There was a tree in the park near my house. It's a wooded park, a trail through a fairly thin strip of woods and streams and paved pathways, so there are quite a lot of trees, but this one was my favorite.
I used to walk in the park at least once a week, from the start just downhill from my development. The early part of the path was downhill, and then mostly flat across several miles. There was a number of pretty bridges over the streams. There were turns and curves, and longer straight stretches. The path was nestled in between rises, on the other side of which were houses, but the path down far enough that it felt quiet and away. There were places where woodpeckers hollowed out holes in older trees, and places where bamboo kept coming up despite the park service's best efforts.
Along one of the places prone enough to flooding and marshiness that there was a raised boardwalk there rather than an asphalt walkway, there was a sycamore tree. Sycamores are one of the more common trees in the woods, but this one was mine.
It would not have stood out for me, except that in a summer storm in 2010 it was bowed over until its top was touching the ground. I assumed it would die from this injury, but weeks went by and it kept living, trying to send up new growth to find its way upright again. By November it was clear that it was still alive, tough curved into nearly a half-circle. On impulse, on one of my walks I started gathering long, forked fallen branches to prop it up. I pushed it back up to a roughly 45 degree tilt on the first day, and made a habit of checking on it every time I went on a walk.
I added new crutches as old one fell away or were removed, and in a few weeks I had it nearly to upright. I kept it propped through the winter, when snowstorms added weight to it in unexpected ways. When spring came, it struggled a bit, but by summer it was full and healthy and lovely again.
It had a nearly dogleg curve in its trunk, from where it had grown at an angle after the storm.
I kept an eye on it, worrying in the winters, and delighting in the emergence of new growth in the springs. When storms came through, as storms will, I worried about it when the winds were thrashing the trees. It grew and straightened through the seasons, and started shedding its juvenile brown bark for the bone white trunk of a mature tree.
I loved that woods, loved places in it well enough to choose them for scattering the ashes of some of my cats when they passed. Sometimes, when I felt a little reverence was needed, I'd take suet cakes to those places, to leave in memory of loved ones. I'd take a cake for my tree as well.
I thought You will make it. You will grow deeper and stronger, and one day, when your branches reach out so far that you can shade the path, and your leaves are broader than dinner plates, that time that you nearly died will be no more than a little swirl in your grain, a little extra character, somewhere down nearer your heartwood, but layered over with years and years of prosperity and safety. I had so much hope for it.
Last year, the county scheduled maintenance on the sewer lines that ran through the park. The pipes would need to be cleaned and relined, some replaced. To do the work, they'd have to bring in heavy equipment, and to manage the passage of that heavy equipment, they had to clear a path in the park, and over it lay down mulch and ties.
They marked the path the repairs would take with ties and stakes.
My sycamore was on it. My sycamore would be cut down.
When I expressed my distress and upset about this, people didn't seem to understand. Why couldn't I transplant the tree (dig up a tree more than twenty feet high from property I do not own plant it... where?) or make cuttings (my tree would still be dead. It was not a rare specimen where I was heartbroken to be losing the type. I did not want to lose that particular tree). Or they seemed to just think I was being weird, being upset about one particular tree in a wood that was going to lose quite a few trees.
My sycamore was cut down this spring.
The repairs went through the summer. This fall, the repair and construction completed, and the companies that brought in the material to make the path began the equally slow process of unmaking it again. The wooden ties went away. The mulch was shoveled and hauled. Seeds were sown and soil retention cloths put down over the places left bare. It took very little time for a new layer of green to start growing in the damaged places.
But my tree is gone, and I like the woods less these days.
We do not always get to recover.
