1
I was on my way out of the house to workout when I got a text message from our neighbor: our large backyard oak had shed a thick branch that spanned the intersecting lines of four properties.
In the backyard, a pile of small leaves showed where my neighbor had done some cleanup, but much more work had to be done if the limb was going to be removed.
I went and got a handsaw and began the awkward work of pruning the fallen limb. It lay half on the fence of the intersection of the backyard of our two properties. The other half lay over the back of my property, balanced over and down three feet on a retaining wall that lined the backyards of a line of houses.
I reached over the the 1950’s metal fence that was built into the concrete of the retaining wall–resembling more of a garden accoutrement in thickness, size, and design than a fence–and tried to lift the now limbless fallen trunk.
“Oh man,” I thought, feeling the weight of it. It was going to be something to lift that.
Wearing Chacos and shorts, legs already full of red blotches and raised bumps from the insect denizens of that part of the yard, I looked up, trying to find the pale blonde innards of the broken base. The canopy had had 70 years or more to fill itself out, creating another world up there. What I did see was that strange eeriness I’ve had since entering the homeowner market: being completely financially responsible for an entire residence. It makes you sick knowing the largest thing you will spend decades paying for, that a loan company yet “owns,” is prone to being ended by an act of such naturalness.
Trees are not immortal, and what goes up must come down.
2
In a nature preserve near the hippy-ish town of Yellow Springs, Ohio–strongly recommend a visit: it is lovely–I was hiking with my wife and her family when a thick snap cackled through the forest. The sound evolved into the plowing of a large broken limb through its older siblings, as if a waterfall had opened up spontaneously in the canopy of the forest.
It put everyone but me into action.
Everyone scrambled while I stood. I wanted to locate the falling branch to see where I should run. It took me a couple of frantic head swivels, but I finally caught the tail end of its fall, far to the right of the trail we were on.
Afterward, I wondered who had been right: those who immediately ran or me. I had figured that without knowing where the branch was falling, one might run into its path. But I, who took time to look around, could’ve been right underneath the branch. That was when I really understood a term I had heard before, something I thought was more unlucky than being struck by lightning: “widowmaker.”
The term applies to trees that look like they will fall or have fallen over on someone. I guess it’s from an odd time when single men and any sort of woman, married or not, never stood in a tree’s fall zone. The times were a lot less favorable to women, but to study the etymology of that word is quite sinister. Its implication that women treated trees like ladders, never going underneath for some “wives tale” mythical reason.
(A male who has lost their spouse–and I must say these terms are not of the modern parlance–is a “widower” and not a “widow.” And it is true that a “widowermaker’s” fourth syllable puts the term out of bounds of seriousness. So perhaps it “widowmaker” is genderless?)
The realness of widowmakers was again reaffirmed a couple months later when I was driving to work on a rainy morning. A dead tree, unburdened from the soily loam it had died in, slowly fell onto the road in front of the car that was ahead of me. This experience was not as intense as locating a branch falling from the sky, but as we drove around the fallen tree, dipping into the empty oncoming lane, I was reminded that these things we live amongst are not stationary objects.
Trees are huge and heavy. A human being could be crushed by a tree, but this is a small potatoes target in terms of a long-lived, thick-as-all-get-out tree. A house is more of a match. Fitting, that. A tree falling into a nailed and screwed together tree graveyard.
There is one such house-destroyer in my neighbor’s yard. A large pine tree, whose limbs have been partially cleaved away by many years of power company shearing, has grown in my neighbor’s yard perhaps since the beginning.
At the base, it’s the thickness of three power line poles placed side-by-side. It is also very tall, creating a canopy above our roofs that reminds me of the gigantic trees out West. If it were to fall just right, the thickest part of the trunk would turn my house into a hot dog bun, the tree a sort of spindly bratwurst, leaving the thinnest topmost parts to dangle in my backyard.
The pine tree’s limbs have fallen on my neighbor’s power line and another time her cable line, knocking both to the ground. I’ve watched the sway of that pine tree in storms and have pondered where it would fall if the thing snapped.
Whenever I’m in a city with buildings standing far taller than the trees, I wonder how many people realize what kind of destruction or death trees can render when they inevitably meet their end.
3
The tree that I was cleaning up in my backyard had had a fungal infection for two years. That first year of infection, the new spring leaves looked as they did in the fall–scrunched, curled, and dry as if cooked on a grill, yet green.
Months later, during an early ice storm in the fall of that first year of infection, I awoke in the middle of the night to the snaps of giant limbs falling on chain link fences, wooden fences, and lawns. Five of those limbs were from our backyard oak tree. When it shed its acorns not long after, it gave that year’s fall a bit of a specter of the possible future of that tree, perhaps coming sooner than expected.
Two years ago, a house on my running route dodged a large backyard tree not 20 feet from the house. Judging by the radius around the tree, it had more than a twenty-five percent chance of being in the tree’s fall path. I could not imagine two humans being able to wrap their arms around that tree if they held hands.
A few years ago, I read Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees and, like most people, learned about the communal nature of trees, especially their symbiosis with fungus to aid nutrient transfers to other close-by trees. But what struck me more was the fact that most trees–weeping willows being a good example of an exception–band together to form a protective wind barrier, better known as a “forest.” Trees that are alone live more tumultuous lives, like trees growing amongst the houses and concrete of the human forest of a neighborhood.
Sometimes when I sit in my second floor office, I look out at the crowns of the trees looming over the shingled roof tops of my street. Squirrel nests and hawks vie for upper limbs, and so many other species I can’t readily see–nature’s Roman pillars holding up so much and coming down with such force.
It makes one compare the end of life scenarios of humans and trees. Dead trees can remain standing for years. And when they fall, there they remain for even more years. Humans harness this staying power.
Or they stay in some capacity, as did the stumps that lingered in the backyards of my first two owned-by-me houses. Being a lawn completionist back in those days, I hacked the crap out of those old stumps to get rid of them and cover them up with sod. Knocking through roots is insane work. And what I thought would only take an hour or two, took days.
A couple years ago, we renovated our pink tiled bathroom. I was sad to see it go. It had survived decades of occupants. But it had shown its age in a couple cracks regardless of how sturdy it all yet was.
When the bathroom was demoed, I remember taking pictures of the structure behind it all, the structure that still exists behind a new facade. It was perhaps the first time humans had laid eyes on it since it was built in the 1950s. Where are those builders now? They have perhaps already made room for the new shoots to reach their place in the sky.