The Tree's Revenge

Other-than-human, tree language, human hubris, plant magic

There’s so much going on in the world. So much loss. So much injustice. So much grieving. While the wealthier of us humans may only now be feeling the deleterious effects of western civilization, other beings were impacted long ago. This is a story of tree who had had enough. One small victory to carry our day. One injustice requited. One small story for us to celebrate!

Other than his tendency toward stinginess, I found my landlord to be rather sweet, which makes it all the harder to reconcile the number of lives he had to take in order to create his pretentious little alley of dream homes. There are other lives besides the human. Not only do theirs also have meaning, they are integral to life on the planet—more so, even, than ours. In this post we are primarily discussing our very tall elders—majestic, Douglas fir trees. My landlord cut down a lot of them. Just to upset myself further, I will sometimes imagine what the property must have been like when ours was the only house on it—before it was logged and subdivided into thirds. How many large, stately fir trees there must have been, providing the structure for their own, thriving, woodland community, both above and below ground. And what a precious thing it would have been to be the resident human partaking in that community then.

I live in a modest, older neighborhood, nestled in a wooded area of 300-400 year old fir trees, in the once-temperate climate of the Pacific Northwest. Here, when we speak of a forest, we are primarily referring to Douglas firs—interspersed with cedars, hemlocks, spruce, and yew. Because of my landlord’s scheme, the denser forest thins out at our end of the street. In the forested area beyond us, there are houses scattered among the firs. On our end of the street, there are firs scattered among the houses. The two are not the same. Our property has no firs at all. Instead, we have the kinds of trees that live at the forest’s edge: birch, alder, hazel, holly, and laurel—lots and lots of laurel. That said, I’m grateful for the small grove of firs just on the other side of our southwest corner, chiefly because of the language they speak, soughing exquisitely in the wind. That gorgeous sound throws the doors to my heart wide open every single time..

The house itself is situated between a street to the north and an alley to the east. While our home and the home directly across the alley from us were built in 1949 and are far, far from pretentious, the alley and its four ostentatious homes were built very recently by my landlord. In actuality, the alley continues beyond those houses to serve a second group of four houses, built by a different landlord, and accessed via a street of older homes on the other side, so that the two little housing projects are virtually mirror images of each other. But before all of the wheeling and dealing, before the chainsaws and the enrichment of a couple of landlords, there had simply been four large properties with modest homes in front and a large, shared, forest in the back—much like the houses farther down our street.

In February of 2020, one year to the month after moving in (and just two weeks before the Covid quarantine), a major ice storm struck the Willamette valley, which stretches north-south along much of the length of Oregon. Tree branches broke everywhere, especially in the deciduous trees lining city streets, country roads and the I-5 freeway. Wherever your eyes turned they were greeted by damaged trees. It was heart-breaking, of course, but ice storms do happen from time to time and they tend to break trees when they do. Though this one seemed worse than usual, we’d seen its likes before. Little did we know, this was only the first act of the tree tragedy of 2020. Only four months later (in June, of all times!—a normally cool and rainy month of extended spring weather) the valley was blasted by a record-breaking heat dome. During a five-day stretch, the temperature remained above 100 degrees, with three days above 110 to reach an official high of 116. Our own backyard thermometer read 117. Although we have adjusted to the fact that 100-degree days are no longer rare in Oregon, temperatures above 110 had, up until that time, been unheard of. Many Oregonians remain without much or any air conditioning. Our home, at that time, had only one unit, a stand-alone we purchased for our bedroom.

Not only are humans not made to withstand such temperatures (and many people died) but neither are our trees. In the days following the heat dome, the south side of all of our firs turned red. Horrified, I wondered if they would look that way permanently. Was this the beginning of the end or do needles replace themselves every year like the leaves on deciduous trees? Never having seen this before, I didn’t know the answer. (FYI: They do turn green again.) Later that summer, as we headed southward to the high Sierras of California, I couldn’t help but notice how ragged Oregon was looking. Clean-up from the ice storm, which took a couple of years, had not yet begun. Between the gimpy looking deciduous trees and the red, dried-out fir trees, the scenery was apocalyptic. As we continued on into California, dodging routes with active wildfires while peering through smoke at forests that looked as ravaged—or worse—than Oregon’s, my heart ached. Yet the odd thing was that everyone with whom I tried to discuss the sad state of the trees just gave me a puzzled look. They simply hadn’t noticed.

