The Sycamore on the Housatonic

The sycamore was the largest tree Wren had ever been asked to prune. It stood on the bank of the Housatonic River in Cornwall Bridge, at the edge of a property owned by a retired judge named Arthur Keane, the trunk rising from the riverbank at a lean of about fifteen degrees over the water, the lean the result of a century of phototropic growth — the crown reaching toward the light over the river, the open water providing the light that the forested hillside behind it did not, the tree growing where the light was, the trunk following the crown, the lean increasing slightly each year as the crown extended further over the water and the weight of the crown pulled the trunk with it.

The sycamore — Platanus occidentalis — was the largest deciduous tree native to North America. The species could reach a hundred and seventy feet in height and ten feet in diameter, and while this one was not the largest of its kind it was extraordinary by any measure. Wren estimated the trunk at fifty-four inches in diameter at breast height and the height at a hundred and ten feet and the crown spread at eighty feet, the crown extending over the river, the lower branches touching the water at high flow, the branch tips dragging in the current during spring floods, the tree's fingers trailing in the river the way a person's fingers trailed in the water from the side of a canoe.

The bark was what made sycamores unmistakable. The outer bark exfoliated — the brown and gray outer layers peeling away in patches to reveal the inner bark beneath, the inner bark smooth and pale, cream and green and white, the patches of exposed inner bark creating a mottled, camouflage pattern on the trunk and the branches, the tree looking painted, the surface a patchwork of colors, the bark shedding itself the way a snake shed its skin, the tree continuously revealing its newer self beneath the older surface.

Judge Keane had called because the lean was getting worse. The tree was leaning further over the river each year and the roots on the uphill side were lifting, the soil heaving slightly at the base of the trunk on the high side, the root plate beginning to rotate, the tree's anchorage weakening as the crown weight pulled it toward the water. He did not want the tree removed. He wanted the crown reduced — the weight on the river side taken back, the lean addressed through pruning, the tree lightened on the heavy side so that the mechanical stress on the roots was reduced and the lean stabilized.

Crown reduction on a tree leaning over a river was not a job Wren could do with her usual setup. The branches that needed reduction were over the water. She could not rig them to the ground because the ground was the river. She could not drop them because they would land in the river and float downstream and create a hazard at the covered bridge a quarter mile below. She needed a crane to hold the branches while she cut them, and she needed a boat to collect the brush that would inevitably fall into the water despite the crane, and she needed a plan that accounted for the lean and the roots and the river and the branches and the weight and the physics of a fifty-four-inch tree that was slowly falling into the Housatonic.

She spent three days planning. She walked the site with the measuring tape and the clinometer. She waded into the river in chest waders and looked up at the crown from below, from the perspective of the water, the branches a ceiling of green and white above her, the sycamore leaves — large, palmate, the biggest leaves of any native tree — casting a shade that turned the river dark beneath the crown. She could see the lean from the water. The trunk was a column tilted over her, the crown a mass of branches extending toward the far bank, the whole tree a cantilever with the root plate as the fulcrum.

She brought Tomas for the job. And Dale. And Pete Kovacs with the crane. And a man named Gus who owned a flat-bottomed jon boat and worked part-time for the highway department and was willing to spend a day on the river collecting brush for a hundred and fifty dollars and the promise that it would be interesting.

They set up on a Thursday in May. The crane on the road above the bank, the boom extending over the tree, the reach at maximum for the sections on the far side of the crown. The jon boat in the water below, Gus at the tiller, the boat anchored to the bank with a line that could be released if a large branch came down near the boat, Gus understanding that his job was to collect brush and to get out of the way if something large fell toward the water.

Wren climbed. The sycamore bark was different from any bark she had climbed on — the smooth patches slippery, the rough patches brittle, the bark unreliable as a handhold, the surface changing texture every few feet as she moved from rough to smooth and back. She used the climbing rope and the flipline exclusively, never trusting the bark, never loading a bark surface without a rope backup, the ascent slower than it would have been on an oak or a maple, the bark's unreliability adding a layer of caution to every movement.

She reached the crown and stood on a scaffold branch forty feet above the river. The view was spectacular — the Housatonic running below her, the water dark and green, the current visible as lines on the surface, the current pulling downstream, the covered bridge visible around the bend, the red paint of the bridge bright against the green of the trees on both banks. The hills rose on both sides of the river, the forest thick, the May canopy full, the world green in every direction, and Wren was standing in the largest tree in the valley, the sycamore's crown the highest point on the riverbank, the tree the anchor of the landscape, the thing that the eye went to first when approaching from either direction, the white bark and the enormous crown a landmark, a beacon, a tree that people knew.

Tomas was in the tree with her. She had put him in the crown on the uphill side — the side away from the river, the side where the branches were over solid ground, the side where a mistake would mean a branch landing on the lawn rather than in the river. He was sixty feet up, working the upper canopy, removing the dead wood and the small branches that did not need the crane, the branches that could be dropped to the ground without rigging.

