If Trees Could Scream
If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
The Squirrel Superhighway. The tree on the north-east corner of my house.
Trapper Tom - yes, Trapper Tom - said that we would need to trim that tree severely. “It is how the squirrels are getting on your roof. Even though I’ve trapped all the squirrels that have been getting into your walls and even though I’ve sured up where they get in, squirrels will return. They will smell where the other squirrels got into your house and they will get in your walls again. You must trim that tree.”
That tree: the Squirrel Superhighway.
Trapper Tom’s advice came a little over a year ago. Last fall the squirrels returned. I cut down the tree.
It was a maple. I’m guessing it was between 75 and 100-years-old and 35, maybe 40 feet high. It was so near the house I feared that even my deftest cuts would fell the tree into my wife’s sewing room.
That tree: the Squirrel Superhighway: the Wife-Beast’s favorite tree.
It’s leaves decorated her room through the two windows of her second story room. “I felt like a bird in a nest with that tree there. I felt part of the tree and part of the real world. I could smell it. Feel it. It made me more alive.”
She cried when I cut it down.
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I returned to that tree this afternoon. All that remained was a two-foot tall stump. Thin sap puddled on the cut top as the nature of spring called sap from it’s roots to its budding leaves - only neither the roots nor nature realized that there were no branches, no leaves, no buds. Not this spring. Not any spring ever again.
Tears, the clear sap wept down the side.
My mission was to cut the two remaining feet of the tree and finish my work; but before I did, I considered the stump. I was sad for the tree. Seriously, I was. I wondered if it knew, in a tree sort of way, anything. Anything.
A tree is a living thing, after all. It lives. It grows. It reproduces. It breathes. It has a lifespan. It is.
It took some time for me to cut it at its base. I had to rest between a couple of cuts to rest my muscles. I sat on the ground near the tree and examined the fresh wound.
It oozed more sap. So much clear liquid ran from the that I can only describe it as copious.
In my world, copious is most closely associated with blood: the brain has a copious blood supply, the retina has a copious blood supply, … a wound … bleeds copiously.
I sat there thinking that my father and grandfathers on down the line might think me a fool for sitting there lamenting a sugar maple. But they aren’t sitting there watching it weep, watching it bleed.
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