Murder Most Foul…

I am not a tree-hugger in the conventional, high-profile media sense, but today I feel as if I truly committed a crime against the Earth I profess to have such a high regard for. Call our planet Ghea, Gea, Mother Nature, or even Haumea (often used by the Hawaiians to refer to the Mother Nurturer of all life). No matter how you phrase it in terms of the various linguistic utterances that issue forth from human throats, my actions today were, I feel, truly reprehensible, for I cold-bloodedly ordered the execution of a beautiful, healthy tree.

As I sit here, contemplating my actions of the past several hours, it is raining steadily and unrelentingly outside my window, the first wave of one of the first serious Pacific storms to have come sweeping off the near-limitless expanses of that immense and nearby ocean this winter. The neighborhood trees are all dancing about uncomfortably, trying to dodge the worst blasts that have toppled a few of their older relatives as they weave and twist, bending pliantly with each new onslaught of cold wind. It strikes my fancy that they somehow sense the pending doom of one of their brethren.

Today is, as I later realized with some mild disapprobation, the 13th of February. ‘Lucky 13’ as a few of the more hopeless optimists regard it, but a most unlucky number for everyone else. And today is the day I had unwittingly scheduled for the execution of a beautiful, healthy and handsome Bishop Pine. A tree that I went to a great amount of trouble to save when it was a but a wee small sapling whose survival was doubtful, and replanted in our home’s rear yard some 13 years ago.

At 8 o’clock AM the designated executioners arrived promptly on schedule, consisting of a crew of three Mexican-Americans (or just Mexicans, for all I know) named Rodriguez, Juliano and Benedicto. Rodriguez was their leader, for he spoke for all of them and with the unmistakable authority of a ‘padrone’. It was hard not to notice the deference of the other two, as they regarded him while he spoke.

Mind you, there they are…the rain is coming down in buckets and there’s already a tremendous amount of pooled water on the already-saturated ground. The grass is smushy and there’s plenty of mud to go around as they came into the yard to assess the job. “Lovely weather…”, I somewhat lamely offered to Rodriguez, who nodded as the rain dripped off his protective hard-hat.

Rodriguez’s rejoinder in very acceptable English was an unhappy reminder of the enormity of my crime: “Why you cut down this tree? It looks very healthy.”

How to explain to them, these commercial husbands of trees and growing things who are charged with tree trimming and removals? I quickly decided to share the blame a bit, being a weak mortal who frequently lacks the necessary dollop of moral courage to rise to whatever task is at hand on the domestic front at any given moment. A weak person and yes, also a congenital procrastinator who tends never to take care of now whatever may be conveniently postponed till tomorrow. And so it was that I leveled the blame squarely where it may or may not have actually been: at my (Chinese) wife. Pontius Pilate blaming Rome!

“Well, I love that tree very much, but wifie doesn’t want it there and in fact she said she hates it (all true), so I had no choice but to have you guys take it out”.

The tree we were all focused upon was a lovely, healthy and verdant pine of about 45 feet in height, with a trunk at its thickest diameter of just under a foot. They accepted this remark without further comment since, after all, their job is to remove trees they have been directed to take out and this job was about $300 worth of labor. But I noticed that Rodriguez did give me a quick, sideways glance that seemed to register some as-yet unsatisfied puzzlement. Probably wondering who exactly was this she-devil dragon woman upon whom I defaulted the blame for my callous act.

And with that they went right to work. For my part, I quickly retreated to my man-cave, not wishing to witness the demise of this wonderful tree I had invested so much personal effort in. As I sat there, at my desk, I wondered if the tree had sensed its imminent peril in the days leading up to its extinction. I wondered further if it knew that I was now hiding in my room like a craven coward, unable to face the brutal consequences of my own destructive human nature. I sensed that it did, and felt really awful about it.

After a mere 20 minutes, the deed (as post-Beat poet Richard Brautigan so memorably put it) was done, since after all, these were professionals, regardless of the resident/immigrant status, and they accomplished the job very, very quickly. When I went out to view the carnage, I was surprised to find barely any residual evidence that a 45-foot tall tree had originally been there! It was almost as if the whole scenario had played out like a video in my imagination…and it could have, if it hadn’t been for the horrible, wrenching grinding of my lovely tree’s remains in the tree-shredder mechanism they had parked in the street. Mercifully, that noisy process, the last groans and shrieks of pain my poor tree made while it was being cruelly dismembered by sharp metal blades, lasted only a few minutes.

I had asked them to leave me a one-foot-long section of the trunk as a fond reminder of my tree and recovered it, placing it under the patio awning. What I shall do with it is uncertain. It sat there, oozing sap that reminded that damnably creative aspect of me of the bloody stump of a freshly amputated leg, dripping its life-blood away.

