The Myth of Trees

Mature trees can look perfect. Big, sprawling shade-makers with bright green canopies look almost like they were manufactured and spit out of a mold, they're so perfectly sculpted and so deliciously set into the green earth below them. There's not a leaf out of place and not a flaw in their strong, sturdy bark. They appear rock-solid and permanent. Like mountains, they will be there forever. They will always provide a place of protection for the birds that call them home. The squirrels that live in and on them can always depend on them for refuge.

Even mountains erode and succumb to the forces of earthquakes and water and freezing and thawing.

These last few days, as I've wandered through old, established neighborhoods near my home, I've seen evidence that trees aren't rock solid. And they're not permanent. Enormous oak trees that must have lived for 90 or 100 years were felled by the recent windstorms. They were massive things. Some of them must have had circumferences of twenty feet or more.

Other trees have simply been ripped and torn so badly by the wind that there's no telling whether they can survive. Time will tell whether the remaining stray limbs and massive trunks can weather the damage.

If the damage done by the wind were not enough, ciy and electric company crews have gone out in force since the storms, mutilating trees to protect overhead wires in case there's another fierce storm. The crews with saws and cables are adding insult to injury.

When big trees are ruined or badly damaged, it changes the character of a neighborhood. It makes all too apparent the fact that permanence is a myth.