Felling the Trees
by Rebecca Lawton
The big trees have come down on our property. It's all very sensible that they should have. One stood a few feet north of the cabin we're rebuilding; one stood south.
The largest Douglas fir had to be cut to make way for a room we're adding. The other one had to go because it was forever weeping and leaning, threatening darkly. The trees cast a perennial shadow on a roof that never dried and so grew several species of moss. During windy storms, branches as big as saplings fell with a frightening crack. Fir needles packed the rain gutters in a matter of hours.
Still, we didn't come easily to the decision to cut the trees. On hot days they funneled divine air down their trunks to the valley floor. Their boughs as thick as small trees provided a hush when the days were still. On summer nights the dark silhouettes of treetops framed shooting stars in an indigo sky. In the dusky evenings, owls somewhere overhead murmured to those in other trees scattered through the neighborhood.
For months my husband and I prepared for the felling day. Native plant lovers, we'd been potting up tiny seedling Doug firs collected from the soil surrounding the cabin. The young plants had grown from long-winged seeds blown down from their elder trees in insistent winds. Recently, to make way for the arborist to back his big truck in, we busted up a fence on the property. We pulled nails, moved lumber and dug out concrete footings on old posts. As we worked, the biggest Doug fir, more than 100 feet tall with a trunk too wide to join hands around, provided both green shade for the unseasonably warm spring day and a pitch fragrance evocative of deep forests.
As we prepared, we mourned the pending loss of the trees. Friends consoled us with things like, "Know they're coming down for a reason." They came down so we could move into the cabin my husband has owned for 30 years. A widower when we met, he needed to reinvent his old home to reoccupy it. "Making way for the new is a good thing," our friends reminded us. The rebuilt cabin will have room for our family of three — a slightly larger space with two bedrooms instead of one.
Our arborist, too, recommended felling the trees. "They're dangerous so close to the house."
The Douglas fir thrives in deep forests where their collective crowns, like those of redwoods, host communities of lichen, fungi and insects. An entire world can be found in them high above ground.
But here in our south Sonoma County neighborhood the Doug fir forest is not only fragmented by residences, it's also at the southern limit of its range. The trees don't do well this far south and low in the valley. They tend to topple in windstorms, as happened a few years back to our neighbors across the street. They lost a Doug fir in a severe blow when a 30-foot section of tree crashed into their backyard, just missing the house. Tree surgeons took the rest of the Doug fir down in sections. When they examined the core, they found little inside to support what had once been standing. "Basically," they said, "its bark was holding it up."
The argument for safety carried plenty of weight with us. Reluctantly we gave the go-ahead. Knowing what beautiful timbers they could become, we asked to have the Doug firs milled and graded for use in our cabin reconstruction. Impossible, we were told. Space restrictions required that they be brought down in short sections and bucked up for rounds. All right, then, we'll split them and give them to friends who have modern, efficient wood-burning stoves.
The arborist felled the trees when I was away. I didn't have the guts to watch. But in the evening when I visited the cabin to view his work, the air smelled like Christmas trees; shavings covered the ground. Rounds as big as small outbuildings were piled around the property, and I examined their cores. I found the smaller Doug fir to be obviously unsound; the tree was cracked to the center with sap-filled gashes. The larger Doug fir, though, the one where the south wing will go, was flawless. I counted 50 rings, not including the heart of the tree, which the arborist said equaled "a good 10 years right there." Whorls in the wood showed me where the limbs once attached. I felt a sense of shame and wrongdoing, as if I'd killed an elder.
But my husband, eternally optimistic, pointed out another Doug fir on our property, farther from the cabin. "That's a beautiful tree," he said. The arborist agreed: "Sometimes you find even better trees hidden behind the old ones." Get rid of the shade and those who've been merely surviving stand a better chance of becoming amazing.
We'll let the remaining trees around our new home grow; perhaps they too will rarefy the air, lull us with a hush, and frame the summer sky. Perhaps owls will come to nest and make their ghostly calls through the half-light.
"And we have these," my husband reminded me, leading me to the clay pots that held the baby Doug firs we planted. Beaming, he said, "They'll grow fast."
(First published in San Francisco Chronicle Magazine. San Francisco: Hearst Corporation. July 22, 2006.)
