The Summer Canopy

Summer came to Litchfield County the way it always came — not gradually but in a rush, the canopy closing in the second week of May, the leaves expanding from their folded newborn state to their full size in a matter of days, the light on the ground changing from bright to dappled to dim as the canopy thickened and the trees took back the sky. By June the world was green. The hills were green. The valleys were green. The roads ran through tunnels of green, the sugar maples and oaks and beeches and ashes arching over the pavement, the canopy meeting in the center, the light underneath filtered and cool, and driving through the countryside was like driving through a cathedral whose ceiling was made of leaves.

Wren worked. Summer was the busy season — the storms came in June and July, the thunderstorms that built over the hills in the afternoon heat and dropped hail and wind and rain and lightning, and the lightning struck trees and the wind broke branches and the hail shredded leaves, and in the morning Wren's phone would ring and the calls would come, one after another, the homeowners with a branch on their roof, a tree on their driveway, a trunk split by lightning, the white stripe of a lightning scar spiraling down the bark where the electrical charge had followed the sap from crown to ground, the sap boiling in the cambium, the steam exploding the bark off the trunk in strips.

She and Dale and Tomás worked six days a week from May through August. They started at six-thirty, when the air was still cool and the dew was still on the grass and the trees were still, and they worked until four or five, when the heat of the day had peaked and the thunderheads were building in the west and the work became dangerous — not because of the heat but because of the storms, the lightning that could strike a tree while a climber was in it, the wind that could snap a branch while a climber was standing on it, the weather the one variable that could not be managed, could not be rigged for, could only be avoided.

Tomás was climbing now. Not the difficult trees — not the dead ones, not the ones over houses, not the ones near power lines — but the straightforward removals and the pruning work, the trees where the risk was manageable and the consequences of a mistake were recoverable. He had developed the fluid motion that separated a competent climber from a beginner, the body moving through the tree with an economy of effort that came from understanding the tree's structure, knowing where to put a hand and a foot, knowing which branches would hold and which would not, the knowledge residing not in the mind but in the body, in the hands that tested each hold before loading it, in the feet that found the branch unions where the wood was strongest, in the hips that stayed close to the trunk where the stability was greatest.

Wren watched him from the ground on these jobs, the way Bill Fenwick had watched her, the way her father had probably been watched by someone when he was learning to fall timber — the older worker standing back, saying little, letting the younger worker develop the instincts that could not be taught but could be cultivated, the way a gardener cultivated a plant not by forcing it but by creating the conditions in which it could grow.

She watched Tomás climb a Norway maple on West Street in Litchfield — a removal, the tree planted too close to a house thirty years ago and now pressing against the siding, the roots in the foundation, the branches on the roof. The Norway maple was an invasive — a European species planted widely in the 1960s and 1970s as a shade tree, the trees now producing seeds that flooded the forests and outcompeted the native sugar maples, another introduced species reshaping the landscape. Wren did not feel bad about removing Norway maples. She did not feel bad about removing any tree that needed to come down, but she felt less with the invasives, the trees that should not have been planted, the trees whose presence was itself a wound on the landscape.

Tomás topped the maple in four hours. He was efficient. He was safe. He checked his rigging before every cut. He called down to Dale before every drop. He followed the protocol that Wren had taught him, the protocol that was not a set of rules but a habit of mind, the habit of thinking about what could go wrong before making the cut that could make it go wrong.

When he came down, his face was flushed and his arms were shaking from the effort and he was smiling, and the smile was not the grin of her father in the Polaroid — it was quieter, more private, the satisfaction of a person who had done a difficult thing well and knew it and did not need anyone to tell him.

"Good," Wren said.

The word was enough.

