May
14, 2018
Greetings from
the root of the problem,
It
looks like a ship has run aground in our back yard. Some ghost ship, its rotting ribs exposed,
plowed through the forest near our house and finally crashed through the edge
of the brush.
It
seems to be dragging itself out of the woods now, the branches heaving the
carcass from the undergrowth onto to the manicured edge of our yard.
It
was a pine tree, long since given up on the evergreen sham, standing back in
the woods in brown anonymity. I would never
have paid any attention to it except that during a rather invigorating
windstorm recently the pine determined that it was time to retire from the tree
business.
It
might have been fifty feet tall when it changed its perspective from vertical
to horizontal. If I recall my completely
fictional botany education correctly, and doing some simple math which I never mastered,
I can estimate this tree is about one thousand or one billion years old.
This
development creates a call for action. (I
should state here that while I do not feel that call, I am in close proximity
to others who do, and this initiates the process of osmosis.) This former tree is threatening to disturb the
harmony of the carefully crafted landscape surrounding us, which if not
corrected will fracture our Wa.
And
so I have set about planning. First I
will need a large, limb-shredding chain saw.
Something with lots of horsepower, or megabytes or kilojoules or whatever. Then I am going to put together a complex
series of harnesses and pulleys so I can climb the fifteen feet or so to the highest
flank of the pine to begin cutting.
There,
dangling from that precarious perch, I will flail away at the tree until it
gives in, dismembering it one knotty spine at a time. And then I will begin slicing the trunk into
manageable thousand-pound sections, so I can more easily roll them to the curb
where the sanitation department can ignore them.
I
have done some time/motion projections and I estimate that I should have the project completed in a fortnight. Unless I
misunderstand the definition of ‘fortnight’ which I recall from my fictional
horology class as ‘one million years’.
Or.
It
becomes an art installation. Our
community is starved for culture and how better to introduce it than through
horticulture. My vision for this piece
would be to put up some tasteful red ropes slung between locally harvested plastic
stanchions. There would be a neatly worded
plaque that gave an ambiguous explanation of the piece, and of course an
invitation to visit the gift shoppe. (Spelled with an extra consonant AND an
extra vowel to instill a sense of expensiveness.)
I would title the work. ‘Reclining Pine’, or ‘Woodn’t’, or ‘Sapless’. Or something else. If it was a big hit, we could take it on the road. Load the whole thing onto enormous flatbed trailers and move it to the Met or the Smithsonian or feature it in other ‘natural habitats’ like someone else’s back yard.
Or.
I
hire some well-equipped, trained and experienced experts to dispatch the
tree. Burly men with plaid shirts and suspenders
and full masculine beards. They will
swing double headed axes and enormous chainsaws and pikes and other instruments
that are manly and loud and are an actuary’s nightmare.
They
would drive huge trucks across our yard, possibly solving my mole problem, and
probably creating permanent creases in our neatly ironed lawn. There would be noise and wood chips and spitting
and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments.
They would transform the dead pine into bite size pieces and haul the
carcass away to some tree burning sect hiding in the woods up near Capac.
Or.
I could just write
about it.
Hope
this finds you going with your strengths,
David
Copyright
© 2018 David Smith
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