Our Environment: “Gone Tree, Gone” by Scott Turner
Saturday, March 07, 2020
Twenty-four hours after the removal of the eminent white pine, all that was left where the grand tree once stood was a rectangular plot of fresh earth that looked like a grave.
In one day, the 60-foot-tall-by-60-foot-wide tree was dismantled and carted off. The second day, its stump was ground up, with any lingering sawdust swept away.
Just a few years ago, our block featured two such majestic white pines. Every April, the Pine Warbler, a small, yellow, uncommon songbird returned to breed in either tree.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTBut those pines loomed over the homes beside them. One tree was cut down some 10 years ago. The second pine, which dropped ever-larger branches with each windstorm, was removed this week.
That last giant required a crane to help take it down. The pine was the primary backdrop of the view from our upstairs windows. The tree also shaded our home during the doggiest summer days. Now, and especially with the world warming, our house is going to cook.
The neighbors on each side of the pine were justifiably concerned for the safety of their homes and their families. But as the chainsaws fired up, I realized that I felt personally attached to that tree. It was a magnificent specimen. Growing up, my kids played under and around that it. The pine was the defining landscape feature of our street.
To mourn the loss, I headed to the greatest local living monument to greenery: Roger Williams Park.
If you crave the peaceful feeling that comes from strolling through a bucolic setting, or the thrill of encountering all sorts of trees, native and ornamental, then head to Roger Williams.
I parked by a rolling meadow that led off toward the Temple To Music and Cunliff Lake. Once upon a time, each of our children gathered to take pre-prom pictures at the Temple. I have always been smitten with the pastoral way that the birches in the distance, with their light bark, combine with evergreens along Cunliff Lake to look like a wooded pond in Vermont.
Wanting even more tree company, I circled around to the Betsey Williams Cottage and the spectacularly shaped American sycamore tree beside it. Also, there was a large tulip tree, pyramidal in form beside a more-tapering pin oak. Meanwhile, a squat cork tree, with its warty dimples, featured limbs that twisted over the turf. I meandered around a groove of conifers that included conical specimens of fir, spruce, cedar, pine, and larch.
When I returned home, I sat on our front porch. Staring at the now-open space across the street meant that I had to peer through a cascade of sap dripping from the sugar maple tree in front of our home. About a month ago, a tree company lopped-off branches on the maple, even though we hadn’t requested the pruning. I did not assume bad intent on behalf of the tree firm, but the sap has dripped incessantly from the cuts ever since.
Trees provide us with food, oxygen and shade. They help us conserve water, stabilize the soil and store carbon. Trees are home to wildlife. And that’s just scratching the surface of their value. I believe trees are spiritual entities.
As my sugar maple wept, I thought that if I were to come back to this world, I would like to do so as a tree.
Scott Turner is a Providence-based writer and communications professional. For more than a decade he wrote for the Providence Journal and we welcome him to GoLocalProv.com.
PHOTO: Kenneth C. Zirkel/Wikimedia Commons
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