In the evenings, Wren sat at the kitchen table and did the paperwork that running a two-person business required — invoices, estimates, insurance claims, quarterly taxes, equipment maintenance logs, the Arborjet supplies for the Cavendish hemlocks, the chain orders from Bailey's, the rope orders from Sherrill Tree. She had started the business six years ago with her savings and a used truck and a used chipper and the tools she had accumulated during her years with Bill Fenwick, and the business had grown the way a tree grew — slowly, from the roots up, the reputation spreading through the county by word of mouth, homeowner to homeowner, the network of referrals that was the only advertising a good arborist needed.

She was not making a lot of money. She was making enough. She paid Dale well because Dale was irreplaceable and because she had seen what happened to tree companies that underpaid their ground men — the good ones left and the bad ones stayed and the bad ones made mistakes and the mistakes cost more than the raise would have. She was paying Tomás a training wage that would increase as his skills increased. She paid her insurance, which was enormous — the liability coverage for a tree service was the highest of any trade because the work was the most dangerous, the combination of height and chainsaws and falling wood creating a risk profile that made underwriters nervous.

She paid her mortgage — the farmhouse in Morris, which she had bought two years ago when the landlord decided to sell. The purchase had stretched her finances to the point of anxiety, but the house was hers now, the first thing she had owned that could not be driven or carried, the first thing rooted to a place. And the oak in the backyard was hers too, or she was the oak's — the relationship between a person and a tree on their property was ambiguous, the legal ownership clear but the existential ownership unclear, because the tree had been there first and would be there last and the person was a tenant in the tree's timeline.

On Wednesday evenings she drove to Litchfield and had dinner with Jesse. The dinners were simple — Jesse cooked now despite her declaration that she was done cooking, producing meals that were efficient and plain, the food of a person who ate for fuel rather than pleasure, chicken and rice, soup and bread, a salad from the garden she maintained behind the house, the lettuce and tomatoes and herbs that were the only things Jesse grew, the only living things Jesse tended besides the books and the library and the memory of a life she did not discuss.

They talked about work. Jesse asked about the trees and Wren told her, and the telling was the closest they came to intimacy, the shared territory of Wren's work being the place where they could meet without encountering the things they did not discuss — Glenn, Oregon, the box in Wren's garage, the ring in Wren's drawer, the photograph of a man grinning next to a stump.

One evening in July, Jesse said, "Tell me about the oak."

Wren looked at her. Jesse was cutting bread, not looking up, the question offered casually, tossed onto the table like a napkin.

"Which oak?"

"The one the old woman won't let them cut down. Phil Hendricks told me about it. He comes to the library."

"The Blackwell oak. White oak, two hundred and fourteen years old. It has oak wilt. The infection is localized. I recommended monitoring instead of immediate removal."

"Can it be saved?"

"I don't know yet. White oaks can compartmentalize oak wilt sometimes. The tree is fighting. I'll re-core in October."

Jesse nodded. She set the bread on the table and sat down. "Two hundred and fourteen years," she said. "That's older than the town."

"Older than the republic."

"What would make someone plant a tree that would outlive them by two centuries?"

Wren thought about this. The question was simple and the answer was not. People planted trees for shade, for fruit, for beauty, for property value, for the children who would sit under them, for the grandchildren who would climb them. But none of these reasons accounted for two hundred years. Two hundred years was beyond shade and fruit and beauty. Two hundred years was an act of faith in a future so distant that the planter could not imagine it, an investment whose return would be collected by people who did not yet exist, an act as irrational as love and as enduring.

"I don't know," Wren said. "Maybe the same thing that makes someone write a book. The hope that something will still be standing after you're gone."

Jesse looked at her with an expression Wren could not read — surprise, or recognition, or the look of a person who has heard their own unspoken thought spoken aloud by someone else.

"Eat your soup," Jesse said.

Wren drove past the Blackwell oak on her way home from these dinners. She slowed each time. She looked. The tree was leafed out fully now, the canopy a dark green mass against the evening sky, the south side thinner than the north but not dramatically, the die-back camouflaged by the density of the surrounding foliage, the tree hiding its wound the way a person hid a limp, the compensation barely visible to someone who was not looking for it.

