An Old Man in the Trees

There is something awful about an old man with a limp shuffling out into a tree farm, saw in hand, intent on cutting down a young tree.

There is something particularly awful about being that old man.

I grew up in a small clearing where once there had been almost nothing but fir trees. Western Washington is a temperate jungle of evergreens. It wasn't a tree farm. It was a forest. The timber companies, and the hard-scrabble farmers who followed them, did not steal the land from the First People; from the Native Americans who came first thousands of years ago. The land was stolen from the forests of trees; the real natives on those rocky slopes.

All my long life I have cleared small patches of land, usually just to beat back the trees that edged forward to where they used to be, more at home on those graveled fields than any apple tree or oat patch. The fields just survived: the trees thrived.

Never have I cut down a tree without sadness. Sometimes I planted more than I cut, to try, by subtraction and addition, to leave more than I took, and to ease a sad ache.

I limped out and cut a Christmas tree: a tree for the holidays, if you wish. I think of it that way, myself, because it is hard for me to pretend, any more, that there is anything more real than the trees, and me, and family and friends. The tree is not to lure angels to our home. The tree is to provide a lovely place to hang memories of childhood, or parents, of small gifts in hard times, and other gifts in better times. "We did it this way when we were children," we say, "and our parents and grandparents did, too." And we do it, still, for ourselves and for our children and grandchildren.

And I am small-sad to have cut down a tree, but I am old, and I know that someday I shall be cut down, too, or fall finally, when it is time, to earth, as the trees do.

It is not so much the individual trees that must survive if there is to be life: it is the community of trees. Our holiday tree might have lived for years, or it might, as was evident all around this year, have been stressed too much by a hot, dry summer. It might be time for the evergreen trees to move north, ever so slowly, ever so persistently, where until now, it has been severe. Our tree, where we shall hang our memories and stories, is not a forever-tree. It is the community of trees that matters. And it is so with us, too. It is the community: our friends, our loves, our children and grandchildren. They will take their turns becoming old, like the trees; persisting.

There is something lovely, too, about being an old man, in the trees.

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