Tree ambitions

This evening there's an empty socket, like a place of a pulled tooth, in the wall of foliage that begins with the chain link fence between my yard and the wild vine-twined jungle beyond. Indeed, a big section of the fence is gone since the maple tree that filled the now open space grew up in and through the fence, it's ever larger trunk swelling and swallowing the metal loops.

Like many things in my backyard, I hadn't noticed it until it was big. One day, this half-in, half-out tree leaning over toward my roof was a distinct presence. An ugly tree (though in summer it blocked the street lights from sleepers upstairs), it spraddled the space, a branch snaking away here, another in that direction, heavy tufts of foliage at the ends of the boughs. Little branches with leaves sprouted  from random locations on the trunk, like hair on an old man's body. I'd cut a few branches but the tree seemed to redouble the vigor of its remaining limbs. Time to go.

Step one was climbing a ladder, hoisting myself onto the branches, getting as far aloft as I could (or dared) and, swaying the breeze of the beautiful day, sawing away at the thinner, wrist-sized branches with my bucksaw. Crack, snap, and the end-laden branches swagged and swung down to the lawn far below-- usually. Some branches dangled though unattached, suspended by a thick fibrous mass of hairy vines pebbled with tiny green proto-grapes. To get them to drop meant tugging on a tangle as densely matted as dreadlocks. My hands were shaking when finally the tree stood stripped and naked, like a caryatid  in a ruined temple.

Step two began when I could hear my friend across the street Kejo start testing his chain saw to complete the project. Meanwhile, heaps of tangled branches scattered across the lawn had to be piled up, cut up, bundled up and put aside for city garden waste day a month hence. Such a mountain of sticky green debris. The spirit quailed before the task. Bales tied with twine, each the size of rolled carpet, were, one by one, made and stacked elsewhere. with of course the standard blood drawn by the stabbing twigs. (Thanks, Duster, for the help.)

Men with chainsaws, men on ladders with chainsaws, old men on ladders...this is when you proceed carefully. I climbed one more time to tie a rope to the top, the cuts were planned and discussed--You back there pulling. go farther, you don't want it to fall on you--the tightening of the saw chain, the lashing of the ladder to the trunk so it wouldn't wobble, the first cut, adjustments to the machine, the notch cut--Look out back there, it'll come quickly--and it did, twisting and crashing down on the top bar of the fence. In surprise, Kejo jumped from the ladder, but no injury.

Then the middle section down to the fence top, and finally the section embedded in the fence. The trunk looked marshmallowy, the fence had sunk its diamonds so deep into it. But there was nothing to do but snip the links of the fence with bolt cutters and take out trunk and fence together, inseparable, which Kejo did masterfully--while taking breaks to entertain me with passages of his poetry.

Now several thick logs litter my lawn, looking like fallen columns from classical ruins. I don't know what to do with these trunk segments which represent the ambition of the tree, its striving for life, its filling out a space for itself to be--where now is absence, and a raw white stump. The vines and small trees are waiting to pounce on the volume newly vacated. Soon the signs of the maple trees having been at all will  be overwritten. Let this then be the epitaph: This was an opportunity-taker that almost got to 'too big to cut'. Taking it down was complicated and exhausting. Not an easy life, not an easy death. Acknowledged.