Flash Friday ~ The Oak

The oak came down on Thursday morning. The sky was blue, the temperature around 34 degrees to start, later warming to nearly 50, which in March is balmy. Our arborist friends put a rope around its limbs, above the point where the trunk split into two leaders, threaded the rope around a distant maple tree, and hooked it up to the winch on a blue tractor. 

The arborist cut a notch out of the base of the tree, near the ground, on the north side, the direction it was intended to fall toward. Then he cut lines perpendicular to the notch and began the working the chainsaw into the meat of the tree. The bar was not much longer than the thickness of the trunk, and he came at it from different angles, until only a narrow strip of bark on either side of the notch remained intact. I thought about how the living tissue of a tree is only a thin layer of cells beneath the bark, how those two strips of connection might be enough to keep the tree alive, until a windstorm took it down.

The arborist turned his saw off and all was quiet for a moment, then the winch started up, pulling the rope taught. The oak stood up, vertical, its limbs reaching toward the sky; it had developed a houseward lean over the years, reaching for the sunlight that grazed the roofline from the south. Then it tipped over and lay down almost gently among the scrubby saplings that grow on that side of the house, its own twigs and branches breaking its fall.

The oak was originally scheduled to come down in November, when I would be gone, visiting my family in Colorado. I measured it before I left, wrapping my dressmaker's tape around it at chest height: 57 inches in circumference, making it 18 in diameter. Later, after the arborists left and the tree lay in the yard in bucked-up cordwood lengths, I measured the stump at ground level: 27 inches across its widest dimension.

I have a picture of the oak from when out house was a framed-in box of raw wood. I stand where one day our purple front door and a granite step will be, holding M, a few weeks old, all big head and scrawny limbs. The tree stands in the foreground, and because of the perspective it's hard to say how big it is, but it looks almost small enough to wrap my two hands around. Counting off the thick growth rings of the last twenty years, it appears it was about eight inches in diameter then, meaning it's more than doubled in thickness in less than half its life.

We never intended to keep the oak. C had cut down most of the trees that inhabited the little, mostly bare, knoll where we planned to build our house. The oak tree he'd left for some reason--he thought it was too far from the house's footprint to bother with, perhaps, or he figured the excavators would take it down with their bucket. As it turned out, however, the tree was too close to the foundation for comfort--its roots would eventually gnaw at the basement walls, its branches overhang the roof and encroach on the chimney--and the excavators went to great lengths to avoid knocking it down. 

Because they'd saved it, we let it stay, leaving a little well around its base for water to collect in and to allow some of the roots to breathe when we backfilled the front yard. I planted white-and-apricot daffodils in that well. Our first clothesline hung between the oak and a poplar in the scrubby area north of the house, where I hung M's diapers, gathering them in in the twilight to an audience of mule deer. Each summer I'd hang the hummingbird feeder from the clothesline. We strung the hammock between the oak and a hemlock nearby, and I whiled away many summer hours reading and writing and daydreaming in its swinging embrace, the dappled shade of the oak leaves filtering the sun.

Then the brown-tailed moths came. The first caterpillar dropped from a different oak tree in the yard onto the back of my shirt. The rash formed in minutes, covering me from chin to shoulder in an angry, stinging red patch of raw meat. I am a sweller and an itcher, reacting redly to everything from cheap jewelry to synthetic waistbands. Mosquito and blackly bites give me welts; bee stings swell to the size of footballs; don't even think about fire ants and chiggers; poison I've spreads and weeps and oozes. But none of these irritations have kept me indoors. However, for weeks after my brown-tailed moth run-in, every time I stepped outside, my skin erupted in goosebumps. Burn the trees down, I thought. Burn them all down!

We did not burn the trees down, and we tried to live with the moths. For the first time ever, I prayed for a cold wet spring. But they kept coming and coming. By night the caterpillars would rain out of the oak tree and by day they would climb up the front of the house. I knocked them off with a twig into a bucket of soapy water. One day I counted more than 200 caterpillars caught in my bucket. C considered pruning the tree back, to keep it from overhanging the house, but our arborist friend issued the death sentence: take it down; take the whole tree down. Not long after the poplar, where the other end of the blackened clothesline was tied, long-dead and swollen with water from a rainstorm, collapsed on a still day. A sign.

After the tree was cut and bucked, it lay in the yard, the chunks of log giving off the vinegary smell of cut oak. When Z got home he asked why we hadn't left the log whole, to be cut into lumber, and I felt panicky ache in my chest, the feeling of having made a mistake you can't undo. The tree could have yielded the wood for the quarter-sawn oak end table I've always wanted. It could have ended its life with a little more dignity than sixteen-inch chunks of cordwood. We could have honored its place at the front door of our home for the first twenty years we lived here, but instead we will burn it, to keep that home warm, the tree reduced to nothing but smoke and ash and heat.

You can order my book, Uphill Both Ways: Hiking Toward Happiness on the Colorado Trail from any of the retailers listed here, or ask your local bookstore or library to order a copy. And if you want more Andrea, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.