In Defense of Trees

https://web.facebook.com/ipsum.novus

In Defense of Trees

By Michael A. Bengwayan

Trees have no teeth.  That is the reason why most fall down in Indonesia, why pine stands drop dead and silent from loggers’ chainsaws in the Philippines, and why Himalayan larches crackle in fireplaces in energy-starved Nepal.

Trees have no teeth but have very quiet voices—which is distinct  disadvantage in a competitive world. Fortunately for them, we need them.  And we need them for reasons that man has always found persuasive.  We believe that without them, the atmosphere will choke up, the icecaps will melt, and before we can say reforestation, one of our most precious resources of renewable energy will have been lost.

That is at the root, so to speak.  Of man’s concern for the tree.  That is why forestry programs  are implemented and thousands of acres of trees planted from China to the hills of Scotland.

But there is more to trees than oxygen, carbon or chlorophyll.  A bird, a common house sparrow told me so.  So I say this tongue in cheek.

It happened when two very old two pine trees were felled by my neighbor, a policeman (armed with a tree cutting permit and nailed close to my fence for the purpose that I read it because I stopped all earlier attempts).  The trees have stood there forever and have been taken for granted as part of the scenery, greening our view to the forest every summer, pleasantly as kids romped over the grass in glee.

I went outside and stood as they cut the two trees.  There were six big guys with two chainsaws, the policeman and his family with two other burly fellows who also looked as cops, the barangay chairman with three of his kagawad and some neighbors.   They were all making sure that the two trees will fall down this time and I could not stop them.

The woodcutters discussed how to do the cutting, measured up the trees, paced out where they were to fall and decided how they would be dispatched. The victims, voiceless as I said, stood silent.

One of the men spidered into the canopy of the tree, deftly severed some limbs and attached a big nylon rope.  Two other men fitted a hand winch and attached it to the other tree.  The rope was snarled to life and was put to work  against a steel electric post.

The job was professionally executed, passively accepted by the onlookers and seemed somewhat slightly immoral, reminiscent of whaling where man’s superiority is so obscenely exploited..

It was all over in an hour.  The cutters and onlookers peering at me while the trees were being hacked  to death by roaring chainsaws and machetes.  All the burgeoning growth of long passed seasons—summer, rainy days—the travails of almost 100 years, so easily and swiftly brought to an end.

When the trees fell,  it echoed in the mountain and sent shock waves to the nearby pine forest, into the tiny glen painted by strawberry gardens, to the Longlong Elementary school where pupils lifted their heads and the hillside grass blades quivered.

My onlooking neighbors’’ faces were expressionless.  The policeman and his wife laughed  contentedly. The treecutters shouted to speed up their job.  And I stood silently.  Only the taut nylon rope seemed nervous.  The chainsaws on the ground purred after their kill.

At that moment,  I heard the house sparrows call, a distant mewing from the eaves of my house that sheltered them from rain.  House sparrows are not unusual on the perip[hery of rural life.  The treecutters and their audience did not hear the birds.  They were intent watching the limbs being cut from the tree trunks.  The men muttered how many board feet the trunk will make, from the time the seedling popped from the soil when the country was sold by the Spanish for a measly 15 million dollars, through the American occupation, one World War, man’s first visit to the moon,  and to this very day that I helped vote for a leader I hoped will stop once and for all, any tree cutting in the country.

As the treecutters sat over to chew momma before slicing the tree trunks into timber, I turned around towards the house sparrows’ cry.  The birds left their station, swung down in uncertain ellipses, nervously impelled and flew over where the fallen trees stood.  They swooped over, crying all the while in full sound, mellow and poignant.  They hovered for a minute, called eerily, swept down and upward from 10 feet from the ground .  And were gone.

Everything was still.  A message was sent.  Clear in that stillness of the morning.  I can play it over and over.  A message without words, enigmatic, difficult to construe or misconstrue.

Did they mourn for a loss of a nesting site?  Could it be idle curiosity?  Inquisitiveness?  My experience has no neat explanation within the comfortable parameters of human logic..

My indigenous being tells me the sparrows lifted the spirit of the pine trees on their broad soft wings and carry these to the forests of eternity beyond the horizon.

If birds can emphatize with a tree, how can man, the wisest of all creatures, can’t?

I returned to my house, choose two good pine saplings. I walked, half limped to where the tree cutters and their supporters stood. They gazed at me blankly. I went  near where the trees fell and  planted the two pine seedlings.

No one talked. No one moved.

I walked away.