The Canopy

Wren Matsuda assesses a dying American elm on a residential property in Litchfield County, reading the tree's decline and the homeowner's reluctance.

Wren removes a storm-damaged sugar maple in the village of Litchfield, while training Tomás on his first residential takedown.

Wren treats a stand of eastern hemlocks infested with woolly adelgid, confronting a pest that cannot be stopped and a landscape being erased.

Wren drives to Litchfield to open the box of her father's belongings found in her mother's basement, and confronts the objects that survived him.

Wren removes a massive white ash killed by emerald ash borer, and Tomás confronts the reality of working at height when a section doesn't go as planned.

Wren prunes a century-old ornamental cherry on the Litchfield green, a public tree with a public audience, and learns that Margaret Blackwell has called about the oak.

Wren assesses Margaret Blackwell's two-hundred-year-old white oak, and both women face the truth the tree is telling.

A June thunderstorm drops a red oak across a house in New Milford, and Wren works the emergency call with Dale while Tomás runs his first solo ground operation.

Summer settles over Litchfield County. Wren works through the busy season while monitoring the Blackwell oak from a distance, and Tomás begins to find his confidence in the crown.

Wren returns to the Blackwell oak for the fall assessment. The cores tell a story she does not want to read.

Winter settles in. Wren sharpens the falling axe and reckons with the tool she carries and the man who carried it before her.

Wren and Jesse spend Christmas together. The conversation turns, for the first time, toward Oregon.

Wren develops the removal plan for the Blackwell oak — every cut, every rig point, every sequence mapped before the first saw starts.

The removal of the Blackwell oak begins. Wren climbs the tree for the first time, starting with the dead south side, while Margaret watches from the porch.

The second and third days of the removal. Wren takes down the living side of the crown — the heavy, healthy branches — and confronts what it means to cut living wood.

The final day of the removal. The trunk comes down in sections, the crane lifts the last pieces, and the stump is revealed.

In the weeks after the Blackwell oak removal, Wren moves through the ordinary work of spring while something shifts inside her.

Wren flies to Oregon. The landscape changes beneath her — the flat Midwest, the Rockies, the Cascades — and she arrives in a place she has never been that she recognizes.

Wren finds Glenn's falling partner in Mill City. Ray tells her what she needs to hear about her father and the work and the trees they cut together.

Ray takes Wren to the unit where Glenn died. She walks through the regrowth, finds the stumps, and reads what remains of her father's last trees.

Before leaving Oregon, Wren hikes into the Opal Creek Wilderness to stand among the living old growth — the trees that were saved, the forest that Glenn's cutting bordered.

Wren flies home to Connecticut. She returns to the work, to the trees, to the landscape she has chosen, carrying what Oregon gave her.

Autumn. Wren sits at Margaret Blackwell's table, made from the oak. She climbs one more tree. The rings continue.