The Maple on North Street

The sugar maple on North Street had split in the March ice storm, the central leader cracking at a co-dominant union where two stems of equal size had grown together and the bark between them had been included — folded inward, trapped, unable to fuse — and the union had held for sixty years and then had not held, and the right half of the tree had peeled away and fallen across the sidewalk and into the street and the town crew had cut it up and hauled it away and what remained was half a tree with a wound the size of a door where the other half had been.

Wren stood on the sidewalk and looked at it. Tomás stood beside her. It was his third week.

Tomás Reyes was twenty-six and had come to her through the extension service, where he had been working as a seasonal field assistant doing gypsy moth surveys — walking through the woods counting egg masses on tree trunks, which was the kind of work that made you either love trees or never want to see another one. Tomás loved them. He had grown up in Waterbury, in a neighborhood where the trees were London planes and honeylocusts and callery pears, the urban trees, the ones the city planted because they tolerated pollution and compacted soil and road salt and the general hostility of pavement. He had never climbed a tree professionally. He had never used a chainsaw. He had a degree in environmental science from Western Connecticut State and a body that was built for climbing — five foot eight, lean, long arms, the proportions of a gymnast, which was what climbing was, gymnastics with a saw.

"What do you see?" Wren said.

Tomás looked at the tree. She could see him working through the assessment the way she had taught him — species, size, structure, condition, site. He was methodical. He took notes. He asked questions that showed he was thinking three steps ahead, which was the quality she valued most, because in a tree three steps ahead was the difference between a controlled cut and a trip to the hospital.

"Sugar maple," he said. "Acer saccharum. Maybe thirty inches DBH. The co-dominant failure took out half the crown. The remaining stem has a long lever arm to the left — it's going to be weighted that way now. The wound face is huge, probably four feet of exposed heartwood. There's no way that calluses over. The decay column is going to go right down the center of the remaining trunk."

"How long before it's a hazard?"

"It's a hazard now. The wound face is open to the elements. Fungal colonization has probably already started. The heartwood is exposed. Give it five years and the trunk will be hollow from the wound down."

"So what's the recommendation?"

"Removal."

"Why not a crown reduction on the remaining stem? Reduce the lever arm, take some weight off, let it stand?"

Tomás thought about this. She watched him think. He was not the kind of person who answered immediately to seem competent. He paused. He considered. He looked at the tree again.

"Because the wound is too large," he said. "A crown reduction addresses the mechanical risk from the remaining canopy but it doesn't address the decay pathway. The exposed heartwood is an entry point for decay fungi — probably Ganoderma, maybe Laetiporus — and once the decay column establishes, the structural integrity of the trunk is compromised regardless of what the crown looks like. You'd be maintaining a crown on a trunk that's rotting from the inside. It might stand for ten years. It might not. And it's on a sidewalk."

"Good," Wren said.

She did not say more than that. Good was the word she used when Tomás got it right, and she used it sparingly so that it meant something, the way her own trainer had used it — a man named Bill Fenwick in Northampton who had taught her to climb by not talking about climbing, by talking about trees, because the climbing was just the method and the tree was the thing, and if you understood the tree you understood how to move in it, where the branches would hold your weight and where they would not, where the wood was sound and where it was not, where to put the saw and where to put yourself.

The homeowner was the town itself. The tree was on town property, on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street, what arborists called the tree lawn, a term Wren found poignant in its simplicity — a lawn for a tree, a small piece of ground dedicated to this one purpose, this one life. The town tree warden had approved the removal. The paperwork was done. They were here to take it down.

Dale had the chipper running in the street, the traffic cones out, the flagging set. The chipper was a Vermeer BC1500, a machine that could reduce a twelve-inch log to chips in four seconds, a machine that Wren respected the way you respect anything that can kill you instantly, which the chipper could do if you fed it a branch that pulled your hand in, or if your sleeve caught on a limb going through the feed roller, which was why Dale wore tight sleeves and no gloves at the chipper and Wren had a rule: nobody feeds the chipper except Dale.

"You're climbing today," Wren said to Tomás.

