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When you live a long time with trees, they become a part of you.
So it pained me to take down the old sugar maple, my arboreal cathedral, one rafter at a time, her demise not from flames but an underground blaze of fungus.
Small honey-colored mushrooms fruiting at her base were “the giveaway,” said the forester.
The tree was old when we moved to the farm 36 years ago, about the age of this farmhouse we figured, 160 years. I know she was here as far back as the 1940s because we have a photo of her in her younger days, much smaller and not quite ruling over the side yard as she did in her later years.
In her old age, she reached about 90 feet high. And she was a tree with a personality. Not straight and narrow, but quirky, with a trunk that had split into four and branches that splayed this way and that, coping with aging as best she could. I felt privileged to have lived under her canopy for many years.
But lately she’s been battered by torrential rains, and then drought. Summers are hotter, winters aren’t as cold. She’s had little snow cover to insulate her roots. Climate change probably made her more susceptible to the fungus, armillaria, the forester said.
And she’s not the only tree stressed on the farm. Ash trees have been decimated by the emerald ash borer. Native dogwoods are dying of anthracnose. Hemlocks are being attacked by the hemlock woolly adelgid and spicebush and sassafras are suffering from laurel wilt, spread by the nonnative ambrosia beetle. Woods that were once woods are becoming fields again.
We watched the old maple die slowly. She’s not doing well, my husband and I said to each other.
Then, in one season, her entire left side started coming down. Limbs crashed onto the springhouse below, chunks of bark everywhere. Anthills appeared at her base. Vegetation that had lodged high in her crevices looked less vigorous to me.
Even the birds were leaving. I saw no Baltimore oriole nest high in her branches as I had the year before, nor did I find on the ground the glossy white and elliptical egg of a mourning dove. Perhaps the birds knew that securing a nest to those branches was no longer safe.
Still, I hoped we could save her. Prune the dead limbs. Trim back. A little longer, I begged. I knew I was too attached to her. My children had grown up beside her. Animals of all sorts scampered about her trunk. Black bears often ambled by. At night from the sleeping porch, I watched the moon circle east to west above her. She was more than just a tree, she was a village.
And what, I wondered, had she witnessed in her long life? Horse and buggy, farmers who lived in log houses with corn cob daubing, a barn raising, cold winters with piles of snow, many more birds, more insects, lots of bats (which are almost gone from the farm now). Darker skies, brighter stars, years with no airplane noise and then Flight 93 hijacked overhead. She’d watched the pond being dug, the house modernized, the land altered, by us, to divert new floodwaters.
Like the wrinkles on my face, her gnarly roots were a record of years gone by, of lives lived, the blessed and the painful.
But I could fool myself no longer. It had become too dangerous to walk underneath her or mow the grass. My husband and another fellow strung ropes to her branches. I could feel it in my limbs. I didn’t want to look. They used pole pruners and chain saws: dangerous, noisy work. They were experienced, but not on this scale. We had to call in a professional with a bucket truck, more people and more powerful chain saws. But he was so busy dealing with dead and diseased trees in our small town that he said he’d drop her, but not clean up the mess.
She was down.
That couldn’t be the end, though. I remembered the suggestions of many readers of my original New York Times essay who urged me to turn the old maple into tables, shelves, lumber, guitars or bowls. I took their advice.
“Turn it, don’t burn it,” says Corey Snyder’s business card. I’d met Snyder, a wood turner, years ago at our farmer’s market, had bought beautiful bowls from him as wedding gifts. I asked if he could do the same with our tree. He said he’d come look at the wood. Maple is often a light wood, sometimes almost white, he said, which many people don’t like. But he was willing to see how the grain turned out.
His chain saw struck up another chorus. More piles of sawdust accumulated on the grass. This time, I put my nose to the newly cut grain and soaked in its sweet smell. We placed heavy chunks of the tree into a tractor bucket, then loaded them onto his trailer. He took them back to his shop. He’d let me know if the wood was worth using.
A couple months later, Snyder presented me with three beautiful, honey-colored bowls: one for our son, one for our daughter, and one for us. Each has different characteristics. One has a “bark inclusion,” a dark brown mushroom-shaped mark where a branch had been trimmed or damaged.
Another has a wave pattern resulting from a Y (a crotch, Snyder called it) where two branches met and the tree’s growth pattern changed. One has light streaks of green because of mineral deposits. They are different shapes, sizes and thicknesses. I asked him how he chose what form the bowls should take. “I let the piece of wood dictate,” he said.
The old maple had spoken.
She still had not revealed her age, though. I had hoped I could count her rings, but she was so scuffed up with a kaleidoscope of chain saw marks that it was impossible to do so.
Now, instead of gazing up at the tree, I can hold her in my hands. The bowls are silky smooth, not rough like her bark, light-colored, not dark, small, not stately. But they are the old maple in a second life, albeit a different form. Some of her will stay here, where she put down deep roots, but other parts will venture out into a wider world because Snyder said he liked working with the wood so much he wants to cut more.
Pretty soon only the stump will remain. I console myself further that, over time, the stump will become another little ecosystem unto itself. Bacteria will decompose the wood, ants and beetles will move in, and then perhaps pileated woodpeckers, which feed on them. Salamanders may shelter there, snakes hibernate, and chipmunks hide acorns in her crevices. Fungi, moss and lichen will grow and nutrients will return to the soil.
Maybe, someday, a seedling will sprout.
Yet when I walk out to the side yard, I still see her standing, her long, elegant branches reaching skyward. It is autumn now and there is no longer that colorful array of red, yellow and orange leaves blanketing the ground beneath her. And last spring, I strained to hear the dawn chorus.
That glorious sound is not as close to the house as it once was, not as vibrant. It emanates from branches farther away, from trees closer to the forest. The birds that once called the old maple home have had to move on, to sing elsewhere. So must I.
Daryln Brewer Hoffstot’s collection of essays, “A Farm Life: Observations From Fields and Forests,” was published by Stackpole Books.
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