Wifie, spotting it later, gave me a fish-eyed glance that silently confirmed her suspicion that her Guai Loh (Cantonese for ‘foreigner’ and a whole lot of other unrepeatable aspersive characteristics) husband is a certifiably whacko nostalgist. And of course, it is true. I am.

“You need to let things go”, she said. “It was only a tree!”

I should explain that this is somewhat like telling a Zen Buddhist that he shouldn’t covet material things, since there is a very formidable part of my personality that reveres the Buddhist philosophy of nothingness…of not forming attachments to material things. But it was still a telling truth. I DO need to let things go and recognise the impermanence of all that the human senses urge us to value and/or possess. And I consistently fail each time, when I try.

I suppose a big part of my problem, aside from the fact that I am a total moral wuss, is that I am also a typical ‘Gemini’, astrologically speaking, comprised of two distinct halves that clasp each other tightly in a sort of dual polarity embrace, like that of north & south poles of a magnetic field. Half of me is an austere antimaterialist, while the other part of me is a techy, nerdy and enthusiastic clinger…a ‘possessor’ of all things material and worldly. A regular Yang-Ying contradiction and one that has held me in thrall for almost all of my conscious life.

In Chinese astrology, I am regarded as what the Chinese would term a ‘Fire Dog’, or a person whose birth falls into the adjunctive influences of specific times & seasonal forces. Dog people are regarded as somewhat closed, slow to warm up to others, but after they feel fully confident about a person having all the ‘right’ personal qualities, there’s little a dog person won’t do for a close friend or loved one. Dogs (human type) are also ferociously sentimental (I am) and protectively reflective (that’s me).

If you know anything about Chinese astrology, it will help if you understand that my wife is a Rooster person. Dogs and Roosters are supposed to be a terrible match, according to Chinese tradition, being temperamentally and constitutionally at entirely different ends of the personality spectrum. How true, but ah well!

The tree that lies at the focal core of all this wet, blustery and rainy day rumination has a somewhat interesting story, by the way. I’m uncertain where it actually began its life, but I rather suspect that it started off as part of a Bishop Pine cone that had been brought to Sacramento by persons unknown. Whatever its actual and exact origins, it ended up in the back yard of a shabby, run-down old duplex in what is referred to as the ‘Old Chinese Town’ of Sacramento, a dwelling coincidentally inhabited by my wife’s auntie Margaret and her husband.

Auntie Margaret is my wife’s paternal sister, now 91 years old and presently living in what is called a ‘memory care assisted living facility’. Auntie originally came from Canton, China, which is where my wife’s family lived until chased out by the Imperial Japanese Army during the mid-40s. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the circumstances of their times there closely mirror those described by novelist Amy Tan in her well-known book ‘The Joy-Luck Club’.

When Auntie Margaret came to the United States, she was a reasonably young and attractive Chinese woman, but unmarried and without family wealth or education to otherwise ease her sojourn to ‘Gold Mountain’ (America). After arriving in Sacramento (in the 60s), she met a slightly younger Chinese man here and they moved in together. He didn’t have any money either, but he did have a job, so they were able to get by, living frugally as many ‘old time’ Chinese do in the US. It wasn’t a comfortable existence, but it was at least acceptable.

Her husband had, however, a serious (but not uncommon) flaw in his makeup: he was an inveterate gambler. Over a short period of time he managed to gamble away much of their scant disposable income, leaving them perpetually impoverished. And as may be imagined, there was little domestic harmony in their small dwelling as a result. It may not be well known to those who haven’t lived in China, but there no equal anywhere in the world to the sort of knock-down, drag-‘em-out marital fights that are not uncommon to older Chinese couples. And Cantonese is a language that for sheer breadth and depth of profane pejoratives, has no match (with the possible exception of old-style Irish households, where the Gaelic lexicon is equally filled to the brim with choice curses, swear-words and epithets that would make a French whore blush three shades of scarlet).

Auntie’s errant husband would regularly disappear for most of each day with whatever money there was about the house, a curious circumstance that was later revealed to be explained by trips to the local Indian (oops, ‘Native Americans’) casinos in this area, where he lost consistently.

To mercifully shorten an otherwise long and intricately complex story, Auntie therefore had little in her life that could be considered a cause for simple comfort or joy. Sometime later, after her errant husband had become somewhat elderly, he suffered a series of falls when out and about that proved to be the consequence of some neural disorder or another, with the result that he eventually succumbed to a severe cerebral aneurism. But not before dragging Auntie over the coals of extreme inconvenience and near-penury.

Filing away all of this this backstory for a moment, try to remarshal your imagination and direct it to a certain point where a particular little Bishop Pine cone seedling ended up in a pot in the shabby, cluttered back yard space behind their dwelling. Against all odds and adverse germinating conditions, that little seedling managed to sprout a small, slender shoot that hungrily reached out in the warmth of a Sacramento summer sun to embrace life.