Was I losing my mind? To find out what was really going on I did a little research, which only served to alarm me further. Trees, it seems, are endangered and dying all around the planet, due mostly to the deadly double-whammy of 1) climate change, weakening the trees through heat and drought, followed by 2) the pests and diseases that thrive, especially, on weakened trees. As I’d suspected, it wasn’t simply that I’d forgotten what a healthy Douglas fir looked like. After all, I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for most of my life, I knew that Douglas fir trees should be closer to opaque, more like this:

But those are hard to find now. These days, Douglas firs tend toward transparent.

This is the grove next to our property.

For better or for worse, I’m the kind of person who goes straight to the worse-case scenario: What happens if we lose our trees? While most of us, apparently, are inattentive to the struggles of trees, we do realize, I hope, that our very lives depend upon them. We breathe in what trees breathe out—the oxygen essential to our lives. Trees, on the other hand, breath in what we breathe out—that pesky carbon dioxide. We are interdependent. Therefore, we ignore their decline at our peril. For some reason there seem to be two competing sets of statistics around these numbers but, to get right down to basics, it turns out that about 28% (or perhaps it’s 50%) of the world’s oxygen is produced by trees. The other 70% (or 50%, as the case may be) is produced by plankton. Right now oxygen makes up about 21% of our atmosphere. The human species needs a percentage of about 19.5% oxygen to survive. A 28% loss in our current level of oxygen would bring the level down to 14.7%. “Okay,” you might say, if you prefer to remain in denial, “but not all trees will die and besides, there’s lots of other plants. And then, of course, there are the mighty plankton!”

Well, let me tell you something I learned about plankton. When ocean temperatures are cool, as they have been for millions of years, plankton perform photosynthesis, emitting oxygen just like plants. However, new and startling laboratory research has found that when water temperatures warm to a certain threshold—a threshold only as little as three degrees warmer than today’s ocean temperatures—plankton stop emitting oxygen. Worse, they emit carbon dioxide instead! Our oceans have been warming at a rapid speed over just the past few years—so much so, in fact, that if it turns out that these conditions actually do apply outside the lab I don’t think we can hang our hope on plankton. Naturally, my research did nothing to soothe my aching heart. Though it’s been confirmed that trees are dying and our oceans are heating, it’s quite evident that we remain mostly oblivious—certainly not concerned enough to make any kind of meaningful change to the status quo at all—nor are our leaders asking us to. In fact, the policy of the current administration is nothing short of outright denial.

Back in my neighborhood, where the trees are abundant but tend towards transparency, trees are being cut down on a slow but regular basis. For a long while after moving here, my poor, soft heart leapt out of my chest every time I heard the growl of a chainsaw. “Who are they killing now?!” I couldn’t help but wonder. I’d even leave the house so I didn’t have to hear the crash, followed inevitably by the shredding sounds of the chipper. But after the extreme weather phenomena of 2021, and especially after reading about the state of trees in general, I had to come to terms with the fact that since we are surrounded by sick trees, they will, over time, need to be cut down—which meant I was going to have to learn to toughen up. Tree-cutting was going to be increasing, not decreasing.

Though I accept the need to remove dead and dangerous trees, I am simultaneously conscious of the fact that their death and removal are not only an indicator of the destructive cycle we are caught in, but are perpetuating it. Each year, due to the drier, warmer climate, thousands of trees burn or are otherwise destroyed by weather, pests, or disease—trees that were meant for the cooler, wetter climates of their youth. Their loss reduces the cooling effect of the overall tree canopy, resulting in higher temperatures which propagate even more tree loss. We are caught in, and perpetuating, a doom spiral. Over time, certainly, trees meant for drier, hotter climates ought to replace the once-abundant firs of the Pacific Northwest, but the growth of trees is a long, slow process and climate change is accelerating. If I were betting on climate adaptation to save us in a race against climate change, I don’t think I like my odds.

Even though I did my best to become more tolerant of the slow, but persistent, destruction of the elder trees who long predated my neighborhood, there was one particular neighbor whom I simply could not forgive. A newly purchased home about five houses down from ours, in the more forested area of the street, was surrounded by majestic Douglas firs. There were at least six in the front yard and several more in the back—many of them very old. Not long after they moved in, an “X” appeared on the trunk of every visible fir on their property. My stomach clenched. “Surely they couldn’t be planning on cutting down ALL of their trees!” I mused anxiously. Several fretful weeks passed—perhaps even months. “Certainly,” I speculated, to cheer myself up, “no one would brazenly cut all their trees down. This is a forest!” The more time that passed, the less anxious I became until I’d almost forgotten my fears.

