Stumps

“Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929”

-              John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“But the trees seemed to know me. They whispered among themselves and beckoned me nearer. And looking around, I noticed the other small trees and wild plants and grasses had sprung up under the protection of the trees we had placed there.

The trees had multiplied! They were moving. In one small corner of the world, Grandfather's dream was coming true and the trees were moving again.”

                                                         - Ruskin Bond, Rusty, the Boy from the Hills

 “Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.”

                                                       - Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

My place is a place of legions of trees. It once was old growth forest, then new growth forest. Houses have been built with a mind to keeping trees standing – with exceptions. More and more exceptions.

Old, august trees still stand – bearded with moss and pocked with lichen. Younger trees grasp at clouds, urging themselves up to similar prominence.

But it is the stumps that make me sad. I have come across stumps with a hundred or more rings. The stumps of trees that felt they would stand forever. I have seen stumps that lovingly nurse new seedlings, and small toads, and multitudes of centipedes. The saddest stumps of all are those of chopped trees. I can bear the ragged tears and gnawed bark of felled trees – their battle with furious winds or blustering storms a foolhardy but lion-hearted one. Their heroic tales remain in the mulched litter at their rooted feet. They lived well and furiously.

But chopped trees meet a repugnant and brutal death. Their exposed stumps look like skinned carcasses, their ringed lives exposed and naked. The remaining stump is antiseptic and burnished – such that it cannot nurse anything else to life. How sad that is, that we do that to trees.

I wish, instead, that we humans were like the father of a character in a book by Jennifer duBois (A Partial History of Lost Causes), who’d “clap for trees he thought were doing a good job of exploding into red during the fall”.  We would clap – and warble and exalt, as we sat upon a stump in the forest.