I Rise to New Heights

Published in The Christian Science Monitor

            It was the dead ponderosa pine tree the bald eagle had perched in when I rode the ranch’s small motorcycle within fifty feet of the tree and stopped. The eagle looked at me but stayed where it was, less interested in me than in everything else going on around us. I said, “Hey Eagle. How’s it going for you this morning?”

            Either the eagle didn’t like the motorcycle as I began to ride on up the road along Trout Creek so I could repair fence, or it didn’t care for conversation, because it flew from the tree on up Trout Creek Valley. I rode on to my morning’s work.

            The next time I went up the narrow dirt road, I discovered that the tree had blown down. It had been dead long enough that roots rotted underground, and when Whitney Valley’s strong winds encouraged it enough, it broke roots and fell over Trout Creek and over the barbed wire fence the other side of Trout Creek. When the tree fell, it brought a large piece of the earth, still surrounding the roots above where they had broken off, with it.

            Had I looked carefully at the pulled up chunk of earth and the roots and the tree, I might have figured force vectors and angles and weights and foreseen what was going to happen, but I just figured when a tree is down, it is down. I was going to have to cut the tree, because it was on my fence, and I would have to get it off and repair the fence to keep cattle where they were supposed to be, and I might as well add the tree to my firewood. In any case, the tree probably would have behaved as unpredictably and dangerously however I approached it and wherever I started cutting.

            I rode the motorcycle home and got my pickup and my chain saw and associated tools and drove back to the fallen tree, climbed up onto the tree, walked up the tree to the top, started my saw and started cutting off limbs and cutting the main trunk into firewood lengths, working my way down the tree. Some of what I cut fell into Trout Creek, but the pieces would stop in shallows downstream, and I could fish them out when I finished cutting.

            I was halfway down the tree when it started to move, and I also started to move as fast as I could, because I understood what was happening as soon as I felt motion. The dirt surrounding the roots and the roots were tilted slightly back toward the ground from where they had come, but the weight of the tree was enough to keep gravity from pulling them back down. But I had blithely kept cutting weight from the tree until the tree lost enough weight that the root wad began moving toward its original oneness with the earth, and the tree began to move toward standing straight toward the sky again, with me on it, almost as high as what was now its top.

            The tree moved slowly at first. I long ago decided chain saws mean less than life or limb, if I can be forgiven the implied pun, and I cast the still-running machine hard away from me as I ran down the rapidly accelerating tree and leaped clear of the root wad just as it rejoined the earth, stumbled, caught my balance, caught my breath, voiced gratitude that I was not injured, and turned to look at the partially cut, upright tree.

            “Try harder to foresee everything that could happen and avoid doing stupid things that seem so simple, in hindsight, to foresee, and that could lead to serious problems,” I told myself.

            I walked over, picked up my saw, and went back to work on the tree, this time from the bottom. The sun still shone and all was still right with the world, even for the eagle, who was resourceful enough to find many more good perches from which to watch over Trout Creek Valley.