Trees

Trees have influenced my life many times over the years. This little memoir attempts to organize all my significant tree experiences into one place. The motivation for this odd little treatise is that the item “Plant a tree” is on my life’s bucket list. After pondering about the trees I have planted, I decided to expand the topic to other aspects of interaction with trees also.

My first memory of a tree experience comes from my earliest childhood playground. My family lived in a small white house in Lakeview, Oregon in 1958. We lived next to a kind old woman we referred to as Granny Green. In her back yard there was an ancient apple tree. It was large enough to support the weight of a 5-year-old boy who was learning to be like Tarzan of the jungle. I remember spending many lazy summer days in that back yard either under the tree or up in it. I hope to see Granny Green again someday in Heaven to thank her for those pleasant memories and her kindness to me and my siblings.

Treehouses

Every healthy child must have a tree house embedded in his childhood at some point. My first one belongs to the period when my family lived in Oregon City in an old farm-house we rented for about a year or so. This would have been about 1964 when I was in the 5th grade of elementary school. There was a large old cherry tree in the spacious back yard of that farmhouse, not too far from a huge barn full of smelly old hay, bugs, pigeons and ancient farm equipment. The cherry tree had a few large branches that extended nearly parallel to the ground at a height of about 12 feet. With a ladder and some sophisticated engineering skills, my brother and I managed to place a few planks of wood across those branches to form a crude platform. This platform hardly qualified as a true treehouse, but it was our first attempt at this kind of construction, and we were still learning the skill. It was just large enough for two small children to sit on and contemplate the vast world below us. The comforts of this treehouse were fairly meager, but occasionally we could eat fresh cherries without leaving the living room.

My next attempt at building a treehouse was considerably more sophisticated. I can’t claim all the credit for the engineering marvel we created because our friend Dan Kraus filled the role of lead construction engineer in this project. I’m guessing I was about 16 years old by this time because I remember going to a lumber mill with “Old Blue”, our old blue Chevrolet station wagon that had been in the family since the dawn of time. We paid them a dollar for all the lumber scraps we could jam into the cargo hold of that station wagon. It was perfect for creating the treehouse of our dreams.

Dan Kraus chose a great location for the treehouse. It was located near the top of a steep drop-off that descended about 100 feet to the river bottoms below. This land was part of the original 60 acres that my father bought when I was about 14 years old. He built the family home about 1/4 mile away at the top of a hill overlooking the river valley below. We found a clump of maple trees that were perfect for our treehouse. There were 4 big tree trunks that rose toward the sky roughly in the shape of a 4-pointed diamond. Two of the trunks in the middle of the diamond were only about 18 inches apart, but the other two trunks at the top and bottom of the diamond were about 6 feet apart. The floorplan of the treehouse is shown below.

As you can see from the drawing above, there is a square hole in the floor between the two tree trunks that were close together. This hole was the door to the treehouse. The only way to get into the treehouse was to come up from below the floor and squeeze through the hole in the floor. It was not the best arrangement for invited guests and visiting dignitaries, but we weren’t too worried about those issues when we designed the treehouse. Now this was no ordinary treehouse in other ways too. The bottom section of the floor (as shown in the drawing above) was the living room and it had sides that rose about 6 feet and then it had a roof over it. The top section was open to the air because it had no sides, just a couple of boards to act as guard rails. This area was the veranda. We also put up guard rails on the tree trunks above the living room so you could climb up there and be on the lookout for pirates coming up the river. We called this upper room the “crow’s nest” because you could see a large marsh and lots of water-fowl in the river bottoms below us. The view was amazing and made us feel like we were the kings of a vast kingdom of wild and untamed wilderness below. I wish we had taken a picture of this treehouse. It was a source of great pride for about one summer. Then other things like girls and cars become more important and the treehouse was left to rot in the forest.

