For use: Sunday, Month XX, 2000 and thereafter

mfinley -
"Here We Go Round the Mulberry Tree; or, Two Days Before the Mast"

by Michael Finley
Copyright © 2000 by Michael Finley

I love my yard and garden, and I would do just about anything to make it nice, except weed it or bend over to pick things up instead of running them over with the lawn mower.

So it was with feelings of real vexation that I noticed that one of our trees was leaning. A mulberry tree.

Now, you may be thinking that it's not unusual for trees to lean. They can’t all be straight up and down. It's normal for them to lean a little on the right, and a little again on the left. But that's not so much leaning as spreading. A non-leaning tree, completely up and down, would be more of a utility pole than a tree.

But this tree was really leaning. Not to the right and to the left -- just to the right. If it leaned much more, it was going to fall right over.

Now, if this was a Tower in Pisa, I might have been looking at significant tourism potential. But it being a mulberry tree, and the leaning being in the direction of all the wires looping across our yard and attaching themselves to our house at a major fixture electricians call "the mast," my immediate potential looked like a plunge into the 14th century.

No PC? No Internet? That's just the beginning. Try no dryer, no track lights, no telephone. We'd be down to battery power. In essence, we'd be camping.

And, reliable sources tell me that it's no tiny deal to reattach a mast to a house. Contemplate a $4,000 bill. Contemplate being made of such stern stuff that you would entertain competitive bids on such an emergency item. "What, you can’t fix it cheaper?"

The problem was so vexing that I went directly to bed.

In the morning, I exited my back door to see something no one ever wants to see. The mulberry tree, which had been leaning at a 60-degree angle when I retired, was now leaning at a 45 degree angle -- and indeed, that its branches were already enmeshed with the looping electrical wires. It looked like it could fall at any moment.

Quick, I asked myself: What would someone who knows about such things do?

Not getting an answer, I dashed to my garage and pulled out five 2x6 boards of various lengths from 7 to 10 feet. One by one I jammed these boards under the reeling tree's trunk, propping the tree up, then levering the trunk backward until I had eased some of the pressure from the lines, which were bent in the middle like a very broad letter V.

It looked like a tree in a Dr. Suess book, held up by a series of wavering crutches.

But all my neighbors crowded round to see my handiwork, a tree caught in midfall. The electric lines still bent in midline, and the tree leaning on them was like a drunk on a bar, or a whale slouched on a stretch of sand. It was like a photograph of a sneeze, with very fast film. You could see all the little balls of snot suspended in the air.

Ultimately, of course, the tree came down. I hired a crack team of tree surgeons code-named Blue Chip to take it out. I stood in an upstairs window while they surgically eliminated one stress-point after another, and the V disappeared. Having no wires as hostage, the mulberry tree was hideously vulnerable, and a few Z's of the chainsaw brought it hurtling down.

And as I stood looking down on its mighty hulk, I pondered the campaign that faces each one of us -- our technology or our trees.

There will be many who say, I speak for the tree. Bit these, without exception, are people who don’t have to spend $4,000 to boot back up.

Why did the tree fall over? Root rot appeared to be the answer. But a better q uestion is, Why don’t they all fall over?

In the fullness of time, there is not one that will not. And if you do not take pains, starting today, to police your patch of green, may God have mercy on your mast.

 

And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street , by Dr. Suess

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