Death of a Tree

We had a tree cut down Saturday.  It was a water oak, around 70 feet tall.  The problem was that it was too close to the house, and this is Louisiana where we have hurricanes regularly, and with hurricanes come high winds, sometimes above 100 mph, and with those winds come trees toppling onto houses.  It happens all too frequently. 

Our water oak was fully grown, meaning that it was on its decline. At roughly 70 feet, growing two feet a year, it was somewhere around 40 years old. Water oaks live just 50 years.  So, that when those strong winds inevitably arrive, our water oak, aged and somewhat shaky, more and more would likely be blown over.  Of course, it might fall the opposite direction of the house.  Then again, it might not.  Though my partner and I love trees, we only have one house, and we want to keep it. So we made the decision to have the water oak cut down.

We hired an outfit to do that. They arrived promptly at 7am on Saturday and went to work.  They set their large chainsaws to the base of oak and began. You know the sound, satisfying and lethal. Soon enough, they had nearly sawn through. They had a small tractor with them and drove it against the now-precarious trunk. That did it. There was the slow-motion toppling, and the heavy sigh of the tree hitting the earth, like an elephant falling to the ground.  A tree newly fallen.  The starkness of that.

Then, a surprise. 

The force of the tree falling 70 feet smashing against the earth with force split open one of its big branches, creating a large blonde mouth.  In it was revealed a teeming beehive.  We had no idea. The bees careened around their exposed hive like electrons, in a fury.  The crew debated what to do.  They couldn’t chainsaw the fallen tree into sections to be hauled away because of the bees.  No one wanted to be stung.  And let’s face it, the bees had every reason to sting anyone who came near. 

So they burned the beehive and killed most of the bees.  No! my partner and I said to each other.  We know the importance of bees, what good they do, and, lately, of their sudden deaths and scarcity.  It especially tore at my partner, who has been living in this house much longer than I have and whose love of animals of all kinds is strongly-felt.  But destroy the hive they did, and we could only live with that.

They brought back their chainsaws, and they sawed the downed tree into sections and hauled them away. They left just a massive stump, bright-surfaced and obvious.  The remnant of a colossal amputation. 

In a matter of hours, forty years, gone.

The next morning we looked out onto the yard where before had been a 70’ tree with sprawling branches and a canopy, a reliable and comforting sight.  The absence of a tree is profound. I asked my partner what she would miss the most about the tree, and she said that it would be the swaying of the branches in the wind. 

It was a complex thing, this water oak, having become what it was in its height and sprawl.  It had a presence. Now that it was gone, the air was empty before us.  Privacy and shade were gone. Movement, moods, lyricism were gone. This tall stationary thing had a grace, its branches bending and arching when the wind moved against and through it.  The tree’s arms, with the winds urging, created a choreography, every time original, and it never ceased to delight and impress us.  As did the sounds it made, the swooshes of branches. In a high wind, the branches weaving and crashing against one other made you call one another to come and see.

All that, and the distinct way the branches sprawled and grew, and the tree’s many moods, and its unique way of being alive, gone. Now where it was, nothing, just air.  

What I feel?  Gratitude.