path: root/md/07_Trees.md

---
title: Trees
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Trees have influenced my life many times over the years. This little
memoir attempts to organize all my significant tree experiences into one
place. The motivation for this odd little treatise is that the item
"Plant a tree" is on my life's bucket list. After pondering about the
trees I have planted, I decided to expand the topic to other aspects of
interaction with trees also.

My first memory of a tree experience comes from my earliest childhood
playground. My family lived in a small white house in Lakeview, Oregon
in 1958. We lived next to a kind old woman we referred to as Granny
Green. In her back yard there was an ancient apple tree. It was large
enough to support the weight of a 5-year-old boy who was learning to be
like Tarzan of the jungle. I remember spending many lazy summer days in
that back yard either under the tree or up in it. I hope to see Granny
Green again someday in Heaven to thank her for those pleasant memories
and her kindness to me and my siblings.

## Treehouses

Every healthy child must have a tree house embedded in his childhood at
some point. My first one belongs to the period when my family lived in
Oregon City in an old farm-house we rented for about a year or so. This
would have been about 1964 when I was in the 5th grade of elementary
school. There was a large old cherry tree in the spacious back yard of
that farmhouse, not too far from a huge barn full of smelly old hay,
bugs, pigeons and ancient farm equipment. The cherry tree had a few
large branches that extended nearly parallel to the ground at a height
of about 12 feet. With a ladder and some sophisticated engineering
skills, my brother and I managed to place a few planks of wood across
those branches to form a crude platform. This platform hardly qualified
as a true treehouse, but it was our first attempt at this kind of
construction, and we were still learning the skill. It was just large
enough for two small children to sit on and contemplate the vast world
below us. The comforts of this treehouse were fairly meager, but
occasionally we could eat fresh cherries without leaving the living
room.

My next attempt at building a treehouse was considerably more
sophisticated. I can't claim all the credit for the engineering marvel
we created because our friend Dan Kraus filled the role of lead
construction engineer in this project. I'm guessing I was about 16
years old by this time because I remember going to a lumber mill with
"Old Blue", our old blue Chevrolet station wagon that had been in the
family since the dawn of time. We paid them a dollar for all the lumber
scraps we could jam into the cargo hold of that station wagon. It was
perfect for creating the treehouse of our dreams.

Dan Kraus chose a great location for the treehouse. It was located near
the top of a steep drop-off that descended about 100 feet to the river
bottoms below. This land was part of the original 60 acres that my
father bought when I was about 14 years old. He built the family home
about 1/4 mile away at the top of a hill overlooking the river valley
below. We found a clump of maple trees that were perfect for our
treehouse. There were 4 big tree trunks that rose toward the sky roughly
in the shape of a 4-pointed diamond. Two of the trunks in the middle of
the diamond were only about 18 inches apart, but the other two trunks at
the top and bottom of the diamond were about 6 feet apart. The floorplan
of the treehouse is shown below.

![](md/07_Trees-media/media/image1.png){alt=""}

As you can see from the drawing above, there is a square hole in the
floor between the two tree trunks that were close together. This hole
was the door to the treehouse. The only way to get into the treehouse
was to come up from below the floor and squeeze through the hole in the
floor. It was not the best arrangement for invited guests and visiting
dignitaries, but we weren't too worried about those issues when we
designed the treehouse. Now this was no ordinary treehouse in other ways
too. The bottom section of the floor (as shown in the drawing above) was
the living room and it had sides that rose about 6 feet and then it had
a roof over it. The top section was open to the air because it had no
sides, just a couple of boards to act as guard rails. This area was the
veranda. We also put up guard rails on the tree trunks above the living
room so you could climb up there and be on the lookout for pirates
coming up the river. We called this upper room the "crow's nest"
because you could see a large marsh and lots of water-fowl in the river
bottoms below us. The view was amazing and made us feel like we were the
kings of a vast kingdom of wild and untamed wilderness below. I wish we
had taken a picture of this treehouse. It was a source of great pride
for about one summer. Then other things like girls and cars become more
important and the treehouse was left to rot in the forest.