She worked the river side. Each branch she cut was held by the crane — Pete's cable attached to the branch by a choker sling, the cable taut before the cut, the crane taking the weight before the saw separated the wood, the branch transferring from the tree to the crane in a controlled handoff, the branch then swung away from the river and set on the bank, where Dale broke it down with the chainsaw and fed it to the chipper.

The work was slow. Each branch required three operations — the rigging of the crane cable, the cutting, the swinging to the bank — and each operation required coordination between Wren in the tree, Pete in the crane cab, and Dale on the ground. The radio traffic was constant — Wren calling the cut, Pete acknowledging, Dale confirming the landing zone clear, the three of them speaking in the clipped, specific language of a multi-person operation where the margins were small and the consequences of miscommunication were large.

She reduced the river-side crown by thirty percent. Each branch she removed lightened the canopy on the heavy side, the weight reduction measurable in the response of the trunk — after the fifth branch came off, the trunk shifted slightly, the lean decreasing by a fraction of a degree, the root plate settling, the heaved soil on the uphill side relaxing, the tree responding to the lightened load the way a person responded to setting down a heavy bag, the body straightening, the balance improving.

At noon they broke. Wren and Tomas descended and sat on the bank and ate sandwiches and drank water and watched the river. Gus was in the boat below, collecting the small branches and leaves that had fallen into the water despite the crane, the brush floating downstream in the current, Gus motoring after it with the boat, scooping it out with a net, the brush piling up in the bow of the jon boat like a floating garden.

"Can I ask you something?" Tomas said.

"Yes."

"Why do you do this?"

Wren looked at him. The question was not the question it appeared to be. Tomas was not asking why she was an arborist. He knew why she was an arborist — she was good at it, she had trained for it, the work suited her body and her mind and her temperament. The question was deeper than the profession. The question was about the work inside the work, the thing that made a person get up at five-thirty and drive to a tree and climb it and cut it and come down and drive to the next tree and climb it and cut it, the daily repetition, the physical difficulty, the danger, the low pay relative to the skill required, the isolation of a trade that most people did not understand and could not see and did not value until a tree fell on their house.

"My father was a logger," Wren said. "He cut trees in Oregon. Old-growth Douglas fir. He died when I was twelve. A branch fell on him — a widow-maker, a dead branch in the canopy that came loose when the tree he was cutting began to fall. The branch hit him. He died."

She had not told Tomas this before. She had not told him anything about Glenn. She had not told him about Oregon or the box or the axe or the stump or any of it. The information was personal and Wren did not share personal information at work because the work was the boundary and the boundary was the contract and the contract was what made the relationship functional — employer and employee, teacher and student, the personal kept separate, the professional sufficient.

But Tomas had asked why, and the why was personal, and answering the question honestly required crossing the boundary, and Wren had decided at some point during the morning — while she was standing on a branch forty feet above the Housatonic and looking at the river and thinking about the tree and the water and the work — that the boundary could be crossed, that the crossing was part of what she owed Tomas, that a teacher who withheld the why was a teacher who taught the how without the meaning, and the meaning was what made the how worth doing.

"I do this because the trees are the record," she said. "The rings are the history. Every tree I assess, I read the history. Every tree I remove, I end the history. And the ending is necessary sometimes — the tree is dying, the tree is dangerous, the tree has to come down. But the history matters. The history is the thing that makes the tree more than wood. The history is the thing that makes the cutting more than cutting."

She paused. She ate her sandwich. The river ran below them, the water steady, the current constant, the sound of the water over the rocks the same sound the sycamore had been hearing for two hundred years, the sound that would continue whether the sycamore stood or fell, the river indifferent to the tree, the tree dependent on the river, the asymmetry of the relationship a fact of ecology, the tree needing the water and the water not needing the tree.

"My father read the rings," she said. "I didn't know that until I went to Oregon last year. I went to the place where he worked and I found his falling partner and his falling partner told me that Glenn — my father — Glenn would kneel at the stumps and count the rings. He would finish cutting a three-hundred-year-old Douglas fir and he would kneel at the stump and count the rings and he would say the number out loud. Three hundred and twelve. Two hundred and eighty-seven. Four hundred and six. He said the number like it was a name. Like the number was the tree's name, the only name the tree had, the name you could only learn after the tree was down."

Tomas was quiet. He held his sandwich and looked at the river and did not eat and did not speak, the silence the appropriate response, the silence of a person receiving information that required absorption rather than reply, the information settling into the body the way water settled into soil, percolating downward through the layers, reaching the level where it would be stored.

