The Ash on East Litchfield Road

The ash was already dead. It had been dead for two years, standing in the front yard of a farmhouse on East Litchfield Road with its bark falling off in sheets and its crown a lattice of bare branches and its sapwood riddled with the serpentine galleries of the emerald ash borer, the beetle that had arrived in Michigan in 2002 in a shipping crate from China and had spread to thirty-five states in twenty-four years and had killed hundreds of millions of ash trees and was going to kill all of them, every ash tree in North America, every white ash and green ash and black ash and blue ash, the entire genus Fraxinus on the continent, the way chestnut blight had killed the American chestnut and Dutch elm disease was killing the American elm and woolly adelgid was killing the eastern hemlock, the catalog of loss so long now that Wren sometimes thought of the eastern forest as a patient losing organs one at a time, each species a vital system failing, the body still functioning but diminished, each loss making the next loss more likely because the ecosystem was simpler, less redundant, more fragile.

The homeowner was a woman named Carol Prescott, seventy-one, who had lived in the farmhouse for forty years and had watched the ash die the way you watch anything die when you see it every day — slowly, incrementally, each change small enough to deny until the cumulative change was undeniable. The bark falling off. The woodpecker holes — the sapsuckers and downies and pileateds hammering the bark to get at the beetle larvae beneath, the birds a symptom of the infestation, their presence a diagnosis as reliable as any lab test. The crown going bare. The epicormic sprouts — the desperate shoots of new growth that emerged from the trunk when the crown died, the tree's last attempt to photosynthesize, to keep the engine running, adventitious buds breaking through the bark at random points along the trunk like the arms of a drowning person reaching out of the water.

The epicormic sprouts had died too. They had pushed out one summer, leafed briefly, and then died when the borer larvae girdled the sapwood beneath them, cutting off the water supply to the new shoots the way they had cut off the water supply to the crown. The tree had tried and the tree had failed and now the tree stood dead and dry and the bark was falling and the wood was cracking and the branches were dropping and Carol Prescott had called because a branch had landed on her car and another had landed on the path to the barn and it was only a matter of time before one landed on the house or on her or on one of the grandchildren who came to visit on weekends.

Dead trees were more dangerous to remove than live ones. This was counterintuitive to most people, who assumed that a dead tree was lighter, weaker, easier to take down. In fact a dead tree was unpredictable. The wood dried unevenly — the sapwood dried first and cracked and the heartwood held moisture longer and the differential created internal stresses that could cause the wood to shatter under the saw rather than cut cleanly. The bark was loose, which meant that climbing spurs — the steel spikes strapped to the climber's boots that dug into the wood for traction — could punch through the bark without reaching solid wood, and the climber's foot would slip, and a slip at sixty feet was a fall, and a fall at sixty feet was a death. The branches were brittle and could break under a climber's weight without warning, without the slow cracking that a live branch gave you, the sound that said move now. Dead branches broke silently and suddenly, like glass.

Wren did not let Tomás climb dead trees. Not yet. He was not ready. The instincts that kept a climber alive in a dead tree — the constant testing of every handhold, every foothold, the weight shifting incrementally, the awareness of sound and feel that told you whether the wood beneath you was solid or punky or ready to let go — these instincts took years to develop, and Tomás had weeks.

"You're on the ground today," she said. "Ropes and chipper with Dale. Watch how I move in the crown. Watch where I put my weight."

Tomás nodded. He did not argue. He had learned in three weeks that Wren's decisions about who climbed and who didn't were not negotiable, the way gravity was not negotiable, the way the tensile strength of a rope was not negotiable. These were facts, not opinions, and he had the intelligence to recognize the difference.

She geared up. The harness, the climbing line, the lanyard, the flipline for the trunk work. Her saw — the Stihl MS 261, freshly sharpened, the chain tensioned, the bar oiled, the fuel mix fresh. She carried the saw on a lanyard attached to her harness, the saw hanging at her hip, the weight familiar, twelve pounds that she no longer felt because her body had adapted to the asymmetry the way a tree adapted to a prevailing wind, the muscles on one side stronger than the other, the skeleton slightly torqued, the body shaped by the tool the way the tool was shaped by the hand.

