Now You See It, Now You Don't

What sold me on our house on Cree was the image of my Outback sitting under the Colorado spruce in the front yard. It looked like it belonged there. With a little extrapolation, I came to think that we, too, belonged there. And we do.

However, over the years the spruce has gone from selling point to point of contention. It hates my lawn and does everything in its coniferous power to drive out the Kentucky bluegrass that lays under it's acid-dripping branches. This spring I had had enough and contacted Jonathan Zundel, of Zundel's Tree Service, to remove the offending arbor. He made short work of the tree, removing its branches and toppling the remaining telephone pole-sized structure in under an hour.



I took uncharacteristic glee in the killing of this plant. For me and my house, the removal of a living plant has always been met with some reverence and a deepened understanding of spiritual connections to the earth. Sappy, huh? (Get it? Sappy.) During the summer of 1994 my father asked me to help him remove a cottonwood near the front door of their house in Egin. The tree had been rooting away from the inside for many years and had become to unstable to handle the strong winds that can sweep across the high desert of the Snake River plain. My father, my nephew Hyrum, and I worked together on the project, with me in the tree trimming the large branches while the other two used ropes to guide the branches from hitting the house. After the tree had been defrocked, I set to work at its base, which was easily ten feet in circumference. While the chainsaw I was using only had an eighteen inch blade, it only had to cut through the foot or so of outer wood because inside of the tree was completely missing. Once I had made a complete circle around the tree with the saw, we used ropes to pull the remainder over and rest it on the ground.

I climbed on top of the trunk and looked over this life form that had been around for at least a century. I had the very real feeling that the tree was grateful for what we had done. I can't explain it any other way than that. It felt like the tree was thanking me.

So for me to go from that experience, to my most recent one with the spruce, really showed me how animosity can turn our feelings on their head. How easy it becomes to demonize things, or people, that we have issues with. I was literally smiling the entire time the spruce was being removed, reveling in its demise. I had allowed myself to come to hate the tree, thinking only of its draw backs and nothing of the shade it had provided over the years, or the protection from winds. I know it was only doing what it was supposed to do, and while I am certain that its removal was for the best, I do carry a little bit of shame in my attitude toward it. I would like to think it carries no hard feeling, but I'll never know. It got blocked up and carried away as firewood within ten minutes of hitting the ground. -- Jake