But Wren was looking for it. She could see the south side. She could see the dead branches in the upper south quadrant, the bare gray wood visible among the green leaves, the deadwood more apparent now than it had been in spring because the live branches around it had leafed out and the contrast between green and gray was sharper. She could see the thinning of the canopy on the south side — the light coming through where it should not come through, the sky visible through gaps in the foliage that did not exist on the north side.

She did not stop. She did not walk onto the property. She had told Margaret she would return in October, and she would return in October, and in the meantime the tree would do what it was doing — fighting or losing, compartmentalizing or failing, the war in the sapwood continuing through the summer while the leaves photosynthesized and the roots absorbed water and the tree carried on the business of being alive, which was the only business a tree had.

August was hot. The heat came in waves — three days of ninety degrees, then two days of relief, then four days of ninety-five, the heat building in the valleys, the humidity thickening, the air dense and still. The trees responded. The maples began dropping leaves in the first week of August — premature leaf drop, a drought response, the trees jettisoning photosynthetic tissue to reduce water loss through transpiration, the leaves falling green to the ground, not the red and orange of autumn but the green of summer, the color of a leaf that had been cut off before its time.

The oaks held. The oaks always held. The oaks were the last to drop in autumn and the last to respond to drought in summer, the deep roots pulling water from soil horizons that the shallow-rooted maples could not reach, the oaks accessing the reserves, the geological water, the water stored in the bedrock and the till, the water that had been in the ground since the last rain that was heavy enough to percolate below the root zone. The oaks were drinking last year's rain. The oaks were drinking the winter snowmelt. The oaks were drinking the past.

Wren thought about the Blackwell oak drinking the past, the roots extending into the soil that had been undisturbed for two centuries, the root system a mirror of the crown — as wide, as complex, as branching — the roots reaching out beneath the hillside the way the branches reached out above it, the tree symmetric around the ground, the surface of the soil the axis of symmetry, the crown and the roots two halves of the same structure, the visible half and the invisible half, the half that people saw and loved and the half that no one saw and no one loved but that kept the whole thing standing.

She wondered if the oak wilt was in the roots. The fungus could spread through root grafts — the underground connections between adjacent trees, roots from one tree fusing with roots from another, creating a shared vascular system that allowed water and nutrients to flow between trees, a mutualism that became a transmission pathway when one tree was infected. If the Blackwell oak's roots were grafted to the roots of the red oaks along the road, the fungus could travel from the white oak to the reds, and the reds would die in a single season, not the slow decline of a white oak but the rapid collapse of a red, the crown browning in weeks, the tree dead before the leaves had time to fall.

She would check for root grafts in October. She would probe the soil along the likely pathways, between the Blackwell oak and the nearest red oaks. She would look for the fused roots, the underground connections, the shared biology that could become shared death.

In September, Tomás climbed a tree that scared him.

It was a red oak on a property in Goshen, a tree that had been hit by lightning in an August storm, the lightning scar running from the crown to the base, a spiral stripe of exposed wood where the bark had been blown off by the steam explosion. The tree was alive but compromised — the lightning had damaged the cambium along the scar, and the structural integrity of the trunk was uncertain. The homeowner wanted it assessed and, if necessary, removed.

Wren assessed it from the ground. The lightning scar was extensive — it ran the full height of the tree, perhaps sixty feet, the exposed wood already drying and checking, the bark on either side of the scar peeling back as the cambium beneath it died. The tree had lost perhaps thirty percent of its bark circumference. It would survive — red oaks could survive significant bark loss if the root system was intact and the remaining cambium could support enough leaf area. But the trunk was weakened along the scar, and the exposed wood would decay, and in five years the trunk would have a soft spot, a zone of reduced structural integrity, and the tree would become a hazard.

She recommended removal. The homeowner agreed. She scheduled it for the following week.

On the day of the removal, she sent Tomás up. The tree was alive, the wood sound on the unscarred sides, the climbing conditions safe except for the scar itself, which he would avoid. She sent him up because he needed to climb trees that scared him, because the fear was where the learning happened, and the learning was what would keep him alive.