"I do this because someone has to read the trees," Wren said. "Someone has to know the history. Someone has to count the rings. Not for the tree — the tree doesn't care. The tree adds a ring because the tree adds a ring, because that's what cambium does, that's what xylem does, the growth is automatic, the record is involuntary. The tree doesn't know it's keeping a record. The tree doesn't know there's a record to keep. The reading is our part. The meaning is our part. The tree provides the data and we provide the meaning. That's the job. Not the climbing. Not the cutting. Not the rigging. Those are the methods. The job is the reading."

She finished her sandwich. She drank her water. She stood up and looked at the sycamore, the trunk leaning over the river, the crown reduced on the river side, the tree lighter, the balance better, the lean stabilized, the tree corrected by the pruning, the tree going to stand longer because she had read it and understood what it needed and had given it what it needed, which was less weight, less lean, more balance, the prescription as specific as a medical treatment, the pruning as precise as surgery, the tree the patient, the arborist the surgeon, the tree surviving the operation and emerging improved.

"Why do you do this?" she said to Tomas.

He thought about it. He took the question seriously, the way he took every question seriously, the deliberation visible in his face, the consideration genuine, the answer not pre-formed but being formed in the moment of asking.

"The trees are the only thing I've found that's bigger than me," he said. "Not physically — I mean bigger than my life. I grew up in Waterbury. The streets, the buildings, the concrete. Everything was made by people and everything was the same size as people. The ceilings were eight feet. The doorways were six foot eight. The cars were five feet tall. Everything was scaled to humans. Then I went to the extension service and I went into the woods and I stood under a tree that was a hundred feet tall and the tree didn't care that I was there and the tree didn't know I was there and the tree was older than the city and the tree was going to be there after the city and the scale — the difference in scale between me and the tree — the difference was the first thing in my life that felt real."

He stopped. He looked at the sycamore. He looked at it the way Wren looked at it — with the attention of a person who saw the tree not as an object but as an organism, not as a thing in the landscape but as the landscape itself, the tree the reason the bank held and the shade existed and the river ran cool beneath the canopy, the tree the organizing principle of this stretch of the Housatonic, the tree the thing without which the place would be a different place.

"The scale felt real," he said again. "Everything before that felt — constructed. Built to fit. The trees don't fit. The trees don't care about fitting. The trees just grow. And the growing is the thing. The growing is what's real."

Wren looked at Tomas. He was twenty-seven years old and he had found the thing that most people spent their lives looking for, the thing that was larger than themselves, the thing that gave the daily work its weight, its meaning, its reason. He had found it in trees. She had found it in trees. Glenn had found it in trees. The finding was the same even though the work was different — Tomas climbing, Wren climbing, Glenn cutting from the ground — the method different, the finding the same, the thing found the same thing: the scale, the age, the indifference, the enormity of an organism that had been growing since before you were born and would be growing after you were dead, the tree's timeline making your timeline visible, your timeline made small by the comparison, the smallness not a diminishment but a relief, the relief of being small in a world that was large, the relief of mattering less than a tree.

They went back up. Wren finished the river-side reduction. Tomas finished the upper canopy work. The sycamore emerged from the pruning lighter, more open, the crown thinned, the dead wood gone, the crossing branches removed, the live crown reduced on the river side by thirty percent, the lean stabilized, the root plate no longer lifting, the tree balanced, the tree corrected, the tree going to stand on this bank for another fifty or a hundred years, the crown shading the river, the bark shedding its outer layers to reveal the white beneath, the tree doing what sycamores did, which was to grow and shed and grow and shed, the cycle of bark the visible expression of the tree's continuous renewal, the old surface falling away, the new surface emerging, the tree always becoming, the tree never finished.

They packed up at four. The crane left. Gus took the boat downstream to the public launch. Dale drove the chipper to the shop. Wren and Tomas stood on the bank and looked at the tree one more time.

The sycamore stood against the afternoon sky. The bark caught the light — the white patches luminous, the dark patches receding, the trunk a column of light and shadow, the tree the most visible thing on the riverbank, the tree the thing the eye went to, the tree the reason a person standing on this bank at this hour on this day in May would feel the particular sensation of being in a place that was defined by one tree, one organism, one life that had been here before the bridge and the road and the judge's house and that would be here after, the tree the persistence, the tree the continuity, the tree the thing that stayed.

They drove home. The hills were green. The canopy was closed. The world was the green world of May in Connecticut, the world that Wren had chosen, the world she had come to from Oregon and the world she had returned to from Oregon and the world she would stay in, the trees of this landscape her trees now, the oaks and the maples and the beeches and the hemlocks and the sycamores and the birches, the community of species that she read and maintained and removed and preserved, the community that was her community, the trees that were her trees, the work that was her work, the reading that was her reading, the record that she kept alongside the records the trees kept, her notebook and her cores and her reports alongside the rings and the bark and the wood, the human record and the arboreal record running parallel, each recording the same years, each telling a different version of the same story, the story of what happened in this place in this time, the story told by the trees in rings and by the arborist in words, both versions incomplete, both versions true.