Climbing Trees

I can remember two specific times when I nearly met with disaster when I climbed a tree. The first happened at the same home where we built our first tree house. There was an old apple tree near the house that had a huge limb that extended quite far over the ground 20 feet below. I loved to climb out to the end of that limb and bounce up and down. The limb would sway up and down about 4 feet. I thought I was like a cowboy riding a wild stallion in the air. I was too young and foolish to consider that I might be overstressing the structural strength of that tree limb. I just knew it was a lot of fun and wanted to impress others with my bravery and climbing skills. On one occasion, I was riding the wild stallion when my father came out in the yard. I yelled to him to watch what I could do in the tree. I threw all my weight into the effort to make the show as impressive as possible. Suddenly there was a sharp crack as the large tree limb finally gave up and broke under the strain. Now all my bravery evaporated, and I screamed like a little girl as the broken limb and I fell to the ground below. Fortunately, I didn’t break any bones, but my pride was considerably bruised as my dad ran over to assess the damage. When he found that I wasn’t hurt, he just chuckled and said, “Well, I guess you learned a valuable lesson about how gravity works, Dan.”

The second memorable occasion when I climbed a tree illustrates that I didn’t learn very much from the first memorable tree-climbing incident. We lived in a rented house in Vancouver when I was about 10 years old. The neighbors across the road had a small pasture for a horse out behind their house. Located in the pasture was one of the largest fir trees I had ever seen. It rose about 80 feet into the air and was probably over 100 years old. To me it seemed like the magic bean stalk from the fairy tale “Jack and the Bean Stalk”. I often wondered what the world would look like from the top of that huge old fir tree. I finally worked up the courage to attempt the climb and found it to be quite easy. There were plenty of limbs to grab ahold of as I ascended to the top. I never really felt any great fear as I climbed up that tree. I didn’t tell anybody about my daring climb because I was fairly certain that my parents wouldn’t approve. I made it up to the top of that tree where the trunk was not very large and decided that was far enough. I had proved I could do it and I was ready to come back down. One false move and I would certainly have fallen to my death from about 80 feet in the air. If you were one of my children or grandchildren watching from heaven, you might have had reason for great concern. After all, I was not only risking my own life, but all of yours too. You might still be stuck in heaven waiting for your next ticket to come to earth because your foolish grandpa fell out of that tree and broke his neck. Anyway, you are reading this story, so I must have been OK.

Planting Trees

The first trees I planted are possibly a whole forest of fir trees now, but I will likely never know. The first summer after I returned home from Brazil, I was hired to plant fir trees on a piece of logged off land owned by Jim Granger, a good friend of my father. I’m not sure, but I seem to remember that there was a government grant program that encouraged people to replant their land with trees after the mature lumber trees had been harvested by the logging companies. Accordingly, Brother Granger obtained hundreds of young fir seedlings and hired me and another college student to plant them. I remember trudging over the hills for many hours with a bundle of young trees and a shovel. It was back-breaking work, but it was somewhat satisfying to think we were contributing to a program that would make the world a more beautiful place. Hour after hour I pushed the shovel into the ground, pushed it over to the side to create a space in the soil, shoved a seedling into the opening, removed the shovel, stomped on the dirt around the young tree, then took three steps and repeated the same sequence. I’ve often wondered what ever happened to those trees, but I never had a chance to go back there again.

The next trees I planted were in American Fork, Utah. Lori and I had purchased a starter home in a small neighborhood next to the railroad track and the freeway. After the house was built and the yard was planted in grass, I planted two red-leafed ornamental maple trees in the front yard along with a northern pecan tree beside the driveway. In the back yard I planted a peach tree, a red delicious apple tree and two cherry trees. They were all part of an ambitious back yard garden plan that included strawberries, raspberries, asparagus and a vegetable plot.

We waited for several years while the fruit trees grew big enough to finally start growing fruit. About the third or fourth year later, the apple tree burst forth with hundreds of white blossoms after the winter finally gave way to spring. Lori and I were so excited to see all those blossoms because they meant we would soon enjoy the delight of harvesting our first apples from that tree. Alas, it was not to be. A few days later, I came home from work to learn that Emily, our oldest daughter, had climbed into the tree and picked every last one of those blossoms off the tree. I guess she was making “popcorn balls that would smell so sweet” or some silly thing, but she managed to totally collect every single one of those little white blossoms. Needless to say, she got in big trouble for her sinister prank. Her punishment was that she had to give me her most precious stuffed animal for the rest of the year. I felt that she needed to understand what it felt like to lose something that was very important to her. Then she might understand what she had taken from me. Perhaps I over-reacted a little, but it seemed to make some kind of twisted sense at the time.

