My Trees Are Dying I’m probably not alone in this town, but all of my trees are dying. Not just a few, but all of them except for a few incense cedars. I thought we would dodge the bullet, because in my neighborhood the beetles were only attacking the Ponderosas and were leaving the sugar pines alone. That was O.K. for me, since I just have a bunch of sugar pines. Now they’ve gotten into the sugar pines. It makes you sick to your stomach to see them go. I’ve spent lots of money on water trying to soak them, but I think I’m too late. Fortunately, when I made a swing for the kids a few years back, I put the top support between two incense cedars. Unfortunately, I am building their playhouse just downslope from an 80-foot sugar pine that is starting to go. My wife has always wanted a view of the lake. She has learned from this the adage that you have to be careful what you wish for. We have a 120-foot sugar pine that makes us feel as though we’re in an earthquake when there’s a windstorm. Since it protrudes into our deck, its many tons bash into the house and sometimes shake it violently. Once when I was painting I made the mistake of putting my head between the tree and the deck railing. A gust of wind came up and this tree almost popped my head like a water balloon. So many times I had wished that tree would die. Again, be careful what you wish for. I’m not worried about the expense of getting them cut down because I’m doing it myself. I’m getting pretty good at making even the big ones fall exactly in the direction I want them to fall. I’m just not so great at estimating how far away the top is going to land. Even so, I’m going to have to destroy my fence in a few places. That will be much cheaper than having someone cut the trees down, though. There won’t be any shortage of firewood next winter, but it’s a shame that I’ll have to be burning my own trees. I guess we’ll have to plant a garden or get a pool, with all of the sun we’re going to have in the back yard. We will no longer see nuthatches up close as they file up and down the trunks looking for bugs to eat. I’m wishing for a huge flock of them, like in the movie The Birds, to swoop down and have a monumental feast of bark beetles in my yard. But there I go wishing again. They’ll probably all come down my chimney like in the movie and I’ll regret what I had wished for. We won’t see begging squirrels tapping on the sliding glass door outside of our bedroom in the morning, because they will no longer have access to our house. And we’ll never again be torpedoed by those giant, sticky green sugar pine cones as the squirrels launch them down for a snack. I’ll be an old man before I see any of those activities again. And until then, I’ll miss them. All of these brown trees are making me worry about my neighborhood. I live on Altdorf Drive. If you look about three-quarters of the way up the slope on the south side of the lake, you will see a long swath of dead trees. This brown band basically follows Altdorf from a mile down and ends at my house. If a fire burned through those trees, it would wipe out almost every house on our street. My heart was racing the other day as I followed a line of fire trucks into our neighborhood. I don’t know what they were responding to, it looked like nothing, but the response was massive, just as they have been advertising that it will be. I can see a day coming when I am going to be very thankful for those guys. I’m going to miss all of these big, old trees, but I’m looking forward to starting the forest over again on my property. I’ll be taking the advice of Tom Bonnicksen, PhD, the Texas A&M professor of forest sciences and widely recognized forestry expert and lecturer that we recently featured in an article. I’m going to plant, and then in 10 years, cut back and thin out. I will only leave one tree intact: the giant sequoia that is going to be the new centerpiece of my yard. In it I plan to build a treehouse for my grandkids. |
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