Fourteen days now since Helene winds laid the holler’s oldest tree on its side. A red oak. Another much older ash, long dead, hugged close to its side and toppled, too. When the red oak fell, the dead ash fell with it.
The ash’s naked trunk, having several years ago shed its bark, is inscribed with ash borer hieroglyphs, but those meandering assassins of ash stands are long gone from this scene. They’ve moved on. Scads of dead ash around here. Neighbor mentioned once that it is a bad omen to mess with dead trees. Don’t cut them down, he said. Along came Helene, not a superstitious one.
The red oak’s trunk is forty inches in diameter, which timestamps it to 160 years old, give or take. I emailed the photo above to a local arborist who last winter stopped out to pass his knowing eyes over the trees around here and to bid on some corrective pollarding for the black walnuts nearest to the house. But the arborist lives in a place that was washed hard by New River flood crest, plus no doubt the crew is taking on more urgent work over the last little while.
Wednesday I called a local sawmill. The hulking oak is too big for many loggers to cut on site. He told me about a couple of chainsaw millers from the Floyd area who might be able to slab it on site, thus making it possible to haul away. While red oaks are valuable, they are not as valuable as white oaks, black walnuts, and so on. He explained, too, that the size of this hyperion would be a problem for most mills. So although the tree has a lot of “board feet” lumber to it, getting someone to take on its transport and milling will be difficult. I listened. It was an earnest and generous conversation; free consultation of a sort. And afterward I wrote to the one chainsaw miller whose contact information I could find.
We haven’t decided to do anything with the windthrown tree. It stood there flourishing such a short time ago that it is taking some getting used to, its collapse. Walking Feta on the loop means witnessing accelerated leaf exfoliation, and the hummock and hollow shows for where an animal has burrowed beneath it, where water is puddled, where the upper third of the hummock is drying out. I read about how the hummock and hollow is a site for bursts of living, what might count as a bloom space, a swell of activity. So maybe that is that. The resting oak has already been disturbed enough. And in another 160 years how many of its acorns will have rooted?
In the among the branches, the post where I had mounted the phone of the wind is also on its side and the phone itself is tossed, not unlike the two times I accidentally bumped its edge with the mower’s roll bar and sent it dialing its own long gone elders with a plea of will somebody please discourage this clumsy fool from mowing back here. Heard! Heard. Left as-is, the sprawled crown won’t allow me to mow there again. But I would like to recover the phone, reconnect for this spectral time of year, maybe fasten it to the red oak. Or let the ash have a turn.
Nothing much especially conclusive in this. The uncertainty, the surprise, then wobble, then wilting loss, maybe, is the feeling set. A dry, cool feeling set, and crunchy. When a storm blisters a region as forcefully as Helene did western North Carolina, Asheville and surrounds, something about noting the end of one special tree and noticing it as an intensity doesn’t seem entirely appropriate. Sure, it is unfortunate, but the feelings, like breeze sweeping last summer’s tall standing grasses, are not quite structural enough to write into emotional terms. Whatever sense of loss folds into the everyday, a puff of metabole, ferried by a flash of rain and wind, thus crossing over, quietly, wondering what tomorrow holds and the day after that and next spring, too.