He looked at her. He had climbed four times — twice on practice trees at the extension service, once on a dead white pine she had let him top out on because there was nothing around it and even a mistake would only mean a branch landing in an open field, and once on a live oak where she had supervised every cut from the ground. He had not climbed a residential removal. He had not climbed a tree on a street with houses and power lines and a sidewalk and the accumulated complexity of a tree in a place where things could be hit.

"I'll be on the ground directing," Wren said. "Dale on the ropes. You do the upper crown work. The small stuff, the branches under six inches. I'll come up and do the trunk sections."

"Okay," Tomás said.

He said it the way he said everything — quiet, steady, the word landing flat, without inflection. Wren did not know much about his life outside of work. He lived in an apartment in Torrington with a roommate. He drove a Honda Civic with two hundred thousand miles on it. He ate lunch slowly and deliberately, the way a person eats who has known what it is like to not have enough food, though she did not know this for certain and did not ask. She did not ask personal questions. She offered work and expected competence and paid fairly and that was the contract, and within that contract Tomás was becoming good.

He geared up. The climbing harness was a Buckingham saddle — a waist belt and leg straps connected by a bridge, with D-rings for attaching the climbing line, the lanyard, the secondary tie-in. He had his own harness now, fitted to his body, broken in over the past three weeks. The climbing line was a half-inch polyester-dacron blend, 150 feet, with a spliced eye on one end. The friction hitch was tied with an eight-millimeter accessory cord — a Valdotain tresse, the hitch that Wren preferred because it was smooth on the rope and easy to advance with one hand while the other hand held a limb or a saw.

Tomás set his line with a throw bag — a small weighted pouch on a thin throw line, thrown over a crotch in the upper tree, the throw line then used to pull the climbing rope over the crotch and back down to the ground. He threw well. The bag arced up and over a branch union at forty feet, cleanly, the throw line draping over the crotch without snagging. He pulled the climbing rope up, set the friction hitch, and clipped in.

"On rope," he said.

"Climb when ready," Wren said.

He went up. The technique was called single rope technique — SRT — where the climber ascended the rope itself rather than using the rope as a doubled line. He used a foot ascender on his right foot and a knee ascender on his left leg, inchworming up the rope, his body rising smoothly, the motion efficient if not yet fluid. Wren watched his form. His hips were too far from the rope — he was leaning back, which made the ascent harder because he was fighting his own weight rather than keeping it over the rope. She said nothing. He would learn this from his body, from the fatigue in his arms telling him that something was wrong with his position, and the correction would come from his body's intelligence rather than from her words, and it would be deeper for that.

He reached the branch union and redirected, setting himself up to move laterally into the crown. The remaining crown — the left half of the tree — spread over the sidewalk and the tree lawn and partly over the street. The branches were sugar maple branches, which meant they were dense and heavy and closely spaced, the kind of crown that held snow and ice and caught wind, the kind of crown that had caused the failure in the first place, because co-dominant stems in a sugar maple were under enormous mechanical stress from the crown weight, and the included bark at the union had meant there was no structural wood connecting the two stems, just bark folded in on itself, a seam that looked like a joint but was not a joint, and when the ice loaded the crown unevenly the seam had opened and the tree had torn itself in half.

Tomás began making cuts. The small branches first, the tips, working from the outside of the crown inward and from the top down. Each branch he cut was attached to a lowering line — a separate rope rigged through a block at the top of the tree, with Dale on the ground controlling the descent. Tomás would cut, the branch would swing free, Dale would lower it to the ground, Wren would drag it to the chipper. The rhythm established itself: the buzz of the small saw, the crack of the branch separating, the whir of rope through the block, the thud of the branch landing, the roar of the chipper eating it. Cut, swing, lower, chip. Cut, swing, lower, chip.

Wren watched Tomás work and thought about the first time she had climbed a tree to cut it. She was twenty-three. It was a white birch in Northampton, a small tree, thirty feet tall, already dead, nothing around it but lawn. Bill Fenwick had stood on the ground and watched her the way she was watching Tomás now — not for mistakes, but for tendencies. Tendencies were what killed people in trees. The tendency to reach too far. The tendency to cut toward yourself. The tendency to trust a branch that looked solid but wasn't. The tendency to forget that you were sixty feet in the air because the work absorbed you and the fear went away and when the fear went away the caution went with it.