She set her line. The throw was difficult — the crown was bare and the branch unions were suspect and she needed to find a crotch that would hold her weight, that the rope would not pull through, that was attached to wood solid enough to bear a dynamic load if she fell. She studied the crown from the ground, reading the architecture, looking for the branches that were still structurally connected to the trunk — the ones where the branch collar was intact, where the union had not decayed, where the wood was still sound even if the bark was gone. She found one — a scaffold branch on the north side, maybe fourteen inches in diameter, the union tight, the collar visible, the branch extending out from the trunk at an angle that would hold the rope in the crotch.

She threw. The bag went up, arced over the branch, dropped down the other side. She pulled the climbing rope through. She set her friction hitch. She tested the line with her full weight, bouncing on it, loading it dynamically, feeling for any movement in the branch, any give, any sound. The branch held. The union held. She went up.

The tree felt wrong immediately. She could feel it in the vibration — or rather in the absence of vibration. A live tree vibrated. A live tree was in constant motion, the sap flowing, the cells transporting water and sugars, the leaves photosynthesizing, the roots absorbing, the whole organism a system of flows and pressures and exchanges that a climber could feel in the trunk the way a doctor could feel a pulse in a wrist. This tree had no pulse. The wood was still. The trunk was a column of dead fiber, a structure without a system, a building without an occupant.

She climbed carefully, testing each hold, tapping the trunk with the butt of her saw handle and listening for the sound — a solid thunk meant good wood, a hollow thunk meant decay, a soft thud meant punk. The lower trunk sounded solid. At thirty feet, the sound changed. The thunk became hollower. She was entering the zone where the decay had set in, the upper trunk where the borers had been most active and the sapwood had died first and the fungi had colonized the dead wood and begun breaking it down.

She set a secondary tie-in — a second line attached to the trunk above her position using a flipline, a short line that went around the trunk and clipped back to her harness, so that she was attached to the tree at two points, the climbing line above and the flipline around the trunk. If the branch holding her climbing line failed, the flipline would catch her. If the flipline failed — if the trunk broke where the flipline was wrapped — the climbing line would catch her. Redundancy. Always redundancy. Two points of attachment. Two systems. Two chances.

She reached the first major scaffold branch and stood on it, her weight on the branch, her flipline around the trunk above, her climbing line through the crotch she had set from the ground. She was forty feet up. The ground was visible below, Dale and Tomás and the chipper and the truck small and angular against the green of the grass. Carol Prescott was standing on her porch, watching.

The branch Wren stood on was dead and dry and felt like standing on a steel beam — rigid, unyielding, no give. A live branch flexed under your weight. It bent slightly, like a diving board, the wood elastic, the fibers absorbing the load. A dead branch did not flex. It held until it didn't, and when it didn't, it shattered.

She began cutting. The small stuff first — the dead twigs and small branches in the upper crown, the ones she could reach from her position without climbing higher. She cut them with the handsaw — a Silky folding saw, faster than the chainsaw for small wood, quieter, more controlled. The dead twigs fell straight down through the open crown, rattling through the bare branches, landing on the ground with small dry sounds. She worked quickly, clearing the crown from the top down, reducing the tree to its main scaffold branches.

Then the chainsaw. She pulled the starter cord and the saw came to life, the familiar sound, the two-stroke engine running at idle, the chain still, waiting. She revved it, checking the response, listening to the engine. It ran clean. She set the saw on the first scaffold branch — a ten-inch branch extending over the driveway — and made the undercut, the shallow kerf on the bottom to prevent bark tear. On a dead tree there was no bark to tear, but the habit was in her muscles and she made the cut anyway because habits kept you alive and breaking habits got you killed.

She made the top cut. The branch let go with a crack — not the wet, fibrous tearing of a live branch but the dry, sharp snap of dead wood, a sound like a gunshot. The branch fell free and swung on the lowering line and Dale controlled the descent and the branch landed on the grass and Tomás dragged it to the chipper.

She moved to the next branch. And the next. The tree came down in pieces — each scaffold branch removed, lowered, chipped, the trunk growing more spare with each cut, the tree losing its shape, becoming a pole, a bare vertical line against the sky.

