Thinking like a prairie
It was a beautiful tree. A fo40-foot tall pine with a wide, shady base. When I heard the pesky chainsaw zing at it, I thought it was only a haircut. Trim a little off the low branches to make for a shapely top. The jaws of the chain saw were hungry, ravaging the tree all morning. I gathered my books and laptop and repositioned my workstation downstairs.

In the afternoon, only a tall stump remained. Vast amounts of blue sky filled the space that used to be occupied by the tree. White wispy clouds moved in, then rolled out as if they too were unsure of what to make of this new space. By the time it took me to respond to a few e-mails, only a short stump remained, surrounded by a pile of huge rounds.

When my son came home from school, we counted the rings on a stump: 53 and counting before the lines became too crowded to count. I thought of my how mother, born and raised in a house just a few blocks down, may have ridden her bike down this street when the pine tree was just a young sap and she was just a gangly teen-ager. I imagined her riding her bike with her girlfriends after supper during the summer, when the sun doesn’t set until 10 p.m. and the evenings stretch out before kids, wide open, begging for attention.

Looking closer at the rings, I explained to my son how to read the lines for signs of drought and heavy rains. My husband, a former arborist, and I were confused, utterly baffled, why someone would kill such a healthy, living tree. The clouds rolled in from Canada. Here, in the heart of the central plains, nothing prevents you from not paying attention to the approaching storm. I swear I saw mountain peaks forming on the northern horizon.
“You can take a girl out of the mountains but you can’t take the mountain out of the girl,” my husband sings.

It would have been neighborly if he had come over and told us that he was going to take down the tree, my husband thought. I wondered how neighborly we could be when clearly, our worldviews are shaped so differently.

He is a grass man, our neighbor. He thinks like a prairie, meadows of tall grasses and houses with manicured lawns. Grass is good for cattle ranching, for making hay, for building sod houses. Trees don’t belong out here on the prairie. They are planted in a straight line to stop the snow in its tracks.

My husband and I do as Aldo Leopold suggests: we think like mountains and mountains are anchored by trees. We measure elevations in terms of above or below tree line, and we estimate heating costs depending on how many cords of wood we buy. In the mountains, our homes are built out of logs and our furniture is made out of knotty pine. Grass takes water, lots of water, something that is scarce in the mountains we come from.
A week later the stump was mulched.

When I saw my neighbor mowing the lawn while I was on the way to pick up my kids from school, I stopped him. “What happened to the tree?”
He paused, looked at the space where the tree used to be.

“Too much.” He shrugged his shoulders. “It was too much.”

I looked at him and tried to understand. Too much what: life? Too many branches for birds to perch on?  Too many limbs for squirrels to climb? Too much of a buffer from the cars?

“It opens things up”, he says. “They are going to seed it. More grass.”

Another crew came a week later to dig up its root, cart off the remains and fill in with dirt and sod.

When I look out our living room window, it is odd to not see the great pine. The grass that fills in the hole is looking less like it was unrolled from a truck and more like it is part of the lawn. I am getting used to anchoring my gaze on the beautiful willow tree across the street that weeps.

– Karin L. Becker
(Karin Becker is a former Durango resident. She and her husband, musician David Smith, recently relocated to North Dakota.)


    
    
 

In this week's issue...

January 25, 2024
Bagging it

State plastic bag ban is in full effect, but enforcement varies

January 26, 2024
Paper chase

The Sneer is back – and no we’re not talking about Billy Idol’s comeback tour.

January 11, 2024
High and dry

New state climate report projects continued warming, declining streamflows