By the time I heard the chainsaws they had become such an everyday occurrence that I didn’t, at first, even associate their sound with the trees of that particular neighbor. It wasn’t until I felt the heavy quake of a fallen behemoth that I was shaken from my oblivion. These chainsaws, I now realized with agony, were larger and louder than the usual backyard variety. The grandfather firs were being felled! It took a few days to fully complete their mission but eventually the dastardly deed was done. Every. Single. Fir. Front and back. Toppled. “Why?!” I screamed internally (and externally, to be honest, at my poor, beleaguered husband): “IF YOU DIDN’T WANT TREES, WHY DID YOU BUY A FORESTED HOME????” Knowing that each tree potentially generated income only made me more contemptuous. Using a calculator I found online I was able to determine that their bigger trees would have garnered them $3,789 each. Referring to them now as “the tree killers,” I could hardly stand to walk past their house. Did they plant a beautiful garden there instead? No, they did not. They’ve lived there a few years now, surrounded by an empty, undeveloped lot with a pull-through driveway in front, their oversized vehicles mostly obscuring their house. I’ve never met them and I hope I never do, yet I would surely like an answer as to WHY?

All the while, I have, as my readers will know, been becoming more and more involved with plants as sentient beings. Trees may not appear to move about, but under the ground, things are happening that are invisible to us. Trees protect each other. Their roots are entwined—with each other, yes—but also with other beings with whom they are interdependent. In fact, they live in communities of beings, supporting one another both above and below the soil’s surface. Trees, especially the very tall trees in my neighborhood, have seen a lot in their lifetimes. They were once members of a forest community consisting entirely of wild beings. Gradually, the human species crept in as well, removing trees here and there in order to build their dwellings. Over the years, though, our dwellings have increased dramatically at the expense, of course, of the forest—recognizable, now, only by its scattered fragments. At the same time, climate change is taking its toll. While we may debate whether humans are the true cause of climate change, from the point of view of a tree it most certainly appears that the two are correlated. Yet I like to imagine them as standing sentinel over us in spite of all we’ve done, patiently offering their shady, protective canopies not only to us, but so many other of the creatures that co-inhabit our neighborhood. Could it be, however, that there’s a limit to their forbearance?

One day during the Christmas holidays of 2023, I took a walk with my daughter and her partner, visiting from California. As I passed, resentfully, the tree killers’ recently denuded property, I brought them up to speed on its history, wondering aloud if the trees might take their revenge somehow. They could, I proposed, find a way to retaliate for the actions of these particular humans, who had so willfully, and for no apparent reason, murdered an entire grove of their extended family along with the community who depended on them. “Trees,” I asserted, “are not powerless creatures. They could even the score!” As we chuckled about the possibilities, I sent a silent message directly to the firs, entreating them to exact their retribution!

Only few weeks later, the month of January crippled us with the triple ice storm of 2024. A polar vortex, gripping the bulk of the nation, gradually spread west to include Oregon in its grasp. Temperatures dropped to 12 degrees. While subfreezing temperatures in Oregon normally only occur when the skies are clear, this time things were different. The east wind, instead of scouring out the clouds, arrived in tandem with heavy precipitation. Although it snowed for a short time, conditions soon changed to graupel. East wind gusts, a common occurrence, increased to over sixty mph—very rare for the valley. It didn’t take long before I heard the distant explosion that plunged us into a darker, quieter world without power. Reading my book in my comfy chair, by the light of the windows, I heard sounds I’d never heard before as the wind sought unsuccessfully to lift our roof. As the inside temperature slowly dropped, we put on more and more layers and built a large fire in our fireplace. How long would it take before the heat came back on? The electric company couldn’t tell us. For dinner that night we moved a table near the fire and sat down to eat our sandwiches, learning in the process that truthfully, without the furnace, the fire could not warm beyond five feet from the flames. When darkness fell we lit the table with candlelight in order to play cards by the fire. But the house was so cold—even in coats, hats and scarves—that only one side of our bodies could possibly pass for warm, while the other was uncomfortably chilled.

We gave it up early, and headed to bed, donning many layers of sleep wear, piling on blankets, and creating a warm, covered nest on the top of our bed for the ancient toy poodle we’d inherited from my mother. With no light to read by, we went straight to sleep, nurturing dreams of sleep, interrupted—by blinding light and the warm, humming return of heat and electricity. Alas, it was not to be. In the morning we ate breakfast at Don’s son’s house which, at that time, was still receiving power. Conveniently, the granular quality of the graupel made the roads passable. Re-entering our house upon our return, we were met by a wall of coldness we were not prepared to endure. Luckily, wonderful friends were willing to take us in—including the dog!—so we packed our bags and drove to their neighboring town, which had not been hit quite so hard. And there we stayed, as the days dragged by, returning home each day to check on the house and pack more of the things we’d optimistically thought we could live without (it would only be for a short time, right?) as well as food to contribute toward our keep. As we opened our car doors the sounds of multiple chainsaws met our ears as neighbors up and down the street helped each other dig out from the mess. By the third day the temperature inside our house had sunk to 32 degrees. I threw a lightweight blanket over the window full of plants behind the sink and hoped for the best. (Some died.) The only positive thing I can say about the cold is that we didn’t have to worry about food spoiling in our refrigerator OR our outdoor freezer. All we had to do was prop the doors open!!

