a foot in diameter that needed branches cut off (for chipping) before they could be cut into firewood and stacked for splitting. And there were piles of brush—branches too small, crooked, or rotted to use. These piles have been burned daily.
Working three to four hours a day, it has taken three weeks to get to the main trunks of the trees. These trunks, some of which are three feet in diameter, cut into six-to-ten-feet lengths, currently lie in the front yard like toppled gods from Easter Island.
I’ve been reading a lot of news and analysis, looking for signs of hope and warning. For me, it has come down to one question: have we hit bottom yet? Even if the side I’m cheering for wins, even if there is a landslide, are we going to continue widening the gap between those who have and those who don’t? Are we going to continue destroying our environment—our air, our water, our land—so that fewer and fewer of us can live in an increasingly disconnected and alien luxury? Are we going to continue denying so many other people the very things we treasure because of where they come from, what they look like, or who they love? Economic equality, environmental sustainability, and social justice—three trees lying in our yard.
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It’s been hard to focus lately, so I’m glad to have had my own trees to work on. We’ve cut, split and stacked enough firewood for this winter, and probably next winter as well, and we’ve chipped enough small limbs and branches to mulch most of our flower gardens and renew the walking paths in the vegetable gardens. There is still a lot of work to do—a big pile of limbs to run through the chipper, those giant trunks to get out of the front yard, and raking. There’s always raking. The trunks are too large for me to split with my axe, so once I have them cut to length, I’ll rent a log splitter and stack yet another rack or two of firewood.
It’s taken every tool that we have—rakes, clippers, shovels, a chainsaw, two lawn mowers (one to pull the chipper and one to pull a small trailer), the tractor pulling the big trailer loaded with limbs to burn and the scoop loaded with twigs and leaves. Every day, we work a while, cleaning up a little pile here, splitting the stack of limbs we cut yesterday, raking debris and hauling it to the burn pile, often sweating, grateful, lately, for the cooler and dryer autumn air. In autumn, the sky burns blue.
It’s hard to lose what you thought would be there well past your own short tenure on this planet, hard to lose what you let yourself believe was permanent. And, no doubt, it’s a lot of work to deal with everything that immediately follows such a loss, but sometimes when you do the work, when you marshal all the resources you have, when you make a plan, and when you put in the time, the energy, and the sweat, you look up and suddenly are surprised by the view, so lovely, so clear, almost new.