Her father had not climbed trees. Glenn Matsuda had been a timber faller, which was a ground job. Fallers stood at the base of the tree and cut it at the stump and the whole tree came down at once — a hundred and fifty, two hundred feet of Douglas fir falling through the air and hitting the ground with a concussion you could feel in your feet from a hundred yards away. It was the most dangerous job in America. More loggers died per capita than soldiers, than police officers, than fishermen. Glenn had done it for fourteen years. He had started at twenty and died at thirty-four — Wren's age now, a fact she had been aware of since January when she turned thirty-four and realized she was now living in the year her father had not survived, that every day she lived past this birthday was a day further than he had gotten, and the thought had sat in her like a stone and she had not told anyone about it and she did not plan to.

"Wren."

She looked up. Tomás was at a branch junction, his saw off, looking down at her.

"This one's got a crack running from the union. Goes about two feet down the stem. I think it's from the failure — the shock split it."

"Can you see into the crack?"

"Yeah. The wood's sound inside. It's a surface split, not structural."

"How big is the branch?"

"Eight inches, maybe nine."

"That's mine. Come down and I'll take over for the trunk sections."

Tomás descended. Wren geared up. She had her own harness, her own rope, her own saw — the Stihl MS 261, a mid-size professional saw that weighed twelve pounds with a sixteen-inch bar and chain and was the saw she used for everything, the saw she had bought used from Bill Fenwick when she left Northampton, the saw she maintained with the devotion of a person who understood that a well-maintained saw was the difference between a clean cut and a kickback, and a kickback at sixty feet in a tree was a thing that did not need to be described because anyone who had seen one did not need the description and anyone who had not seen one could not be made to understand it through words.

She climbed. The tree felt different from the ground — the vibrations, the sway, the way the trunk moved in the wind even on a calm day because the crown was catching air that the ground did not feel. She could feel the tree's imbalance — the missing half, the weight all on one side, the trunk loaded asymmetrically, the root plate on the right side pulling where it used to push. The tree was stressed. She could feel it in the way it moved, a slight tremor, the structural wood under strain.

She reached the branch Tomás had flagged. The crack was visible — a split running from the crotch of the branch union down the stem, two feet long, the wood on either side of the crack slightly displaced. It was a shear crack, caused by the dynamic loading when the other half of the tree had failed — the sudden release of tension on one side had sent a shock wave through the remaining trunk, and this branch union had absorbed some of that energy by cracking. The crack was not structural. The branch was still sound. But it was nine inches in diameter and weighted with a full canopy of branches, and it was over the street, and if she cut it wrong it would swing unpredictably and could hit the power line on the other side of the road.

She set a rigging point above the branch, ran the lowering line through the block, tied the line to the branch with a running bowline at the balance point — the point where the branch, if suspended by a single rope, would hang level. Finding the balance point was intuition and experience and the physics of leverage that she had learned not from books but from watching branches swing when the balance point was wrong, watching them pendulum and spin and crash into things because the weight distribution had not been accounted for. She found the balance point. She tied the line.

"On the lowering line," she called down.

"Copy," Dale said. He had the rope wrapped around the bollard on the base of the tree, two wraps, enough friction to control the descent of a branch that weighed perhaps three hundred pounds.

Wren made the cut. She used a three-cut method — an undercut first, a shallow kerf on the bottom of the branch six inches from the trunk, to prevent the bark from peeling down the stem when the branch let go. Then the top cut, a foot further out, cutting down through the branch until it dropped free under its own weight, the undercut preventing the bark from tearing. Then the final cut — the clean-up cut — close to the trunk, just outside the branch collar, the ring of slightly swollen tissue where the branch met the trunk, the tissue that contained the chemical boundary zone that would seal the wound, the tree's own immune system localized at every branch junction, ready to wall off the wound the moment the branch was gone.

The branch let go. The rope caught it. Dale controlled the descent, the rope singing around the bollard, the branch swinging out from the trunk and down, arcing over the sidewalk, slowing, stopping six feet above the street, hanging. Wren watched it hang. The balance point had been right. The branch hung level, stable, controllable.