## Climbing Trees

I can remember two specific times when I nearly met with disaster when I
climbed a tree. The first happened at the same home where we built our
first tree house. There was an old apple tree near the house that had a
huge limb that extended quite far over the ground 20 feet below. I loved
to climb out to the end of that limb and bounce up and down. The limb
would sway up and down about 4 feet. I thought I was like a cowboy
riding a wild stallion in the air. I was too young and foolish to
consider that I might be overstressing the structural strength of that
tree limb. I just knew it was a lot of fun and wanted to impress others
with my bravery and climbing skills. On one occasion, I was riding the
wild stallion when my father came out in the yard. I yelled to him to
watch what I could do in the tree. I threw all my weight into the effort
to make the show as impressive as possible. Suddenly there was a sharp
crack as the large tree limb finally gave up and broke under the strain.
Now all my bravery evaporated, and I screamed like a little girl as the
broken limb and I fell to the ground below. Fortunately, I didn't break
any bones, but my pride was considerably bruised as my dad ran over to
assess the damage. When he found that I wasn't hurt, he just chuckled
and said, "Well, I guess you learned a valuable lesson about how
gravity works, Dan."

The second memorable occasion when I climbed a tree illustrates that I
didn't learn very much from the first memorable tree-climbing incident.
We lived in a rented house in Vancouver when I was about 10 years old.
The neighbors across the road had a small pasture for a horse out behind
their house. Located in the pasture was one of the largest fir trees I
had ever seen. It rose about 80 feet into the air and was probably over
100 years old. To me it seemed like the magic bean stalk from the fairy
tale "Jack and the Bean Stalk". I often wondered what the world would
look like from the top of that huge old fir tree. I finally worked up
the courage to attempt the climb and found it to be quite easy. There
were plenty of limbs to grab ahold of as I ascended to the top. I never
really felt any great fear as I climbed up that tree. I didn't tell
anybody about my daring climb because I was fairly certain that my
parents wouldn't approve. I made it up to the top of that tree where
the trunk was not very large and decided that was far enough. I had
proved I could do it and I was ready to come back down. One false move
and I would certainly have fallen to my death from about 80 feet in the
air. If you were one of my children or grandchildren watching from
heaven, you might have had reason for great concern. After all, I was
not only risking my own life, but all of yours too. You might still be
stuck in heaven waiting for your next ticket to come to earth because
your foolish grandpa fell out of that tree and broke his neck. Anyway,
you are reading this story, so I must have been OK.

## Planting Trees

The first trees I planted are possibly a whole forest of fir trees now,
but I will likely never know. The first summer after I returned home
from Brazil, I was hired to plant fir trees on a piece of logged off
land owned by Jim Granger, a good friend of my father. I'm not sure,
but I seem to remember that there was a government grant program that
encouraged people to replant their land with trees after the mature
lumber trees had been harvested by the logging companies. Accordingly,
Brother Granger obtained hundreds of young fir seedlings and hired me
and another college student to plant them. I remember trudging over the
hills for many hours with a bundle of young trees and a shovel. It was
back-breaking work, but it was somewhat satisfying to think we were
contributing to a program that would make the world a more beautiful
place. Hour after hour I pushed the shovel into the ground, pushed it
over to the side to create a space in the soil, shoved a seedling into
the opening, removed the shovel, stomped on the dirt around the young
tree, then took three steps and repeated the same sequence. I've often
wondered what ever happened to those trees, but I never had a chance to
go back there again.

The next trees I planted were in American Fork, Utah. Lori and I had
purchased a starter home in a small neighborhood next to the railroad
track and the freeway. After the house was built and the yard was
planted in grass, I planted two red-leafed ornamental maple trees in the
front yard along with a northern pecan tree beside the driveway. In the
back yard I planted a peach tree, a red delicious apple tree and two
cherry trees. They were all part of an ambitious back yard garden plan
that included strawberries, raspberries, asparagus and a vegetable plot.

We waited for several years while the fruit trees grew big enough to
finally start growing fruit. About the third or fourth year later, the
apple tree burst forth with hundreds of white blossoms after the winter
finally gave way to spring. Lori and I were so excited to see all those
blossoms because they meant we would soon enjoy the delight of
harvesting our first apples from that tree. Alas, it was not to be. A
few days later, I came home from work to learn that Emily, our oldest
daughter, had climbed into the tree and picked every last one of those
blossoms off the tree. I guess she was making "popcorn balls that would
smell so sweet" or some silly thing, but she managed to totally collect
every single one of those little white blossoms. Needless to say, she
got in big trouble for her sinister prank. Her punishment was that she
had to give me her most precious stuffed animal for the rest of the
year. I felt that she needed to understand what it felt like to lose
something that was very important to her. Then she might understand what
she had taken from me. Perhaps I over-reacted a little, but it seemed to
make some kind of twisted sense at the time.

