The sky was a deep sapphire blue the day they cut down the giant. It was a matter of time, we knew, because they had already cleared out the scrub oaks and the wild cherry trees and the scraggly mountain mahogany. But it was still a shock to see it fall.
The giant must have been 300 feet tall. Actually I have no idea, because I am really lousy at guessing these things. But it was huge. The height of a mid-size building. Like, not a restaurant, not one of those bland dun-colored bank offices, but a proper building, one with at least 10 floors and possibly more, not quite a skyscraper but definitely tall enough to warrant an elevator.
The giant had a family. Many smaller ponderosas surrounded it, and because I know that pines reproduce by dropping cones beneath themselves, I knew the smaller ones were its younger relations. Two of them went that day, too. And two great-x-10^? grand-saplings beneath those also went, under the wheel of the enormous truck that arrived to chip the pines into mulch. The smallest of the giant’s descendants disappeared before I had a chance to dig them out and take them home. I got a couple, but not enough. I still feel terrible about this.
The giant was the tallest tree around, probably the tallest in my entire neighborhood. It stood above our land long before it was a summer camp, well before it was a tuberculosis sanitarium, many years before President Ulysses S. Grant became the first white man to subdivide the acreage where my house now sits. The tree was already giant before European settlers showed up on this continent to build things on the unceded land of the Tabegauche Band of the Ute People.
At some point, someone installed a lightning rod along the tree’s trunk. Someone further installed a power line, and strung a bulb up it, turning the giant into a streetlight. The light probably hadn’t worked in a century. Every time I walked under the giant’s wild tangle of branches, I wondered about the things it had seen, the lives that crossed under and over and into it.
And then some crews came to take it down. They are building a house next to me. I have no right to complain about this, because I suspect my house also felled a giant. I feel such sadness and guilt about my complicity. But if a giant had not fallen to make way for my house, I wouldn’t live in it, which means I wouldn’t be able to greet the forest out my bedroom window every morning with something like joy. Still, I feel a lot of guilt under this happiness.
The guy with the chainsaw got to work. He sliced a wedge out of the giant, ensuring it would fall just where he wanted. We watched from the driveway, 80 yards away. He moved to the other side and started buzzing. It happened so suddenly and so gracefully, so inexorably. A crack, and then it fell.
My daughter and I both cried out, some involuntary “ahh,” as the giant sank under Earth’s gravity. It hit the ground with an almighty crash and then it bounced. My daughter wept openly. I tried very hard not to do the same.
We went to pay our respects as soon as the crews took their chain saws and left. Its crown lay a few feet off the ground, 300 feet below the air it breathed for the last year, and for the last 50 years, and probably at least 250. My husband stopped counting the rings when he got to 50, which was at least a foot away from the rough outer bark. Ponderosa pines can live 500 years or more.
Small ants crawled on its now-dying branches. A downy woodpecker perched at an awkward angle, within the inner branches, and searched for a meal. The needles in its crown were so thick, much sturdier than I expected. Ponderosa needles are usually long and slender, but these were plump and bright green. It had so much new growth. I touched the stump where the workers had made their cuts. The wood was soft and golden, hard but yielding, vanilla-scented. I remembered the woody parts are lignin. I think that’s right. Anyway, it was alive.
That night, the forest began to respond. I know it sounds like I’m writing a Disney story, but everything I report here is true.
One of our bears came by in the hours before dusk to inspect. He approached it slowly, and then turned around. He saw us watching him watching the tree, and he spooked. He left the way he came. Then an hour later, he came back. This is what happened.
He walked up to the fallen pine and sniffed a branch. My tree, I imagine he thought. I’ve climbed this tree so many times. My mom taught me how, when I was just a cub. I could see so, so far from my perch in its branches.
He sniffed the trunk. He sniffed the ground where its branches made impact. My tree. He turned around and walked across my driveway. Then he sat in my grass, made himself comfortable, and stared back at the tree. He sat there contemplating it for several minutes. I am not making this up. He sat there and stared at it. Then he slowly heaved himself up and walked away.
About two hours later, I opened the front door to let my dog out, and I checked the woods up there, like I do every time, in case there’s a bear. There was. He was back, standing by the trunk again. He didn’t move, wasn’t eating anything. He just stood near the tree, quietly. My eyes filled with tears again.
The next morning, two young mule deer bucks came. The smaller one, who I imagine is younger, stopped in his tracks when he saw it. I watched him lift his head, his fresh small antlers still full of fuzz, and stare at it. He lifted a front hoof but didn’t move. Just watched.
I opened the window to bring in the smell of morning. Fresh pine scent sailed inside. Did the other trees sense it? I imagine they were mourning too. One of their greatest was gone. Only logs would remain, and pictures I took, and the small half-Moon wedge I kept from its trunk.
More trees came down the same day. One of them, I’d walked past dozens of times, but I never noticed its trunk. It grew straight through a rock. Right through this boulder, deposited by some anonymous glacier before humans ever walked here. The tree just grew right through it. I couldn’t believe it. And to meet such a cold and metallic end. God, I’m sorry.
I will miss them all. I will try to carry them forward in my mind.
As I walked around the giant’s remains, I noticed a dozen tiny seedlings growing in the dirt pile. More offspring. So I went to the garden store for pots. Two of those youngest offspring are now growing in my windowsill. I don’t know if they’ll make it through the winter, but I had to try. In the spring I’ll move them outside, cover them in chicken wire to protect them from the turkeys and the deer, and give them a fighting chance. They have potential. At least they have potential, right?
This is something I have learned, to my surprise. A situation that looks hopeless might be full of more hope than you thought. Even when a giant falls. Take the time to mourn, pay your respects, give thanks to the Earth for what you have already, for what it gave you. And remember there is always potential.
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Photos by the author’s iPhone
Rebecca – thank you for putting into words how we feel too. I feel sad for the animals.