"Lower away," she said.

Dale let the rope run. The branch descended to the street. Tomás unhooked the lowering line. Wren moved to the next branch.

They worked through the morning. The maple came down in pieces — the branches first, then the limbs, then the main stem sections, each one rigged and lowered, each one controlled. By noon the tree was a twelve-foot stump standing on the tree lawn, the bark still intact, the heartwood exposed at the top where the co-dominant failure had ripped it open, the wound face dark with oxidation, the pattern of the failure visible in the torn fibers of the wood — not a clean break but a peeling, the two stems separating along the seam of included bark like a zipper opening.

Wren came down. She stood on the sidewalk and drank water and looked at the stump.

"You want to see something?" she said to Tomás.

She walked to the stump. It was thirty inches across, the rings visible on the top face where the failure had exposed the cross-section. She pointed.

"Count from the outside. See this ring? It's narrow. That's 2011 — the year Hurricane Irene came through. The tree put everything into repairing the damage. See how the next three rings are wider? That's the recovery. The tree was spending reserves it had stored up, pushing growth to replace the canopy it lost." She moved her finger inward. "This dark line. That's a frost ring — a late spring frost that killed the cambium on one side. You can see it goes about a quarter of the way around. The tree survived it but the ring on this side is compressed for two years after."

Tomás leaned in. He was looking at the rings the way a person looks at a language they are beginning to read — the symbols recognizable but the grammar still uncertain.

"What's this?" he said, pointing to a dark streak running radially through several rings.

"Wound response. Something penetrated the bark at that point — maybe a nail, maybe a woodpecker, maybe a branch stub that decayed inward. The tree compartmentalized it — see how the dark zone is bounded? The tree set up chemical barriers around the wound to contain the decay. CODIT — Compartmentalization of Decay in Trees. The tree walls off the injury the way your body walls off an infection."

"But it didn't wall off the co-dominant failure."

"No. Because the co-dominant failure wasn't an injury that happened to an intact tree. It was a structural defect that was there from the beginning — from the moment the tree forked into two co-dominant stems instead of maintaining a single central leader. The included bark was there from the start. The tree grew around a flaw it couldn't fix."

Wren heard herself say this and felt the sentence land in a place she had not intended it to go. She stepped back from the stump.

"We'll grind this tomorrow," she said. "Let's clean up."

They chipped the brush, loaded the logs onto the truck, swept the sidewalk. By two o'clock the tree lawn was bare — a circle of sawdust and torn ground where the maple had stood, the grass around it indented with the marks of the chipper's wheels and the drag marks of the branches. The space looked wrong. The sidewalk looked wider. The light on the street had changed — brighter, more direct, the shadow gone. An elderly woman walking a small dog stopped on the far side of the street and looked at the empty space and said nothing and kept walking, and the dog pulled at the leash because the dog did not care about the tree or the space or the light.

In the truck, driving back to the shop, Tomás said, "How many trees have you taken down?"

Wren thought about it. She had been running her own business for six years and before that had worked for Bill Fenwick for four years. In a busy year she removed sixty to eighty trees. In a slow year, forty.

"Maybe six hundred," she said.

"Do you remember them?"

"Some of them. The big ones. The difficult ones. The ones that went wrong."

"Have any gone wrong?"

"Two," Wren said. She did not elaborate. The two that had gone wrong were in her body — one in her left shoulder, which ached when it rained because a limb she had been lowering had swung and caught her across the back and knocked her out of her tie-in and she had fallen eight feet before her secondary caught her, and the impact had torn something in the shoulder that had healed but not fully. The other was in her memory — a red oak on a steep slope in Warren that had barber-chaired during the felling cut, the trunk splitting vertically as it fell, one half kicking back toward her and Dale, both of them running uphill through slash and brush, the slab of wood landing where Dale had been standing three seconds earlier. They had not talked about it. They had finished the job. They had driven home. Dale had called in sick the next day, the only day he had missed in seven years, and when he came back neither of them mentioned it and they continued working as if it had not happened, which was how you survived this work — not by forgetting but by continuing.

