Requiem for a Tree

a send-off for a cedar

At first I didn’t even like the tree. It blocked my view.

It wasn’t a special or important tree. A deodar cedar, or Himalayan cedar, is a common tree in Portland and just about everywhere else. But it was big, which meant that it was old, which made it impressive.

It didn’t take long for me to understand that it wasn’t blocking my view. It was my view.

Its cones were white, and they stood straight up and glowed against the deep shadowy branches. The first time I saw those cones emerge, I thought the tree had been visited by a flock of white birds.

The best view of the tree was from my bedroom window. I would look out at it when I couldn’t sleep. That’s what I’ll miss it the most, waking up in the middle of the night and seeing it loom over the rooftops against a dark sky, and imagining that it is full of sleeping birds.

Portland only occasionally gets snow, but that’s when the tree was at its best. While we humans worried about slipping on the ice and our pipes freezing and the roads closing, the cedar was majestic. It wore the snow like a fur coat.

On those nights I would wake up even more often, because I was so curious about what the winter storm was bringing our way. I’d look out the window and there would be the tree, its branches pillowy with snow, and it seemed to be looking back at me and saying: “It’s all right. I’m out here in the ice. You stay in there where it’s warm.”

The tree was a very different kind of creature than me, and the snow always reminded me of that.

I’m not surprised that it had to be cut down. It leaned precariously across the street. Not one but two apartment buildings stood directly in its path. It didn’t belong in a little sidewalk strip, it belonged in a forest.

Which this neighborhood once was. From its perspective, we were the ones in the wrong place.

But here we are.

When a red ribbon appeared around the tree, with a notice attached to it announcing the end of its life, my heart ached for it.

“Poor doomed tree,” I said to my husband as we walked by and read the notice. “I bet it doesn’t know why it has a ribbon around it.”

“It probably thinks it’s getting a plaque,” he said.

Oh, that crushed me! Of course it would’ve hoped for a plaque! Over the roofs of the apartment buildings across the street, it could see the tops of two venerable old elms that both have plaques. It had been watching those elms since before I was born.

What do they have, the cedar might’ve wondered, that I don’t have?

They can’t even hold onto their leaves. They just stand around all bare in the winter. I’m out here every December looking as luscious as a Christmas tree, the cedar must’ve thought, and I get passed over for a plaque?

The tree’s inglorious end came this week. Taking down a hundred-foot-plus tree is no small feat: the street was closed, people had to move their cars, and for three days an armada of very specialized trucks arrived to hoist men and chain saws into the branches.

At the end of the first day, it looked like it had just been given a very terrible haircut.

At the end of the second day, there was nothing left but the trunk. Just a lone, crooked pole where a tree had once been.

I couldn’t bear to see it like that. It was undignified. In my grief I went through all of my sketchbooks, looking for paintings of the tree. I chose my favorites, made some color copies, and walked over with a box of thumbtacks.

At least on its last night, it wasn’t just a pole. It was an art gallery.

People stopped to talk to me while I was putting my pictures up. A guy asked me if the wood would be reused for something, and I said I didn’t know. A woman from one of the apartment buildings across the street said that she and her neighbors were in a group text, talking all day about how they were sad to see it go, but they understood why it had to happen. A guy from the other apartment building stopped to show me some pictures he’d taken of the tree. The mail carrier sighed and shook her head.

I went home, but I kept my eye on the much-diminished tree from my window. A steady stream of people stopped to look at the pictures I’d put up. They took photos, which I thought was nice. Often two or three people would stop at the same time and talk to each other about the tree, which was even better. I watched a guy who lives across the street take one of my pictures—which I expected, I put up two copies of each, figuring that would happen—and he rolled it up carefully in a way that made me think that he might hang it on his wall.

I like to think of my drawing hanging on his wall after the tree is gone.

On the morning of the third day, the man whose house sat behind the tree came outside when the crew arrived, carefully unpinned what remained of my drawings, and took them inside. Then a man harnessed himself to the tree, climbed to the top, and grabbed a rope that was dangling from a crane and attached that to the top of the tree. Then he lowered himself down ten or twenty feet and took a chainsaw to the trunk. The crane lifted that top section off and deposited it gingerly in the back of a truck. In this fashion the man worked his way down the tree, until noon, when it was gone. The crew maneuvered another machine over to the stump and ground it away until there was nothing but a pile of sawdust.

I couldn’t stop looking at the place where the tree used to be, the way you can’t help pushing your tongue into the gap where your tooth fell out.

I wanted to do something else to mark its absence. Every sad song of lost love was on rotation in my mind, so I made some missing tree flyers, put the lyrics on the little tear-off tags where the phone numbers go, and posted them on telephone poles up and down the street.

They’ll probably stay up for a day or two. Then I guess I’ll start getting used to looking out the window where a Himalayan cedar used to be and seeing Mount Adams instead.

Here’s a branch I picked up after the crews left. This was the last time I drew that tree from life.

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Supporters are painting birds

We’re continuing a series of bird paintings. We started with pencil drawings, then did ink and watercolor, then watercolor and colored pencil, and now we’re doing gouache. (But if you’re not into gouache, you can do this one in watercolor!)

We’re also scheduling a live Zoom for next week, where we’ll paint many small birds in a very relaxed, casual style.

For just a few bucks a month, you can join us, get these tutorials in your inbox once a week, and support this whole enterprise. You’ll also get access to quite a substantial archive aimed at helping you to do just about anything in a sketchbook. Join us!

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The bit at the end

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