“Why don’t the trees fall down?”
I was pulling out of the local elementary school, where I’d just dropped off my daughter, a third-grader. It was 8:35 a.m., a sunny day. Seated in the back seat of the car, my pre-school-bound son was looking out the car windows. At that age, belted into the back seat of a car, about all you can see outside is trees. It was late spring. The trees weren’t just leafing out. They were practically gushing green.
“Trees just stand up,” I said to him. “That’s what makes them trees.”
He took a thoughtful suck on his thumb and considered my answer. “Don’t they get tired?”
I took a thoughtful sip of coffee, considering his question. “What if they all decided to lie down and take a rest?”
A little more thumb.
I caught his face in the rearview mirror. He was gazing out the car windows, making it work. “Like spaghetti,” he said. He smiled, satisfied with his science. “But we’d want them to stand up again.”
One of the things I took from my father’s workshop after he died was rope. He had a lot of it, nylon and hemp, coiled and hanked, knotted and loose.
Right now I’m trying to fix a few bent-over trees at the edge of our yard. Between our house and the neighbors’ is a clump of cedars. They’ve stopped standing up. They have felt the weight of snow and ice, and lost their will to be trees.
One of the things I took from my father’s workshop after he died was rope. He had a lot of it, nylon and hemp, coiled and hanked, knotted and loose. I took it all, without thinking much about the symbolism. I just thought I’d need it sometime. I also took what he called a coffin hoist, a come-along ratchet winch. I’m using these tools to make the trees stand up.
Technically, these are the neighbors’ trees. My wife’s position is that Jed, the neighbor, should just cut these failed cedars down. For her, this is an astonishing assertion. She loves trees with a fierceness that makes me jealous. She mourned the loss of a craggy ant-infested apple tree when we cut it down some time ago. For a few years now she has been saying goodbye, limb by scabrous limb, to the sepulchral mountain ash in our front yard. When she sees new maples squirting out of the flowerbeds, with trunks no bigger than skewers, she sees future trees. She delights in the sound of wind in their future leaves, she basks in their future shade. But the cedars, to her, are as good as dead.
“I’d like to screw an eye into that tree,” Jed says to me one day. We’re standing at the edge of my driveway.
I smile at the linguistic strangeness of this statement (he means a eye bolt), then tell him no, that would be impossible.
“Then we could pull those cedars upright,” he says.
That we could pull those trees upright, by hand, and tie them off, I seriously doubt.
But the more important sticking point is the tree in question, the anchor tree, a large cottonwood nearly three feet in diameter, nine feet in circumference, a viable tree close enough to our driveway to be ours. (We pay to have it trimmed. Maintenance, I figure, is 95 percent of possession.) It is, in truth, a miserable plant. It drops a gazillion seedpods—they resemble goose droppings–in early spring, from which seeds emerge. These seeds are the size of almonds. They emit a sticky sap that glues them to your shoes, stains a car’s paint job, and leaves brown gluey curlicues on a windshield. Then there’s the cotton, flurries of the stuff that can last a month. And then there’s the sticks a cottonwood tree sheds in abundance, year around. Still, my wife loves this tree. To screw an eye into it would be to inflict bodily harm upon it and possibly let death in. She will have none of it.
Don and I table the measure, or so I think.
A few days later I look out and see his stepladder leaning against our tree, and five or six wraps of white ¾ inch nylon rope around the trunk, at eye level.
“It’s an eyesore,” my wife says.
“It’s a compromise.” I tell her about the eye bolt, and she gets a little ballistic. To me, no bolt was a neighborly concession on Don’s part. But the white rope, there is no denying it, is ugly.
My wife says, “He does these things just to make me angry.”
“I don’t think so.”
A week goes by. It’s full spring. Our driveway is covered with brown cottonwood pods. It looks like it’s been raining turds. And the stepladder is still there. And the rope, wrapped around our cottonwood, disappearing ineffectually into the little grove of decrepit cedars.
My wife decides the trees must die.
“He just wants them to straighten up,” I say. “Wouldn’t you? You love trees.”
“He should cut them down. They’ll never stand up again.”
In physics, what little I had, in the section on strength of materials, I learned about fatigue. Over time, repeated loads on a material cause stress. Materials have a stress limit. Exceed that limit and fatigue occurs—cracks, loss of tensile strength. Fatigue is permanent. Materials do not recover from fatigue, even when rested. Think of a rubber band that’s lost its boing.
“Why do you care, anyway?” she asks.
She is more of a friend to trees than I am. I mow around them. I rake under up their droppings. I clean up after the cottonwood. Why do I care?
Because I don’t want to look over there and see nothing.
Because I want them to stand up.
Also, at the risk of getting psychological about it, maybe a short person values tall things, reacts with a natural sense of awe. I am short. And it’s difficult for a man, particularly a young man, to be short; possibly more difficult than for a woman, particularly a young woman, to be tall.
These past weeks I’ve noticed the posture of a woman in one of my classes. Trudy is my best student. Whatever I suggest she try, she does, and quickly masters. In her writing there is energy, invention, clarity, and wit. Every day she walks into class, I notice how she carries herself. Trudy has tall-girl hunch. I also notice her reserve, such diffidence in this capable person. She’s more than shy. I wonder what happened. One day she says she has a twin. I picture these two women together, Trudy and Judy walking side by side, making themselves smaller on purpose. Another day, during a conference, I ask her what her plan is. She smiles and lowers her head. It is then I notice the tiny shiny silver dot in her cheek, a piercing. She says she wants to be an art teacher. I tell her she will be a marvelous teacher, and she will be.
But what I want to say is: “Trudy, be full size.”
She is more of a friend to trees than I am. I mow around them. I rake under up their droppings. I clean up after the cottonwood. Why do I care?
A few days pass. I decide to address the trees.
At Joann Fabrics I buy a length of nylon webbing, like the safety strap on a car seat, like the shoulder strap on Trudy’s backpack. It’s an inch in diameter, ten feet long. Gray would match cottonwood bark. Joann’s does not have gray. I settle for black. At Home Depot I buy a metal ring and an eye swivel. A few pop rivets, and I have a strap, which I wrap around the cottonwood. I attach the coffin hoist to Don’s ¾ inch white nylon rope and get to work, pulling a bent cedar upright. I tie the tree off with ¼ inch nylon rope, black; then I do the next tree, then the next. In the end, five crosshatching black lines, barely visible, hold the cedars upright. It might work.
I coil Don’s rope the way my father taught me and lay it at the edge of the lot.
If she notices my work, my wife doesn’t acknowledge it. The trees, she thinks, are doomed. It’s only a matter of time.
We’ll see. They are fatigued. But they are also living things. Maybe they will recover and stand up straight, be fully themselves. That’s what I want.
Thanks for bringing this back! Trees!