a poem lovely as a tree hacked down

Dateline yesterday. Woke up. Did a few lines of drywall dust. Welcomed in the party: the electrician and the city tree removal crew. And then, in what was the fastest municipal project in the history of municipalities, my two western red cedars were suddenly gone.

Seriously, City of Eugene Urban Forestry Division, I was amazed by how fast you handled this project. I emailed the city about the trees on Friday late afternoon, the inspector came out on Tuesday, and the trees were gone by Wednesday at noon. Buoyed by your responsiveness and speed, I'm going to write to George Bush and request another removal project -- the troops from Iraq. I'll let you know next week what happens.

I watched the tree removal from my living room window and felt surprisingly sad. We have plenty of mature trees, including one 50+ year old Siberian elm that towers over our little cottage and its darling companion, an incense cedar that is even taller and just as old. We have a European birch and a Norway maple and a butterfly bush tree. I know they had to go. The picture of the front of our house before we moved in shows the more damaged of the two; it's the tree leftmost on the photo. I didn't particularly like them. They didn't provide shade or privacy, and they dropped goo all over my car when I parked it on the street. And yet, I felt some deep and decidedly misplaced sorrow about the woodchipping of my diseased Western cedars. This feeling, I know, marks me as a non-native Pacific Northwesterner. It's even more ridiculous when one considers the excellent NeighborWoods program here in Eugene, in which the trees felled for good reasons are replaced for free with new, healthy, appropriate saplings.

My lingering sadness could be simply becasue there's something anthropomorphic about trees. We use the terms "trunk" and "limbs" to describe both our bodies. When we've "got wood," it means a very good thing. In fact, the link between trees and generation is almost as strong as the link between trees and shelter in our mythologies. Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of worlds, the Biblical Tree of Jesse, from which the "shoots" of all the great prophets arose (see Chartres cathedral link for the best root shot ever), and the mystical Kabbala sephiroth are just a few of many examples. The Japanese even have a tradition in which local gods, kami, reside in magnificent specimens.

I don't think there were any kami in my Western red cedars, unless they were crazed, bald, slobbering junkies. Still, though, I've got a feeling of bad karma that I just can't shake.