`Vacant for the Next Two Centuries'

We heard the unpleasantness before we saw it, a muted buzz like a mosquito at midnight in a zipped-up tent. Two blocks away, men with chainsaws were leveling a line of cedars, each a good 40 or 50 feet tall, for no sensible reason I could see.

Three years ago on Easter morning in Houston, we discovered a vertical crack in the outer wall of our youngest son’s bedroom. Only then did we notice the 75-foot post oak outside his window leaning against the house. In its slow-motion fall it had squashed the gutter and eave, and come to rest like an oversized drunk against the edge of the roof. We called a tree-cutting crew who spent 10 hours dismantling an organism that had taken most of a century to assemble, and I still feel remorse.

My point is, I’m not opposed in principle to cutting down trees, but one must have sufficient cause. Is any sight bleaker than a newly built subdivision in which the developer has leveled mature trees and, as a pathetic after-thought, replaced them with spindly saplings? You can rattle off the ecological reasons for preserving trees, but the most convincing is also the most personal: Trees are a joy and a comfort to have as company, particularly in one’s neighborhood.
More than a century and a half ago, Thoreau had an experience similar to mine. Let me quote at length his journal entry for Dec. 30, 1851:

“This afternoon, being on Fair Haven Hill, I heard the sound of a saw, and soon after from the Cliff saw two men sawing down a noble pine beneath, about forty rods off. I resolved to watch it till it fell, the last of a dozen or more which were left when the forest was cut and for fifteen years have waved in solitary majesty over the sprout-land. I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive manikins with their cross-cut saw which could scarcely span it. It towered up a hundred feet as I afterward found by measurement, one of the tallest probably in the township and straight as an arrow, but slanting a little toward the hillside, its top seen against the frozen river and the hills of Conantum. I watch closely to see when it begins to move. Now the sawers stop, and with an axe open it a little on the side toward which it leans, that it may break the faster. And now their saw goes again. Now surely it is going; it is inclined one quarter of the quadrant, and, breathless, I expect its crashing fall. But no, I was mistaken; it has not moved an inch; it stands at the same angle as at first. It is fifteen minutes yet to its fall. Still its branches wave in the wind, as it were destined to stand for a century, and the wind soughs through its needles as of yore; it is still a forest tree, the most majestic tree that waves over Musketaquid. The silvery sheen of the sunlight is reflected from its needles; it still affords an inaccessible crotch for the squirrel’s nest; not a lichen has forsaken its mast-like stem, its raking mast,—the hill is the hulk. Now, now’s the moment! The manikins at its base are fleeing from their crime. They have dropped the guilty saw and axe. How slowly and majestic it starts! as it were only swayed by a summer breeze, and would return without a sigh to its location in the air. And now it fans the hillside with its fall, and it lies down to its bed in the valley, from which it is never to rise, as softly as a feather, folding its green mantle about it like a warrior, as if, tired of standing, it embraced the earth with silent joy, returning its elements to the dust again. But hark! there you only saw, but did not hear. There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks , advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. It rushes to embrace the earth, and mingle its elements with the dust. And now all is still once more and forever, both to eye and ear.

“I went down and measured it. It was about four feet in diameter where it was sawed, about one hundred feet long. Before I had reached it the axemen had already divested it of its branches. Its gracefully spreading top was a perfect wreck on the hillside as if it had been made of glass, and the tender cones of one year’s growth upon its summit appealed in vain and too late to the mercy of the chopper. Already he has measured it with his axe, and marked off the mill-logs it will make. And the space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next two centuries. It is lumber. He has laid waste the air. When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch, and the hen-hawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled. I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing [to] lay his axe at the root of that also.”

This is a magnificent piece of prose, one of Thoreau’s finest. In a cubist painting, the artist gives us multiple, simultaneous views of a subject – front, back and sides. Thoreau does something similar, but with time – past, present and future. He writes of the cut-down tree: “And the space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next two centuries.” I count three tenses, three temporal planes, in 15 words. That’s majesty worthy of the pine it describes.