He went up slowly. She could see the tension in his body — the shoulders tight, the movements deliberate, each hold tested twice instead of once, the extra caution that was the fear expressing itself as competence. He reached the first scaffold branch and set his redirect and paused and looked down.

"You're fine," Wren called up. "Read the tree. The scar side is the only concern. Stay on the north side. Work from the top down."

He turned back to the tree. He climbed to the top. He began cutting.

The tree came down over five hours. Tomás cut the upper crown — the branches, the secondary scaffolds, the leader. Wren climbed up and took the trunk sections, including the section with the lightning scar, which she cut carefully, watching the wood for any sign of splitting along the scar, any structural failure. The wood held. The cuts were clean. The sections came down on the ropes and Dale lowered them and the tree was reduced from a living organism to a pile of logs and brush in the yard.

Afterward, Tomás sat on the tailgate and drank water and did not say anything for ten minutes. Then he said, "I was scared the whole time."

"I know," Wren said.

"I couldn't stop thinking about the scar. Every time I set my weight on a branch, I thought about the trunk splitting along the scar. I thought about the tree coming apart while I was in it."

"But you kept climbing."

"Yeah."

"And you kept cutting."

"Yeah."

"And every cut was clean and every section went where it was supposed to go and you're sitting on this tailgate drinking water instead of lying in an ambulance."

"Yeah."

"That's the job. The fear doesn't go away. You go anyway. The fear is information. The fear said the scar is dangerous, and the scar was dangerous, and you stayed away from it because the fear told you to. The fear was right. The fear kept you on the north side. The fear kept you alive."

Tomás looked at her. He was twenty-six and she was thirty-four and the eight years between them contained the difference between a person who had climbed one scared tree and a person who had climbed hundreds, and the difference was not that the fear diminished — it did not — but that the response to the fear became reliable, became a tool, became as much a part of the equipment as the harness and the rope and the saw.

"I want to keep doing this," Tomás said.

"I know," Wren said.

"I don't mean the job. I mean this — climbing the hard ones. The ones that scare me. I don't want to be a ground man. I don't want to run the chipper. I want to climb."

Wren looked at him. She saw in his face the thing she had seen in her own face in the mirror when she was twenty-six and had just climbed a tree that scared her and had sat on a tailgate drinking water and feeling the adrenaline drain and the fatigue arrive and the satisfaction settle in, the satisfaction that was deeper than happiness because it came from a place that happiness did not reach, the place where the body and the mind and the work merged into a single thing.

"Then you'll climb," she said.

The summer wound down. The days shortened. The heat broke in the first week of September, the nights cooling, the air drying, the sky turning the deeper blue of autumn. The trees began to change — the maples first, the sugar maples turning orange and red at the tops of the hills where the cold arrived first, the color spreading downhill like a tide, the oaks turning last, their leaves going brown rather than red, the brown of tannin, the chemistry of oak leaves different from the chemistry of maple leaves, the color a byproduct of decomposition rather than a display.

The Blackwell oak held its leaves. Wren drove past in the last week of September and the tree was still green, the oaks always the last to turn, the oaks holding on, the leaves staying green until the first hard frost killed the chlorophyll and the green drained away and the underlying pigments showed themselves — the yellows and browns that had been there all along, hidden by the green, revealed only in the dying.

October was coming. The re-coring was coming. Wren would stand at the base of the Blackwell oak and insert the borer and extract the core and read the sapwood and the answer would be there — the staining stable or spreading, the compartmentalization holding or failing, the tree winning or losing the war that had been fought all summer in the wood while the leaves photosynthesized and the roots drank and the crown swayed in the wind and Margaret Blackwell sat on her porch and watched.

The answer was in the wood. The answer was always in the wood.

Wren waited for October the way the oaks waited for frost — not with impatience, not with dread, but with the settled patience of a thing that could not hurry what was coming and did not try.