Auntie’s husband noticed the courageous little sprig of fir one day, when he was puttering around in the yard, and took it over to a small section of the barren ground near a small vegetable garden Auntie had planted and placed it in the soil, where it seemed to thrive. There it remained for a few years, surviving on a single daily hand-watering from an old can, until one day Auntie’s husband had his final aneurism and abruptly passed on, leaving Auntie alone and now dependent on my wife’s/her niece’s ministrations.

More years passed and Auntie herself was now giving evidence of failing, principally in the context of her mental status. It was soon enough evident that she was experiencing early signs of dementia, requiring her placement in a care facility. This sudden adverse change of fortune was also furthered along by the typically parsimonious and philistine (Chinese) slumlord who owned the tumble-down dwelling Auntie occupied, who wanted to evict the old, Chinese long time-residents so that he could build a new property on the site of the previous shacks. As famous 50’s era folksinger Malvina Reynolds so famously put it in her song 'Little Boxes', “No matter how low you go, there’s always another low, below.”

Finally, after many frustrating interactions with the various county, state and federal agencies that subsidise older, medically disenfranchised and financially destitute seniors, we were able to place Auntie in a suitable home.

Not the sort of fancy care home that a person with some wealth would go to but given the Medical/Medicare and other programs that exist, it was adequate to her needs…if certainly a no-frills alternative. Even at that, wifie and her sisters had to each contribute a certain amount of money each month to help meet the payable fees for this home. This is no more certain an indicator of the lengths that Chinese people will go to, when obligated by the requisites of filial piety, to make personal sacrifices for a family member (a rare enough circumstance among most non-Asian families, these days, seemingly).

When we relocated Auntie to the new ‘home’, we also had to winnow down her belongings, clean out the accumulated detritus of their years of mutual residence and clean up the duplex where they had lived (so that the landlord would return the deposit). A dumpster situated in front of the house quickly filled up with unbelievably strange stuff from their home, trash, odds and ends and miscellaneous flotsam/jetsam; but eventually the job was done.

Out back, their sweet, rescued boxer-mix ‘Nellie’ had to be taken to the shelter (I’m happy to say that Nellie was before too long adopted by a kind person unknown) and that left virtually nothing…except the Bishop Pine, which was now about 2 feet tall, still planted in its original spot by the vegetable garden.

Wifie (and her sisters) were all in favor of simply abandoning it where it was, although it is certain that had it been, it would have been quickly cut down and discarded by the slumlord, who was eager to begin building a new edifice on that site, without the slightest hesitation.

Naturally, as an indefatigable sentimentalist (I know better than to get attached to things, of course, as I have explained earlier), I proposed that we dig the little guy up, place it in a large container and replant it in the large back yard of our nice home in a better part of Sacramento. Which I did.

Once it was situated at our place, the next crisis came when the matter of where exactly it would be replanted was put to Madame Chairman and her Ruling Triumvirate (her sisters). This resulted in the pine remaining in its container for more than a few weeks until finally I put my (wussy) foot down, dug a nice hole (oh! the complaints that were forthcoming), prepared it according to the specified arboreal recommendations and placed the little pine into its new soil.

Over the next 10 years or so, endless arguments ensued over the appropriateness of my selected planting site (naturally) as the little pine eagerly took root and gave evidence of thriving. I wasn’t even aware of what kind of pine it was until one day a good friend of mine who is wiser to the ways of all things green and growing than I, took a close look at the little pine’s needles and promptly pronounced it unmistakably to be a Bishop Pine.

Bishop Pines have a reportedly somewhat unique and restricted range, being indigenous almost exclusively to California’s coastal regions and adjacent areas. They are sturdy, robust evergreen trees capable of reaching heights of 75 feet or so, and able to thrive in mild drought conditions. It is sometimes referred to as the Santa Cruz Pine or the Obispo Pine.

[Note: According to Wikipedia,“Pinus muricata is a coniferous evergreen tree growing to a height of 15–25 m, rarely up to 34 m, with a trunk diameter of up to 1.2 m. The species is often smaller, stunted and twisted in coastal exposures. It is drought-tolerant and grows on dry, rocky soil.

“The needles are in pairs, green to blue-green, and 8–16 cm (3–6.5 in) long. Cones occur in one to five clusters. The cones are strongly reflexed down the branch, 5–10 cm long; the scales are stiff, thin on the side of the cone facing the stem, but greatly thickened on the side facing away and with a stout 5–12 mm spine; both features adaptive to minimise squirrel predation and fire damage to the cones. The cones remain unopened for many years until fire or strong heat causes them to open and release the seeds”.]