At fifty feet, she stopped. She was at the upper trunk, the section where the sound had gone hollow, and she needed to assess before cutting. She tapped the trunk. Hollow. She tapped lower. Less hollow. She tapped higher. Hollow, with a soft resonance that meant the interior was punky, the heartwood decayed, the structural wood compromised. The trunk above her was a cylinder of wood with a rotten core, and cutting into it would be unpredictable — the saw could bind as the trunk compressed under its own weight, or the trunk could split vertically instead of falling where she directed it, or the top could snap off before she finished the cut and fall in a direction she had not planned.

She looked down. "Dale. I'm going to take the top in sections. The upper trunk is hollow. I need the bull rope for the first section — I want to pull it away from the house."

Dale rigged the bull rope — a heavy line attached to the section to be cut, run through a redirect block on an adjacent tree, the line pulled by the truck. The bull rope would give the falling section a directional pull, overriding the lean, directing the fall away from the house and into the open yard.

Wren made the cut. She notched the trunk first — the face cut, the open mouth that determined the direction of fall, the hinge that controlled the rotation. The notch faced the yard, away from the house. She moved to the back of the trunk and began the back cut, the saw entering the wood from the opposite side, cutting toward the hinge. The wood was soft. The saw went through it easily, too easily, the chain eating the decayed heartwood without resistance, sawdust coming out brown and fibrous rather than the white or pale yellow of sound wood. The trunk was rotten. The hinge would be weak.

She cut slowly, watching the kerf, feeling for any shift in the trunk above her, any lean, any movement. The bull rope was taut — Dale had the truck idling forward, keeping tension on the line. The trunk shifted. She felt it through her feet on the branch she stood on, through her flipline around the trunk — a slight movement, a settling, the cut opening a fraction of an inch on the back side. The hinge was starting to work. The top was beginning to lean toward the notch, toward the yard.

She pulled the saw out and stepped back, keeping her flipline tight, her weight on the branch, her body on the house side of the trunk so that the falling section would go away from her. The top leaned. The hinge held for a moment — one second, two — and then the decayed wood in the hinge let go and the top section separated from the trunk not in a controlled rotation but in a fracture, the rotten heartwood crumbling, the section dropping straight down six inches before the bull rope caught it and swung it outward, and the section — eight feet of dead trunk — arced away from the house and landed in the yard with a thud that shook the ground.

Wren exhaled. The cut had not gone as planned. The hinge had failed because the heartwood was more decayed than she had estimated, and the failure had turned a controlled cut into a partial freefall caught by the bull rope. The bull rope had done its job. The section had gone where it was supposed to go. But the margin had been thinner than she liked, and the feeling in her chest — the tightness, the surge of cortisol, the awareness of what could have happened if the bull rope had not been rigged, if the section had dropped straight down onto the branch she was standing on, if the branch had broken — was the feeling that kept her alive, the fear that was not weakness but was wisdom, the body's way of saying pay attention, the body's way of reminding her that she was sixty feet in the air in a dead tree with a chainsaw and gravity was always working and the wood could not be trusted.

She looked down. Tomás was standing at the base of the tree, looking up. His face was hard to read from this height but his body language was legible — he was still, tense, his hands at his sides, his head tilted back. He had seen the hinge failure. He had seen the section drop. He had seen the gap between the plan and what happened.

"You okay up there?" Dale called.

"I'm fine. Hinge was punky. Good thing we had the bull rope."

"Yeah."

She continued down the trunk, cutting sections, each one rigged, each one controlled. The lower trunk was more sound — the heartwood intact, the hinge cuts clean, the sections falling where she directed them. By noon the trunk was a twelve-foot stump and Wren was on the ground and the yard was full of logs and brush and sawdust and the tree was gone.

They broke for lunch. Wren sat on the tailgate of the truck and ate her sandwich and drank water and did not talk. Dale sat in the cab and listened to the radio. Tomás sat on the ground with his back against the trailer wheel and ate and said nothing for fifteen minutes and then said, "That section at the top."

"Yeah," Wren said.

"The hinge failed."

"The heartwood was more decayed than I expected. The sound test told me it was hollow but I underestimated how far the decay extended into the hinge wood. I should have made a shallower notch and a thinner hinge. Or I should have rigged it as a top and pulled it off with the bull rope instead of cutting it as a section."

"But the bull rope caught it."

