The Death Of A Tree

Part 2 of a 3 part story. Part 1 can be found here.

September brought unsettling weather last year. Warm, cold, warm, cold. One night there was some wind -- nothing extreme, we've certainly had worse. And then at 3 AM there was the lowest, heaviest, strangest whump I've ever heard. Half-asleep, we looked out the window, but saw nothing, and went back to bed and sleep.

Four hours later, Kelly was in the shower when I suddenly remembered the whump. And I looked out the window to see this:


















Which upon closer inspection, turned out to be this:


















And this:


















One of the main leaders of the tree had come crashing  down, punching a hole in the roof of our garage, crumpling the neighbour's metal shed, and filling both our yards with foliage and wood -- about 1/3 of the canopy of this magnificent 100 foot tall tree.

An arborist was called and after looking this way and that, she concluded that the combination of temperature fluctuation and wind torque had been a bit too much for the old wood. Still, with a surgical trim, the tree might last another 5 or 10 years. "Except," I said, "except we think the squirrels have been digging into the main joint on that other leader." So up she went with her measuring sticks and found two deep burrows, one two feet in length; the other three. She was incredibly kind as she pronounced the death sentence, even reaching up to pat my shoulder (she was very short) as tears pricked at the back of my eyes.

Removing a tree, even a private tree, in the City of Toronto is a difficult job. And it should be. If it weren't, we'd have developers cutting down our magnificent urban forest. Armed with the arborist's report, we applied for a "permit to destroy," and eventually received it in early December. "We really don't want to do this," I explained to the clerk as I picked up the permit, and once again was met with kindness. "Oh, I know you don't. I know."

Nature, on the other hand, is neither as bureaucratic as the City of Toronto, nor as sentimental as its clerks, arborists, and ratepayers.  Overnight on Saturday December 21, an ice storm descended, crystallizing our skeletal tree and sending more of it --and countless others in our old green neighbourhood-- crashing to the ground.  Whump. Whump. All through the night and into the morning. Whump.

When we woke, this is what we found:

Next door, an entire trunk came down, missing one house by six inches and another by a foot. We were lucky no one died.

Finally, the day came when the tree had to come down. I stayed home that day, on the off-chance that part of it might decide to crash into the house. At about 9 AM, I was awakened by the sound of a chain saw, and looked out the window to see this: a tiny orange man hanging off a limb.

He spent most of the morning cutting off all the branches. It was mesmerizing to watch him judge each branch -- where to tie, where to cut, where to let it fall.

This is what it looked like when they left for lunch.

And after lunch, a colleague joined him to take down the trunks.

Truth be told, I didn't just stay home to be there in the event of emergency. I stayed home to watch my tree be destroyed, much as you sit by the bedside when someone you love is dying, or cradle your cat in your arms after she is given a needle and takes her last breath. And I watched it come down, limb by limb, chunk by chunk until by 4 PM, when this was all that was left.

That trunk, complete with its 3 foot burrow, remains. And so, we were to discover in the coming days, does life...