"My father died doing this," Wren said.

She had not planned to say it. The words came out the way a branch comes off a tree in a wind — not cut, not planned, just the load exceeding the capacity and the thing letting go.

Tomás looked at her. "Tree work?"

"Timber falling. Oregon. He was clearing old growth. A widow-maker — a dead branch in the canopy — came down during a cut. He didn't see it."

"I'm sorry," Tomás said.

"It was twenty-two years ago."

She said this as if twenty-two years were a long time, which it was in the life of a person and was not in the life of a tree, and the tree she had just taken down had been sixty years old and had lived through events that were ancient by human measure and recent by geological measure and the rings did not care about the distinction, the rings simply accumulated, one per year, the tree adding a layer of wood around itself each growing season the way a person added a layer of experience around themselves each year, except the tree's layers were visible and countable and readable and a person's were not.

She drove. The truck smelled like bar oil and wood chips and sweat. The chipper rattled behind them on the trailer. Tomás was quiet. Wren was quiet. The road ran through the valley and the hills rose on either side and the trees on the hills were beginning to bud, the first pale green appearing on the maples — the red maples first, always the red maples, then the sugar maples, then the oaks, the oaks always last, the oaks cautious, waiting until the frosts were truly over before committing their leaves, and the oaks were right to wait because a late frost could kill new leaves and a tree that had already spent its stored energy pushing leaves had nothing left to push a second set and would stand bare and weakened through the summer while the maples and beeches and birches leafed out around it.

She dropped Tomás at his car in the shop lot. She parked the truck. She sat in the cab for a moment after the engine was off, her hands on the steering wheel, the smell of the day in her clothes and her hair and her skin, the sawdust in the creases of her knuckles, the chainsaw vibration still in her forearms like a ghost of the work, the white finger that would come eventually if she kept doing this for twenty more years — Raynaud's phenomenon, the vibration disease, the nerves in the fingers dying from the constant shaking of the saw, the fingers going white and numb in the cold. Her father had had it. She remembered his hands at dinner, the tips of his fingers white, and he would run them under warm water at the sink and she had thought it was a game, the white fingers, and it was not a game, it was the saw taking his hands one nerve at a time the way the saw took the trees one cut at a time.

She got out of the truck. She locked the shop. She drove home.

The box from her mother was waiting. Saturday. Two days from now. She would drive to Litchfield and sit in her mother's kitchen and open a box that had been behind the furnace for however many years and look at whatever was inside. Her mother would sit across the table and not look. Her mother would make tea and not talk about Glenn. Her mother would ask about work and Wren would tell her about the elm on Barker Hill and the maple on North Street and her mother would listen the way she always listened — carefully, completely, with the attention of a person who had spent her life listening to what was not being said, which was the skill of a librarian and the skill of a woman who had survived something she did not name.

Wren went inside. She fed the cat. She showered. She stood in the kitchen in a towel and looked out the window at the backyard, where a white oak stood at the edge of the field, its crown massive and spreading, the branches reaching out fifty feet from the trunk in every direction, the whole tree shaped by a lifetime of growing in the open, in full sun, with no competition, the crown symmetrical and full and sound.

She had assessed that oak when she moved in. It was healthy. It was structurally sound. It was a good tree. She did not know how old it was and she had not cored it because she did not core trees that did not need to be cored, trees that were not in trouble, trees that were simply living, and knowing the age of a living tree was a curiosity rather than a necessity and she had enough of trees during the day. At night, she let them be.

She made dinner. She ate. She read. She went to bed.

In the dark, she thought about Tomás in the tree, forty feet up, the saw in his hands, the small saw, the limbing saw, cutting the branches of a sugar maple on a street in a town in Connecticut while below him an old woman walked a dog past the space where the tree had stood that morning and would not stand tomorrow and would not stand ever again, and the old woman had not stopped, had not looked, had only paused and then continued, which was what people did when a tree came down — they paused and they continued, because the tree was gone and the space was there and the light was different and the world was slightly more bare and slightly more bright and there was nothing to do about it, nothing at all.