Living with Trees in Maine

My family moved to the state of Maine in 1989. We lived on an acre and a half of forest. It was composed of mostly Eastern white pine trees with a little bit of oak mixed in. One scruffy giant was directly in front of the house beside the driveway into the garage. It was ancient and knobby, but interesting to look at. Due to the location of the house, we seldom experienced much direct sunlight because of all the trees.

I did plant a spruce tree in the forest there, but only because it was a gift and I didn’t know what else to do with it. Now, I always enjoy the opportunity to plant a tree, but while I lived within such an abundance of trees already, I decided it would also be a bit of fun to cut one down. Allow me to explain.

After one particularly long and cold winter, we discovered that one of the trees in the forest had died. We had a wood burning stove in the house, so I decided I would cut down that dead tree and use it for fuel in our stove. The technique is fairly simple, but fraught with an element of danger. Trees as big as the dead one are large enough to cause a great deal of damage if they fall on something like a house. Therefore, I studied the problem for quite a while and came up with a plan to make the tree fall in just the right direction to avoid any harm to myself or the forest. I used my trusty Stihl chain saw to cut a notch at the base of the tree on the side where I wanted it to fall. Then I made the final cut on the opposite side of the tree and watched with apprehension as the old giant slowly started to lean and fall. It gathered more and more momentum as it continued to fall, but the direction of the fall wasn’t precisely what I had tried so hard to engineer. There was a young tree about 40 feet tall and 8 inches in diameter in the path of the falling giant. The big tree snapped the smaller tree just like a little toothpick and hit the ground with a whoosh and a big thump. The ground shook from the impact and there were a lot of frightening snapping sounds as tree branches splintered and flew in the air. I breathed a sigh of relief after the dust settled and I could see that no one had been sent to heaven with my little logging stunt. I have to admit that the excitement and the suspense of the experience got my heart rate up pretty high. I could get used to that kind of destructive fun.

Finally, I’ll conclude my little epistle about trees with a description of the ice storm. Probably somewhere in the vicinity of 1995 we had an unusual weather phenomenon where the air was freezing cold at ground level, but not at higher altitudes. The moisture in the air condensed into rain which froze into solid ice upon reaching the ground. The ice formed on everything to a depth of about an inch. It turned everything in the forest into a magical crystal garden. This rare spectacle would have been quite delightful to experience except for the fact that the weight of the ice caused a terrible destruction of the trees in the forest. When we woke up on the first morning after the ice storm, the view outside looked like a war zone. Many of the trees had fallen over due to the tremendous weight of the ice on their branches. One large oak tree on the other side of the road in front of our house split right down the middle. Fortunately, none of the falling trees caused any damage to our house, but I can’t say the same for the power lines that brought us life-saving electricity in the winter months. Most of the power distribution system in the whole state of Maine had been badly damaged. The consequence was that we were completely without any electricity for a period of 5 days. We managed to keep the house warm by burning wood in our stove, but this only kept the family room warm, while the rest of the house was like living in a refrigerator. I remember that the greatest hardship was not having any light in the house in the evening. We had a few candles to make a little bit of feeble light, but it was difficult to even read a book in those conditions.

The other frightening thing I remember was the noise in the night-time. While I was in my bed trying to sleep, I was often awoken by the sound of crashing branches in the forest. Many of the branches of the pine trees had hundreds of pounds of ice clinging to them. All this weight caused a curious thing to happen to the trees. The branches would literally be pulled out of the trunk of the trees. Whenever a branch finally lost its battle with gravity, there would be a sharp cracking sound followed by a thundering crash as the branch and hundreds of pounds of ice plummeted to the forest floor. It was difficult to sleep under these conditions. All night long the forest echoed with the sound of crashing ice avalanches as the trees were decimated by the load of ice. I can imagine it might have been like the bombing raids that were conducted at night during the world wars.

Finally, after 5 days, the power was restored and life moved on. The experience certainly made me appreciate the simple things we had to do without when there was no power. I could go on and on. Trees are still a big part of my life in the state of Washington. They are a fascinating form of life that brings beauty and richness to my mortal experience.