Stormy weather and trees
A week or so ago, we had a lot of wind blowing in the evening, accompanied by white jagged lightning bolts and splitting thunder.
I went outside to look. We live on three acres in rural Louisiana, and there are four towering live oak trees next to our house in addition to bushes and other trees opposite our front door. I stood and watched the wind as it swept through the trees in front and made their tops sway to its will. There was some rain, but not a lot, mostly strong wind. The sound the bushes and trees made as they brushed against one other was exciting. What did the poet Marianne Moore say about wind bending salt marsh grass? “It is a privilege to see so much confusion.” I was mesmerized, happily.
After a while, I had my fill and went back inside. The wind continued, then abated, and, finally, the thunder and lightning passed, too. The tumult was over, and a slightly disappointing ordinariness came over everything. I want to feel alive. Storms do that.
The next morning, I went outside to discover a thick, many-branched limb had been detached from one of the live oaks by the wind and had fallen. It had narrowly missed our house.
When you look at a large live oak, the limbs stretch out forever, in hills and valleys, descending their way sinuously toward the earth. They look like ballet dancers’ arms moving to music. Because they’re so graceful, you tend to forget how heavy and dense those limbs are. This snapped-off limb on the ground was very heavy indeed, and I breathed a sigh of relief that it missed our tin roof. It’s not a match for large live oak limbs. There were so many branches and limbs on this one tree, it was very hard to locate where the limb had broken off. The tree would do fine without it.
Live oaks are synonymous with Louisiana. You see them everywhere. No other tree looks like them. They are dramatic and expansive, yet another manifestation of the originality of trees. I think of Walt Whitman’s poem, “I Saw in Louisiana A Live-Oak Growing.” He calls the tree “lusty,” but that’s like him.
I spent the greater part of the morning sawing off the branches of the limb, hauling them away, one by one, sometimes two by two, to a field nearby where they would be out of the way. It was hot. I used a medium-sized handsaw—we do not own a chainsaw—to do the work. I always find sawing wood with a handsaw more fatiguing than I expect. It makes my chest heave, my face flush. There is no doubt about your progress. But it’s work.
Work like this, small as it is, makes me feel connected to the writers who have made work in nature part of their lessons. I think of Aldo Leopold. In his stirring book, A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949, about his life on a Wisconsin farm, he describes sawing into a felled oak tree with a companion in February. He writes, “Fragrant little chips of history spewed from the saw cut, and accumulated on the snow before each kneeling sawyer. We sensed that these two piles of sawdust were something more than wood: that they were the integrated transect of a century; that our saw was biting its way, stroke by stroke, decade by decade, into the chronology of a lifetime, written in concentric annual rings of good oak.” He was sawing wood to provide heat. I was doing it to clean the yard. His writing is noble, and I feel better quoting it here. The page seems cleaner.
I sawed off all the branches and got down to the limb itself, thick as a python. It was twisted with its end displaying where it had snapped off unevenly. I sawed as much as I could from it to reduce its weight. Once again, I was amazed at how dense and heavy a tree limb can get, originating as it does from a single nut no bigger than a fingernail.
I lifted the fat limb and placed it in our wheelbarrow. I pushed it to the field of dead limbs and branches where I deposited it with a great heave. I felt like Hercules casting this heavy thing, with a shout, onto the pile. Manual labor like this can make even small tasks seem heroic.
My job was over. I went inside. Not everything about living deep in Louisiana appeals to me, but work like this does. It’s about as clear a sense of satisfaction as you can get. It had been a good morning.
Loved reading this, Richard. Reminded me so much of Cumberland Island, which is covered with old live oaks. And I mean old. Hundreds of years. Forming canopies over the narrow dirt paths. Spanish moss hanging, creating images of old men, stooping to whisper to one another.
At the Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking, I learned one of the ways to respond to writing called, Center of Gravity. This sentence struck me as the center of the piece's gravity. "Manual labor like this can make even small tasks seem heroic." Isn't that true of most of your writing?