imagination and memory go with them.

On the Life and Death of a Tree

Five hundred year old oak, around the corner from my house.

Around the corner from where I live in Connecticut, there is a tree that we estimate is at least five hundred years old.

It stands on an easement abutting a piece of private property on which in the 1960s was built a simple raised ranch house. A few feet away lie its presumed children: two other startlingly similar oaks, maybe seventy-five or one hundred years old. These two are not on an easement but living surrounded by lush, green suburban lawn, which means that the owners of the house can and may take them down without a second thought. I suspect they will; the subtle malevolence in the banal results in humans chopping down whatever they don’t like or need, or to make room for a garden, which has always struck me as ironic: a life for a life. An eye for an eye. Your canopy of leaves blocks my sun, so I will destroy you for a few more tomatoes.

Some years ago, I remember hearing a story about how two thousand olive trees were destroyed by the Israeli government forces in the Palestinian village of Qarawat Bani Hassan. Agricultural warfare is as old as the skies, and perhaps the most devastating: food insecurity leads to inevitable and wholesale starvation, the loss of jobs, the intentional destruction of an eons-old cultural tradition. The Al Badawi tree, located outside Bethlehem, has been carbon-dated at between 3,000 and 5,500 years old, making it arguably the oldest tree in the world. A former pilgrimage site for Sufis, the tree has round-the-clock protection.

When woods and trees are destroyed — incidentally, deliberately — imagination and memory go with them. - Robert Macfarlane

When my neighbors around the corner from me began to have work done on their property requiring demolition and earth-moving teams, my concern was that the five-hundred year-old oak on the easement was going to be destroyed. It needs care — the town doesn’t do anything to help it, and the most that I can do in cover of darkness is remove all of the vines that creep up its sides, threatening to strangle it — and it would not be out of the realm of probability that a worker would chain-saw it down without so much as a second thought. I feel deeply protective of this tree, for reasons that I cannot pin down. I grew up in urban Queens, New York, across the street from a massive weeping willow about which I also felt somehow possessive; when I came home from school one day to find that it had been cut down to make room for a few parking spots, I wept like a baby. Who are we to do something like that — to think that we even have the right? My mother rolled her eyes at what she called my oversensitivity; my father called it unfortunate. But my grandmother, who lived in the building that towered over the willow, went out, bought a memorial candle, lit it, and let it burn for twenty-four hours. I will never know for sure whether or not she whispered the prayer for the dead; I suspect she did.

When woods and trees are destroyed — incidentally, deliberately — imagination and memory go with them. W.H. Auden knew this. ‘A culture,’ he wrote warningly in 1953, ‘is no better than its woods.’ Robert Macfarlane wrote these words in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, and they came as a warning, a prophetic admonition. When he wrote them, The Sycamore Gap Tree at Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland had not yet been felled in last week’s act of vandalism that would shock England and beyond. That a sixteen year old boy was arrested for committing the act was both stunning, and not.

We live in a world where the magnitude of dispassion and entitled notoriety are not just sad; they are devastating. They are harbingers of societal destruction, and they are increasing every day. Growing up, I knew a boy who liked to fry insects under a cheap pocket magnifying glass; he was the same boy who casually plucked the legs off spiders. A few years later, at twelve, he was arrested for standing on a walkway above Grand Central Parkway and dropping fist-sized rocks onto the windshields of oncoming drivers, thirty feet below. Asked why he did it, he told the police Just because I can.

On the last day of my three week residency in Maine and the day after the destruction of the Sycamore Gap Tree, Susan and I went to the Farnsworth Museum, where there was a new exhibit called Every Leaf and Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination. I felt depleted and depressed at the news, like I had the wind knocked out of me, and when we came upon Wyeth’s stunning painting of a tree, it felt ominous and dark, as if it somehow had known what had happened.

Andrew Wyeth, from Every Leaf and Twig, The Farnsworth Museum

The destruction of trees — of the olive trees in Palestine; of the Sycamore Gap Tree in England; of the weeping willow outside my window in Queens — as blithely as one might pluck a blade of grass from a lawn is not a shame; it is dire, and urgent, and clear evidence of sociopathic behavior run rampant. Children don’t learn to care for the world around them because their parents don’t care for the world around them, and schools are too busy fighting ridiculous, ignominious book bans to focus on the environmental education of their students. With every healthy tree that is destroyed — on a whim, to make room for parking spots, to starve one’s adversaries, to keep the deer away — another brick in humanity’s wall gets kicked out, like a game of Jenga.

Into every empty corner, into all forgotten things and nooks, Nature struggles to pour life, wrote Henry Beston.

We can only hope to be deserving of it.