"That's why we rig the bull rope. The bull rope is for when the plan doesn't work. The plan is for when the tree cooperates. The tree doesn't always cooperate."

"How do you know when to trust the plan and when to add the backup?"

"You don't know. You always add the backup. Every cut, every section, every tree. You plan for the cut to go right and you rig for the cut to go wrong. If the cut goes right, the rigging is unnecessary. If the cut goes wrong, the rigging saves you. The cost of unnecessary rigging is time. The cost of not rigging is a trip to the hospital or the morgue."

Tomás was quiet. He was processing this. Wren could see the processing in his face — the seriousness, the recalibration, the moment when a person who has been learning a skill intellectually begins to learn it viscerally, in the body, in the autonomic nervous system, the system that governs fear and adrenaline and the decision to fight or flee, the system that a tree climber must train to work for them rather than against them, to produce alertness rather than panic, awareness rather than paralysis.

"My father died from a widow-maker," Wren said. "A dead branch that fell during a cut. He didn't see it. He didn't rig for it. He didn't have a backup for it because in timber falling there is no backup for a widow-maker — you look up and you see it or you don't, and if you don't, and it falls, and it hits you, that's it."

She did not know why she was telling Tomás this. She had told him once before, in the truck, and he had said he was sorry and she had deflected. Now she was telling him again, with more, with the detail, and the telling was not for him but for her, or it was for both of them, or it was for the work, for the understanding that the work required — the understanding that the work could kill you, had killed people, had killed her father, and the only defense was preparation and redundancy and the fear that kept you checking, always checking, looking up, looking around, testing the wood, rigging the ropes, adding the backup.

"I rig everything," she said. "Everything. Even when I'm sure the cut will go clean. Even when the wood is sound and the lean is right and the hinge is perfect. I rig it because Glenn didn't rig it, because Glenn couldn't rig it, because timber falling doesn't work that way, because when you're cutting a two-hundred-foot tree at the stump and it's falling through the air and the canopy is a hundred and fifty feet above you, you can't rig for the dead branch that shakes loose and falls straight down. You can only look up. And looking up is not enough."

Carol Prescott came out of the house with a plate of cookies and set them on the tailgate and went back inside without saying anything, and Wren ate a cookie and Dale ate two cookies and Tomás ate three cookies and they went back to work.

They chipped the brush and loaded the logs and ground the stump. The stump was thirty-two inches across and the grinder chewed through it in twenty minutes, the carbide teeth of the grinding wheel shredding the wood and the roots to a depth of eight inches below grade, the sawdust spraying in an arc, the stump disappearing into the ground the way the tree had disappeared into the chipper, the solid becoming fragmented, the structure becoming material, the tree becoming mulch.

Before she ground it, Wren looked at the stump. The rings were there — visible on the cut face, counting inward from the bark to the pith. She did not count them. She could see that the tree was perhaps seventy years old, planted or germinated when Carol Prescott was an infant, the tree and the woman growing up together in the same place, the tree outliving the woman's parents and her siblings and her first husband and now dying before her, killed not by time or weather or disease but by a beetle from China that had arrived in a shipping crate in Detroit and had spread across the continent by flying and by hitchhiking on firewood and by the slow relentless expansion of a population that had no natural predators in this hemisphere.

The emerald ash borer was a beautiful insect. Wren had seen them — small, metallic green, iridescent, the size of a grain of rice. The larvae were what killed the trees — white, segmented, blind, boring through the sapwood in S-shaped galleries that cut through the vascular tissue and girdled the tree from the inside, the tree slowly strangled by an organism it could not see and could not fight and had never encountered in its evolutionary history. The larvae pupated in the sapwood and emerged as adults through D-shaped exit holes in the bark, and the adults flew to other ash trees and laid eggs and the cycle continued, and within five years of the first infestation every ash tree within a ten-mile radius was dead or dying.

There were eight billion ash trees in North America. The emerald ash borer was going to kill them all.

Wren drove home in the late afternoon. Tomás was quiet in the passenger seat. Dale had gone in his own truck, the chipper rattling behind him. The logs from the ash were in the bed of Wren's truck — she would split them for firewood, because ash split cleanly and burned well and the wood was not wasted, the tree becoming heat for the winter, the energy stored in the rings released in the fire, the photosynthesis of seventy years of summers converted to warmth on a January night.

