I love my yard and garden, and I would do just about anything to make it nice,
except weed it or bend over to pick things up instead of running them over with
the lawn mower.
So it was with feelings of real vexation that I noticed that one of our trees
was leaning--a mulberry tree.
Now, you may be thinking that it's not unusual for trees to lean. They can't
all be straight up and down. But this tree was really leaning, not to the right
and to the left--just to the right. If it leaned much more, it was going to
fall right over.
Now, if this were a tower in Pisa, I might have been looking at significant
tourism potential. But it being a mulberry tree leaning in the direction of
all the wires looping across our yard and attaching themselves to our house
at a major fixture electricians call the mast, my immediate potential looked
a lot like the 14th century.
No PC? No Internet? That's just the beginning. Try no dryer, no track lights,
no telephone. We'd be down to battery power. In essence, we'd be camping.
And, reliable sources tell me that it's no small thing to reattach a mast to
a house. Contemplate a $4,000 bill. Contemplate being made of such stern stuff
that you would entertain competitive bids on such an emergency item. "What,
you can't fix it cheaper?" The problem was so vexing that I went directly to
bed.
In the morning, I exited my back door to see that the mulberry tree, which
had been leaning at 30 degrees from vertical when I retired, was now leaning
at a 45-degree angle. Its branches were enmeshed with the looping electrical
wires. It looked like it could fall at any moment. Quick, I asked myself: What
would someone who knows about such things do? Not getting an answer, I dashed
to my garage and pulled out five 2-by-6 boards of various lengths from 7 to
10 feet. One by one, I jammed these boards under the reeling tree's trunk, propping
the tree up, then levering the trunk backward until I had eased some of the
pressure on the lines, which were bent into the shape of a very broad letter
V.
My mulberry looked like a tree in a Dr. Seuss book, held up by a series of
wavering crutches.
All my neighbors crowded around to see my handiwork, a tree caught in midfall.
The electric lines still bent in midline, with the tree leaning on them like
a drunk on a bar. Ultimately, of course, the tree came down. I hired a crack
team of tree surgeons code-named Blue Chip to take it out. I stood in an upstairs
window while they surgically eliminated one stress point after another, and
the V disappeared. Having no wires as hostage, the mulberry tree was hideously
vulnerable, and a few Z's of the chain saw brought it hurtling down. As I stood
looking down on its mighty hulk, I pondered the choice that faces each of us--our
technology or our trees.
There will be many who say: I vote for the tree. But these, without exception,
are people who don't have to spend $4,000 to boot back up. Why did the tree
fall over? Root rot appeared to be the answer. But a better question is: Why
don't they all fall over?
In the fullness of time, there is not one tree that will not fall. And if you
do not take pains, starting today, to police your patch of green, may God have
mercy on your mast.
America's Best Loved Futurist™, Michael also writes Future Shoes, appearing
Fridays on computeruser.com.