Since the friends we were staying with had no reason to leave their home, we brought them tidings of the world outside, the road conditions, the latest damage assessment from our neighborhood, and when the crews, who sometimes showed up on our street, thought they’d make it to our house. The damage we saw on our trips to and from home was astounding—so many roofs with tree damage, trees across roadways, etc. Yet the conditions did not let up. The second day of our stay, with temperatures still well below freezing, meteorologists began warning us to brace ourselves for another bout of wind and ice, which dutifully arrived the next day—also as graupel. Now even more homes had lost electricity. Would we ever make it home? Yet on the day that followed that one, as we headed for home, per usual, I noticed first that the trees seemed quite frosted, and then that unpredicted precipitation had begun falling sideways in a blustery wind. The temperature gauge in the car made clear that it had to be icing up. Sure enough, we arrived home to find the north side of our house completely coated in ice from this third, and literally off-the radar, onslaught of ice. With yet more trees falling, no crews were anywhere in sight.

It wasn’t until the fifth day of our stay with our saint-like hosts that power was restored. By then we’d grown quite worried about wearing out our welcome. None of us had expected that we would need shelter for so long, but with three ice storms in succession, the crews could not even begin to keep up. We were very, very grateful when we arrived back home but it took quite some time to get there. All of the usual routes had been newly blocked by yet more fallen trees. Having lived in this part of Portland for some time now, we knew every possible road we could take. Even so it took three tries to find an unblocked pathway home.

Now that the weather was warming and drying out, I pulled on some boots and took my first stroll through the neighborhood to see the damage for myself, chainsaws still buzzing noisily all throughout the neighborhood. Just on our street alone, there was an amazing amount of damage to take in. Multiple trees and a couple of power poles had fallen across the road, all of which, for the crews, were a higher priority than the restoration of power to an individual home. I counted seven houses that had sustained tree damage, though trees were down everywhere. Most of them were of the smaller and younger deciduous variety that could and did take out several fences. Among the firs, many heavy limbs had fallen, doing their share of damage as well. While I’d heard tales of another, hidden from my view, I could clearly see that one, tall fir had fallen, though it had already been cut into chunks. Because I hadn’t seen where, exactly, the tree had landed, I didn’t know which damages to attribute to it. Slowly, however, I began to piece together its trajectory. This was the tree responsible for the damage on the house in the lot to the west of it, and not only that but, because of its length, on the garage of the home beyond.

But the damage that interested me most was that of the roof of the former, because that was the home of the tree-killers.

What bitter irony, after removing all of their trees, caused them now to be tarping their roof as they pleaded with some beleaguered carpenter to repair it?

Let me explain it to you. After the tree-killers took the lives of every tree in their front yard, only one lone member of the grove remained—a slightly younger tree than some, almost insignificant. Just over the boundary line, untouched by the neighbors’ malicious intent, the tree stood straight and tall, looking, for all intents and purposes, as sturdy as could be, but underneath the soil, invisible to all, the root system of the grove in which it was entwined had lost its life force, and with it, the ability to provide support. With wind coming from the east, a corner of the killers’ home lay directly in the path of its fall. Without the need to physically harm any of the humans in its purview, it exacted its revenge with surgical precision. Justice WAS delivered.

Epilogue:

For months after the storm—long after the storm-fallen trees had been cleared away—chainsaws continued to be employed, as residents throughout the city made appointments with “tree services” to rid them of their trees—trees they now perceived as enemies, who might turn on them given half a chance, trees whose canopies had shaded them in the summer, along with the birds that sang in them—a service they’d provided over hundreds of years, trees that are desperately needed—each and every one. And for each home that will now, without shade, be that much warmer in the summer, more air conditioning will be used, sending streams of hot air into the already overheated atmosphere, each additional hour of heat feeding the accelerating downward spiral of climate change.

Just a little bit of fear with, perhaps, some financial reward, is all that it takes to dispose of the life of a centuries old tree. To the limited intelligence of humans, the wrong things have become dispensable. Even, as you see, our future.

Photo Credits: Tree-cutting by USDA, Forest Service, Public Domain, Fir forest by Wirestock on Freepik, The grove next door by Kathleen Basheera Ritchie