## Living with Trees in Maine

My family moved to the state of Maine in 1989. We lived on an acre and a
half of forest. It was composed of mostly Eastern white pine trees with
a little bit of oak mixed in. One scruffy giant was directly in front of
the house beside the driveway into the garage. It was ancient and
knobby, but interesting to look at. Due to the location of the house, we
seldom experienced much direct sunlight because of all the trees.

I did plant a spruce tree in the forest there, but only because it was a
gift and I didn't know what else to do with it. Now, I always enjoy the
opportunity to plant a tree, but while I lived within such an abundance
of trees already, I decided it would also be a bit of fun to cut one
down. Allow me to explain.

After one particularly long and cold winter, we discovered that one of
the trees in the forest had died. We had a wood burning stove in the
house, so I decided I would cut down that dead tree and use it for fuel
in our stove. The technique is fairly simple, but fraught with an
element of danger. Trees as big as the dead one are large enough to
cause a great deal of damage if they fall on something like a house.
Therefore, I studied the problem for quite a while and came up with a
plan to make the tree fall in just the right direction to avoid any harm
to myself or the forest. I used my trusty Stihl chain saw to cut a notch
at the base of the tree on the side where I wanted it to fall. Then I
made the final cut on the opposite side of the tree and watched with
apprehension as the old giant slowly started to lean and fall. It
gathered more and more momentum as it continued to fall, but the
direction of the fall wasn't precisely what I had tried so hard to
engineer. There was a young tree about 40 feet tall and 8 inches in
diameter in the path of the falling giant. The big tree snapped the
smaller tree just like a little toothpick and hit the ground with a
whoosh and a big thump. The ground shook from the impact and there were
a lot of frightening snapping sounds as tree branches splintered and
flew in the air. I breathed a sigh of relief after the dust settled and
I could see that no one had been sent to heaven with my little logging
stunt. I have to admit that the excitement and the suspense of the
experience got my heart rate up pretty high. I could get used to that
kind of destructive fun.

Finally, I'll conclude my little epistle about trees with a description
of the ice storm. Probably somewhere in the vicinity of 1995 we had an
unusual weather phenomenon where the air was freezing cold at ground
level, but not at higher altitudes. The moisture in the air condensed
into rain which froze into solid ice upon reaching the ground. The ice
formed on everything to a depth of about an inch. It turned everything
in the forest into a magical crystal garden. This rare spectacle would
have been quite delightful to experience except for the fact that the
weight of the ice caused a terrible destruction of the trees in the
forest. When we woke up on the first morning after the ice storm, the
view outside looked like a war zone. Many of the trees had fallen over
due to the tremendous weight of the ice on their branches. One large oak
tree on the other side of the road in front of our house split right
down the middle. Fortunately, none of the falling trees caused any
damage to our house, but I can't say the same for the power lines that
brought us life-saving electricity in the winter months. Most of the
power distribution system in the whole state of Maine had been badly
damaged. The consequence was that we were completely without any
electricity for a period of 5 days. We managed to keep the house warm by
burning wood in our stove, but this only kept the family room warm,
while the rest of the house was like living in a refrigerator. I
remember that the greatest hardship was not having any light in the
house in the evening. We had a few candles to make a little bit of
feeble light, but it was difficult to even read a book in those
conditions.

The other frightening thing I remember was the noise in the night-time.
While I was in my bed trying to sleep, I was often awoken by the sound
of crashing branches in the forest. Many of the branches of the pine
trees had hundreds of pounds of ice clinging to them. All this weight
caused a curious thing to happen to the trees. The branches would
literally be pulled out of the trunk of the trees. Whenever a branch
finally lost its battle with gravity, there would be a sharp cracking
sound followed by a thundering crash as the branch and hundreds of
pounds of ice plummeted to the forest floor. It was difficult to sleep
under these conditions. All night long the forest echoed with the sound
of crashing ice avalanches as the trees were decimated by the load of
ice. I can imagine it might have been like the bombing raids that were
conducted at night during the world wars.

Finally, after 5 days, the power was restored and life moved on. The
experience certainly made me appreciate the simple things we had to do
without when there was no power. I could go on and on. Trees are still a
big part of my life in the state of Washington. They are a fascinating
form of life that brings beauty and richness to my mortal experience.