I’m not very handy with most tools, but growing up spending summers on my family’s ranch, I was taught to use a chain saw at a relatively early age, and assisted in cutting down and cutting up a diseased tree or two. I’m happy to cut up firewood now from fallen limbs, but hope to never need to bring down a living tree ever again. I’m fond of this Nemerov poem on the subject. I’ve learned enough and need do no more.
Learning by Doing
They’re taking down a tree at the front door,
The power saw is snarling at some nerves,
Whining at others. Now and then it grunts,
And sawdust falls like snow or a drift of seeds.
Rotten, they tell us, at the fork, and one
Big wind would bring it down. So what they do
They do, as usual, to do us good.
Whatever cannot carry its own weight
Has got to go, and so on; you expect
To hear them talking next about survival
And the values of a free society.
For in the explanations people give
On these occasions there is generally some
Mean-spirited moral point, and everyone
Privately wonders if his neighbors plan
To saw him up before he falls on them.
Maybe a hundred years in sun and shower
Dismantled in a morning and let down
Out of itself a finger at a time
And then an arm, and so down to the trunk,
Until there’s nothing left to hold on to
Or snub the splintery holding rope around,
And where those big green divagations were
So loftily with shadows interleaved
The absent-minded blue rains in on us.
Now that they’ve got it sectioned on the ground
It looks as though somebody made a plain
Error in diagnosis, for the wood
Looks sweet and sound throughout. You couldn’t know,
Of course, until you took it down. That’s what
Experts are for, and these experts stand round
The giant pieces of tree as though expecting
An instruction booklet from the factory
Before they try to put it back together.
Anyhow, there it isn’t, on the ground.
Next come the tractor and the crowbar crew
To extirpate what’s left and fill the grave.
Maybe tomorrow grass seed will be sown.
There’s some mean-spirited moral point in that
As well: you learn to bury your mistakes,
Though for a while at dusk the darkening air
Will be with many shadows interleaved,
And pierced with a bewilderment of birds.
I’m with you, and Nemerov–even though I know that wood is needed for building houses and other items, in my case, trebuchets.
I too have returned to childhood homes to find trees gone, with the inevitable excuse that they were old or something. They sure didn’t look it just a year before when I left, and I still wonder.
Our town is good at taking out the shade-generous old indispensables that line the streets and root-hump the pavement and, in the height of summer, replacing them with tiny saplings that provide little shade and might not get to live out their natural span either. And this does not count my discovery that some trees make things I can eat–and when one of these is slaughtered, I have to get food somewhere else.
It takes only an hour or so to rebuild a distorted sidewalk, but it takes decades to replace a good tree.
I loooove this. Thank you.