Little-noticed things

“The world will little note, nor long remember…” - Abraham Lincoln

(9/2018) One day last month I came into the house covered with sweat and told my wife, “I cannot tell a lie. I cut down the cherry tree.” I was not just imitating the story of George Washington’s youth (well, maybe just a little bit)… I really had just cut down the tree. I didn’t want to, but it had to be done. It was dead.

The tree, a Weeping Cherry, was a gift from my “Aunt Icky” in 1992, the last time she visited us before she died. It started as a spindly little sprout, less than an inch in girth, and grew over the next 26 years to a diameter of 14 inches and a height of over 30 feet, and it was beautiful. It bloomed every spring, and when our grandchildren were growing up, each year they would come to be photographed under the “Icky Tree” in their Easter outfits; they were growing and blooming too. I wrote about it in these pages several times, most recently last year, when I noticed several dead branches on it; I attributed the damage to allelopathic chemicals produced by a Bradford Pear tree that I had unwitting planted too close to it. Had I known earlier, I gladly would have cut down the pear tree; but it was too late. The damage was done, and in June the cherry tree gave up the ghost and dropped the last of its leaves.

I haven’t done a survey, but I suspect if a tree died in yard of the average octogenarian, he would call The Tree Guy and pay him to cut it down, haul it away and clean up the mess. That would make sense… but I couldn’t do it that way. Trees are in my blood. My great-great grandfather bought a quarter-section of land in West Virginia in 1840 (it was just Virginia then); he built a sawmill, built a dam on a nearby creek to provide water power for it, and spent the rest of his life sawing lumber from the forest around it. He died after the Civil War and left the sawmill to his son, who continued clearing the forest. That son was old but still vigorous in 1902 when his grandson was born. The grandson, who was to become my father, spent his youth around the sawmill, first playing and then working with his grandpa to cut trees and haul them to the mill with horses. My earliest memories are stories of those times, told by my father at bedtime when I was two or three; and before I was a teenager, he had taught me how to cut trees… and how to respect and appreciate them.

I have a chainsaw, which in chainsaw years is about my age, and I used it last spring on a fallen tree; but this time it did not wish to start. So, since my son, Fred, happened to be visiting, I got out an old 2-man crosscut saw that may have belonged to my great grandfather. Fred was intrigued by the idea, but he had never used such a tool, and it was a laborious task to learn about it on a tree of that size. It took us nearly an hour to cut the tree, with many rest-stops for aching shoulders, backs and knees. During the rests I told him the stories my father told me as a child, of cutting big trees with his grandfather and hauling them to the sawmill; and I recalled Aldo Leopold’s essay in A Sand County Almanac, where he described how a crosscut saw sings when you get it going in the proper rhythm. We actually got the old saw to sing a few times, but Fred was unable to maintain the rhythm very long… it does take practice. Eventually the tree fell, in the general direction that I had intended.
When we looked at the stump, the cut was as smooth as if it had been done in a shop and sanded.

The bark was dead on one side of the trunk, and there it was infested with ants. Even before we began to saw, they knew something was afoot. When I pulled a few weeds near the area the guards at the tunnels in the bark gave the alarm, and within seconds the whole area was swarming with workers carrying eggs and pupae out of the tree and down toward the underground colony. We hadn’t touched the tree yet, so I’ve no idea how they knew something was going on, or even whether they knew; but by the time the tree fell, they were all away from the stump. It was an admirable response. If I had just been weeding the area, they would have done the same thing, and then all of their work would have been wasted; they’d have had to carry the eggs back. But their ancestors learned millions of years ago that foresight is a more valuable trait for survival than avoiding extra work; that’s why ants are so abundant and successful. We humans might learn a lesson from them, if we were smarter.

The first thing you are supposed to do after you cut a tree is to count the growth rings, and we could see them clearly. They recited the history of the good and bad growing seasons of the last 28 years, and the onset of the fatal disease. The next thing you’re supposed to do is to sit down in the shade and contemplate the state of the world with a container of liquid in your hand. In Leopold’s case, he counted the rings and reflected backward. His tree had grown from an acorn that fell around the time of the Mexican War. It grew slowly at first, nibbled by deer and crowded among other seedlings in the forest; but eventually a nearby tree fell in a storm and allowed light to reach the ground, and it spurted upward. It crowded out its neighbors and laid down rings, marking the Gold Rush, the Civil War, the Union Pacific Railroad, the first radio, electric light, telephone, automobile, airplane, World War, Dust Bowl, Depression… Leopold marked the dates on the stump.

In my case, a can of root beer had to suffice, and my mind drifted back. When we planted the tree in 1992, the Gulf War had just ended; I was still teaching, and our third grandchild was still in diapers. Our cherry tree started slowly; it took a couple of years to establish a set of roots that could keep it upright when the wind blew, but then it shot upward. As it grew, three more grandchildren arrived. Then came the Clinton scandal, along with 9-11, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, an economic crash and recovery, and… well, you know. By the time I retired, the limbs that had started as erect sprouts had curved outward and drooped like willows, blowing gracefully in the wind. Early on, I stumbled upon Housman’s poem, which I read each year until I knew it by heart:

“Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with blooms along the bough,
And stands along the woodland ride,
Wearing white for Eastertide….”

The tree is gone now, but the stump is still there, and I will leave it as long as either of us lasts. From the trunk and larger branches there is wood that may be turned into mementos to remind the family of Icky. If great grandchildren ever come, I will sit on the stump and hold them on my lap, and I will tell them stories about the days “when I and all the world were young,” as my father told me and as every father since Sir Walter Raleigh has done. And next Easter I will stand by the stump and recite Housman’s poem. And remember.