Ammi Midstokke: Requiem for a tree
There is a cedar tree dying in my yard.
I don’t know how to stop it. Some days I look out the window and chastise it for having tried to grow there anyway. This sunny side of the slope is too dry, or as my arborist friend said: “It is on the edge of its ecological boundary.”
I cannot help but feel like it’s my fault.
Not many years ago, we bought this raw land, stuffed with trees too close together, firs struggling to grow past the dominating ponderosa, the underbrush impenetrable tangles of vine bushes, spindly stick bushes, pokey bushes and dead things. (These are my technical flora naming categories, which also include fern things and things-that-flower.)
There are not many cedars on my property, because it is a southwest facing hillside.
At the bottom a few hopeful birch trees grow in a shallow draw. At the top, where the ridge of this particular geological mound forms, the cedars of the north side of it have crept over and ambitiously spread this way.
When we tromped and fought our way through the overgrown-neglected forest to find a place to set the house, we carefully considered how to avoid damaging any cedars.
When I lamented unplanned tree-felling, the equipment operator called them “casualties of war.”
Large equipment has a way of leaving its permanent mark on any land it traverses: obscene tracks between crushed trees where nothing ever grows quite the same, raw scars across slopes that once had centuries of soil and mycelium, and a wasteland of churned earth around the base of a hopeful cedar.
The cedar tree had three trunks, like reaching necks of a multi-headed, coniferous dragon.
We were told to take down the two smallest ones near the base, so the largest (or healthiest) could thrive. We waited too long, though, in our attempt to not re-shock the tree, and it dwindled in color until we finally lobbed off the two unwelcome trunks.
It’s not really the season of cedars: They all get a little rusty this time of year, and I have a hard time telling the healthy ones apart from the wintering ones.
I know the true sign of its demise will be when the pileated woodpeckers begin thwacking away at it, making their oval wounds through the bark and deep into the sandy-rose meat of the tree.
There is a woodpecker that often digs around in my gutters on that side of the house. I see him as an opportunist now, a more beautiful kind of vulture awaiting the surrender of this tree, generously offering to help it along.
When I grew up here, cedars thrived on all sides of a hill. The birch trees trembled from spring until autumn in great, quaking forests of white bark and shimmering leaves.
The best place to see them was at the edge of a hayfield on our road, where they formed a majestic wall around most of the 40-acre expanse. Now it’s just matching houses on curbed roads with names like “Birch View,” even though all the birches are gone, and you can only see the train tracks and the rooflines.
When this cedar dies, the view from the kitchen window will be the transformer box and the gash in the forest created by the tractors that put it there.
At least the box is green, unlike my wilting cedar tree.
I don’t dare try to plant another tree there, or near there, or most anywhere, because I can neither seem to keep them alive nor protected from the moose. The moose are not here this year, though.
There’s not enough snow in the mountains to drive them down to our saplings and orchards.
On a day it did snow, and heavily, I went for a run on the unbroken trails behind my house. Thick with the snow, the trees and brush sagged over the path with their burden.
The cedars were the most benevolent, with their parasol-boughs of deep green, swaying as I crept beneath them, sometimes softy dumping their load after I passed through. The snowed-in forest absorbs all noise and makes it a more intimate place, as if you alone have been let into its secrets.
I saw that other cedars were not rusty like mine, or like the ones along our road that sip water tainted with chemicals.
Where the forest has been left to be a forest, or tended to with humility and reverence, the cedars grow thick and lush. They form a shield for the forest floor and all its dark and primordial activity.
My cedar, now solidly in tree hospice, will have to find other ways to give to the forest. First to the tiny critters that move into its tissues, and then the woodpecker that will undoubtedly begin his feast by summer, like clockwork at 4 a.m.
Later, so it doesn’t fall on the house, we’ll have to sever it from itself, roots left to some new purpose, wood to its own.
When my parents built our first house, they left a birch tree growing through the deck and two towering firs as the gatekeepers to our front porch.
Every year, we cut back the deck boards and our roof to make room for them to grow. That seems like the more fair bargain for the forest.
Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at ammim@spokesman.com.