"Wren," Tomás said.

"Yeah."

"When you were up there. When the hinge failed. What did you feel?"

She thought about this. She could give him the professional answer — alert, focused, executing the contingency, responding to the deviation from the plan. That was true. But it was not complete.

"I felt scared," she said. "For about half a second. Then the training takes over and you do what you've practiced and the fear becomes fuel instead of paralysis. But the half second is real. It's always real. If you stop feeling it, you're not paying attention, and if you're not paying attention, you're going to get hurt."

"Does it get easier?"

"The fear doesn't get easier. The response gets more automatic. You train your body to act through the fear rather than being stopped by it. But the fear is the same at your hundredth tree as it is at your first. The fear is correct. The fear is the part of you that knows where you are and what can happen. You want that part. You need that part."

Tomás looked out the window. The hills were passing, the farms, the stone walls, the bare trees beginning to bud. "I don't know if I can do what you did today," he said. "Climb a dead tree. Trust the wood when you know it's rotten."

"You don't trust the wood. That's the point. You trust the rigging. You trust the ropes. You trust the system you've built around yourself that catches you when the wood fails. The wood is the variable. The system is the constant. Build the system right and the variable doesn't matter."

She dropped him at his car. She went home. She showered and sat at the kitchen table with a beer and the photograph of her father, the Polaroid from the box, Glenn grinning next to the stump. She looked at the stump in the photograph. Five feet across, maybe six. Douglas fir. Three hundred years of growth, maybe more. The rings were visible in the photograph, concentric circles in the pale wood, the record of centuries compressed into a disc the size of a dining table.

Her father had cut that tree. He had stood at the base and made the undercut and the back cut and the tree had fallen and the ground had shaken and the stump had been there, the record exposed, and her father had grinned and someone had taken a Polaroid and the Polaroid had gone into a box and the box had gone into a basement and twenty-two years later Wren was sitting at a kitchen table in Connecticut looking at a stump in Oregon that she had never seen.

She turned the photograph over. On the back, in the same handwriting as the box label — the round, careful, feminine hand — was written: Glenn and Ray, Unit 12, Opal Creek drainage, September 2003.

September 2003. One year before he died. One year before the widow-maker in the crown of a Douglas fir — maybe this tree, maybe a tree nearby, maybe a tree in the same drainage — fell and hit him and ended the record.

Opal Creek. She had never heard the name. She opened her laptop and searched. Opal Creek was in the Opal Creek Wilderness, in the Cascade Range, in the Santiam Canyon, east of Salem, Oregon. There was an Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center. There was a trail. There was a history — the Opal Creek drainage had been the site of a decades-long battle between environmentalists and the timber industry, the environmentalists trying to save the old-growth forest and the timber industry trying to cut it, and the environmentalists had eventually won and the area had been designated wilderness in 1996, protected from logging.

But the photograph was from 2002. Glenn had been cutting in the Opal Creek drainage in 2002, six years after the wilderness designation. Which meant he had been cutting on private land adjacent to the wilderness, or on land that was not included in the designation, or the photograph was mislabeled, or the designation did not cover the entire drainage. Wren did not know. She did not know the geography. She did not know the boundaries. She knew only that her father had stood next to a stump in a place called Opal Creek and grinned and someone had taken a picture and the picture was now on her kitchen table in Connecticut, a piece of the past that had traveled three thousand miles and twenty-two years to reach her.

She looked at the photograph for a long time. She looked at her father's face and at the stump and at the cut behind them, the hillside stripped of trees, the stumps standing like markers. She thought about going there. She had never been to Oregon. She had never seen the stumps. She had removed six hundred trees in Connecticut and she had never seen the place where her father had removed thousands.

She put the photograph in the drawer with the ring and the increment cores and closed the drawer.

She went to bed. The wind was in the trees outside, the oak creaking, the branches of the sugar maple at the edge of the yard clicking. She lay in the dark and listened to the trees, the sounds they made, the language of wood under stress, the language she had learned to speak the way her mother had learned to speak the language of books and shelving and the Dewey Decimal System, fluently, automatically, without thinking, the sounds of the trees as familiar as the sounds of her own breathing.

She slept.