Storm Made Pretty Trees Turn Vicious

I’m beginning to view the Ponderosa pine as a particularly tall, noxious weed.

I hate to be judgmental about a species of tree. However, I’m in no mood to hear the pine’s side of the story right now, since one of them just crashed onto my neighbor’s house.

This overgrown icicle suddenly began to sway under a few tons of extra ice. Then the trunk cracked about 20 feet up. The next thing our neighbors knew, their house was wearing a tree-hat, and two knotty pine branches were sticking straight down through the ceiling of their dining room.

The main trunk of the tree, thankfully, didn’t penetrate. It came to rest on the roof, with about 10 or 20 feet overlapping on either end. When viewed from the street, it looks like an overblown Martha Stewart scheme for decorating your eaves with Christmas boughs.

I can hardly blame my neighbors for viewing their remaining Ponderosa pines with distrust. Some of their other trees are also leaning suspiciously. So they immediately called a tree service to find out how much it would cost to remove all 10 Ponderosa pines from their yard. The horrifying estimate: $10,000, or a cool thousand bucks per tree.

So they balked, although frankly, I’m beginning to think that $1,000 is a small price to pay to rid the world of one more Ponderosa pine. If I had a spare $1,000, I might want to splurge it all on the pine laying across my power lines.

What are these trees good for? All they do is catch fire in the summer, drop needles on us every autumn, fall down in every windstorm, and crack in half during every Ice Storm of the Century. You might as well fill your yard with anti-personnel mines.

I’m willing to stipulate that there is a place for the Ponderosa pine. I believe, however, that that place is in the forest, and not in my front yard.

I am also willing to concede that the Ponderosa pine has the right of precedence here in this particular corner of the world. The Ponderosa pine was here first; if a bunch of humans moved in under them, whose fault is that? If we were silly enough to stick a city underneath a canopy of Ponderosa boughs, we can’t exactly blame the trees when they fall on our head.

So, I’m probably just letting the emotionalism of the moment affect my judgment.

Emotional? Why should I be emotional? Just because the whole city has reverted to the Stone Age? Just because we’re all huddling miserably around our fires, eating cold Spam for the sixth day this week? Playing our 89th game of Go Fish by the light of our last two votive candles? Trying to take a cold sponge bath in a darkened bathroom? Suffering the risk of dripping hot wax on certain sensitive parts of our bodies? Waking up every morning to the cheerful prospect of a 42-degree cup of coffee and a 38-degree toilet seat?

And all of this, because the Ponderosa pines and their fir and deciduous accomplices have fallen down on our homes and power lines.

I realize, as I say this, that I am guilty of what a psychologist would call “displacement.” My anger is being directed toward inappropriate targets. The Ponderosa pine is not, of course, the direct cause of our problems.

However, I’ve been thinking about something my lineman said to me this week. (I think of him as “my” lineman, because he spent so much time up “my” power pole the other day). He was from Portland, and as he surveyed the carnage in my neighborhood, he offered this observation: “You people in this town must have done something pretty bad to to piss off the gods like this.”

What did we do? The more I thought about it, the more clear it became to me. We did do something to annoy the gods. We moved in right underneath them. In this part of the world, the “gods” just happen to be big, tall, needle-covered spires, and when they get mad, boy, do they get mad.

, DataTimes MEMO: To leave a message on Jim Kershner’s voice-mail, call 459-5493. Or send e-mail to jimk@spokesman.com, or regular mail to Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210.