Thus, despite the fascinating nature of this native California evergreen, there was some concern that it had the potential to reach heights that would eventually compromise the existing PG&E and power lines that border our yard. Or at least that was wifie’s argument, when pressed to specify exactly why she didn’t care for this tree.

I personally suspect that the actual hidden, unspoken core of her dislike of our little pine lay in the fact that it was a vestigial part of Auntie’s difficult concerns and a daily visual reminder of all the demands Auntie had (unknowingly) placed on wifie (who is the eldest of her sisters and therefore the serious, ‘responsible’ one), according to ancient Chinese sibling customs.

Auntie was, after all, her father’s sister, not her mother’s, and her father had, back in China, treated his wife and his children with less than admirable regard. He had in fact maintained (as was so often the custom back in ‘old China’) a couple of ‘Shiao Tai-tai’ (literally, ‘Little Wife’ but in western terms ‘mistress’) while married to wifie’s mother (who had 5 small children at the time). Throughout the years the Japanese had been actively harassing Chiang’s troops during the war, he had left his wife and children to live with one of those mistresses, not reuniting with them until well after the war had ended and they were all in Hong Kong.

This melancholy betrayal of paternal trust, responsibility and marital fidelity appears to have had a lasting effect on wifie to this day, and since Auntie was her paternal aunt, were it not for my wife’s strong sense of filial responsibility towards ‘the family’ at large, she would undoubtedly not have done all the yeoman’s work for Auntie she had, otherwise.

Thus, the poor little pine’s status was fatefully jeopardized at the onset by the taint of this unhappy residual artifact of past family politics & history.

I argued and argued for its preservation, but in the end, as we all know, ‘…if the cat ain’t happy, ain’t no one happy’. Thus, for the sake of continued peace & harmony in our own immediate family, Madame Chairman and her consulting fils had the final say-so and I called up the tree company, albeit with a terrible sense of loathing and sadness, to order that our poor little Bishop Pine be disposed of.

To say I am still filled with a strong sense of loss and misgiving as I write this is a considerable understatement, for it is almost like having lost a palpable, living presence in our ordinary, mundane lives here. I feel a strong sense of having failed to protect that tree and of course all my tender ministrations over the past 13 years now seem like a tragic waste, framed within the enormity of my shameful actions.

Out where that tree used to provide nests for birds and shade for us in the hot summer, there now stands little to mark its demise except a bare patch on the ground and a few pictures I took of it just hours before it was cut down and removed.

I don’t suppose anyone out there who is reading this can fully appreciate exactly why I am making such a big thing out of what most would callously regard as merely a simple ‘tree removal’, but my philosophical outlook on life holds that trees and natural growing things are actually far more important to ALL life on this planet than even the scattering of large-frontal-lobed Homo sapiens tribes scampering here and there on its surface that now threaten to destroy the entire world.

I imagine I hold that opinion in the minority, along with such august individuals as Dr. Ted Kaczynski, and most people pay scant attention to thimble-sized environmental crises like this, so make of it what you shall, but the melancholic remembrance of what that Bishop Pine fir meant to me in my own life will remain with me for a long, long time, sadly enough.

“You need to let things go, it was only a tree!…"

No, I think not. When I reflect back on how much I greatly enjoyed sitting in the shade of our patio during hot summer days, reveling at the natural splendor of that pine and marveling on how important trees and other flora are to the most basic and essential process of enabling oxygen-breathing life on our world to thrive and survive, I doubly regret what I did today. And all merely to accommodate the fleeting and superficial whims of human aesthetic convenience… I sincerely hope others share this feeling as strongly as I do, although I suspect they do not.

That should not diminish the fact that until we begin to start respecting the beautiful, life-giving and diverse flora that we benighted and morbidly ignorant, self-aware souls so much take for granted in our daily affairs, the world, as well as the future of humanity, is surely doomed.

At 9 AM this morning, I indisputably, inarguably and selfishly murdered a close friend… It was, and is, murder most foul by the ultimate and most enduring definition of that word’s implications for all life, everywhere.

Finally, although I was no great fan of former President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his wife Lady Bird-Johnson back in the day, the old gal certainly had it right when she admonished us to ‘Beautify America: plant a tree!’

Bless you, Lady Bird!

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PS:

Just before the tree people came to cut my tree down today, I took a few pictures of it with a small hand-held camera. Only after I developed the images (in my PC) did I notice that in each of the three images of that tree that I took, standing out there in the pouring rain, a small white orb appeared next to the trunk. Make of that what you will, but there were no defects on the camera lens, not were there any reflections that could have conceivably caused an artifact of that sort to appear on the image.

I should say here that I am most definitely NOT a believer in ghosts or the supernatural (although I do maintain an open mind), but I have seen similar white orbs in pictures taken by so-called ghost-hunters in supposedly haunted venues.

Do you suppose...?