Trees
Today I watched four trees felled by a machine.The trees were uprooted to make room for a huge brick mansion that is planned in the midst of a neighborhood near where I live. There had been five large trees on the lot and only the smallest one was left. It is the one close enough to the property line and fence to be out of the way of the construction.
The other four are now huge piles of wood chips in the lot.
I simply wasn't prepared for the horrible lurching and sinking of my heart as I watched. The machine -- huge and orange with a claw that could bend steel beams -- ripped into the ground, tearing, gnashing and clutching at the roots, huge thick, life giving roots that seemed to cling to the ground desperately. Then the metal giant raised its clutches to the treetops, and pushed. Oh, they were such terrible determined pushes! The tree strained against the merciless metal for breathless, lingering seconds, to the very last exerting all the power of its life and vitality, the age-old and God-given strength in its venerable wood against the dead, lifeless mass of sheer human power. Then the CRACK, hollow and vibrating in my stricken ears like a moan of defeat.
And all I could think as I watched, wanting to turn away, but held in the awful fascination of the struggle of man versus nature, was "I would have wanted those trees! I would have built my house between the trees, in their shade, needing and being thankful for the beauty, strength and wisdom with they would grace my home and my family and the years that they would outlast me, living to grace another's lives. I would never hurt those beautiful trees!"
It was like a wrongful death.
Oh, someone said, the County will make them re-plant a ridiculous amount of new trees. Yes, I thought, of course they will. People want trees. They just want them where they want them. And I guess that's our privilege as the "stewards" of this earth. We move and arrange and grade and zone and city-plan and develop and de-forest and re-forest. We can do that, because we are man. And I know that that's a good thing too.
And yet, as I watched those trees gouged and pried out of the earth, I blinked back tears. There is something more and greater than man and his little plans in those trees, old, strong and beautiful. Trees carry the weight of seasons and the weathering of storms, they shelter and protect and grace. And there is a real true power in a tree that seems to me like a reflection of the nature of God Himself.
When I was a child, a relative of mine had a large photo poster of a broken tree. It stood, a ripped stump in a small sunlit clearing in a forest. It was all alone and it was broken. I was terrified of this picture. I didn't understand why it was broken! I still see broken trees, or even sawn stumps or holes from the uprooting and I feel a touch of sadness. I wonder what the tree looked like, what kind it was, whether it had been living or dead, how many years it had lived. I remember learning to count the rings in sawn trees to find the age of the tree, to see the thick or the thinness of the ring and to know the amount of rainfall and sunshine, the quality of that forgotten year that it had lived stamped forever in the wood.
And then, like someone remembering a long-forgotten kindred spirit that one knew in another time but had forgotten, J.R.R. Tolkien came into my mind. Oh, he would have understood, I thought, he loved trees.
I came home pensive. I did some internet research and I was right! My kindred spirit did have a "profound love for trees and wooded landscapes, both for what they are in themselves -- objects of beauty and reverence -- and for the link with the past that they represent through their longevity and persistence, . . . their power, and their essential loneliness.'' www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/06/13/TRGVB734931.DTL
"Tolkien loved trees, and he was upset with their destruction most of all: "The savage sound of the electric saw is never silent wherever trees are still found growing. Every tree has its enemy, few have an advocate. In all my works, I take the part of trees as against all their enemies."
http://www.sacredlands.org/lord_of_machines.htm
In the end, this confirmation made me smile. I felt Tolkien's company in my sadness for those beautiful trees that are no more. And, as I rather look up to him, that's kind of nice. :)
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