~by Colleen O’Brien
A mature, healthy, perfectly shaped oak tree towering on the corner of W. Lincoln Way and Grimmel Road was cut down recently to make way for a sidewalk.
The sidewalk plan probably didn’t mention specifically killing this tree when the need for a sidewalk was proposed in city council and public meetings posted for the public. For months, the decision to build a very long sidewalk in the southwest corner of town was community known and available to be discussed. The sidewalk will be constructed along S. Grimmel Road, W. Lincoln Way and Westwood Drive. These are not currently well-traveled walking areas; installing sidewalks will make it possible for us to walk this beautiful, naturally treed area of town; and if that is its purpose – and with plenty of information having been made available to all, I support the idea.
Besides beautifying my world, shading me from two to nine degrees below a climate-changed summer temperature, making me feel comfortable as leaves released cool moisture, I loved all the trees every day I was living in Jefferson this past summer. I was happy being under them, seeing them from afar, gazing at beauties through my sister’s front window, saying good morning and good evening to the lone beauty on the northeast corner of my apartment building, I unaware of its destiny.
Walking and driving Jefferson this summer, I was in Druid heaven [ancient Ireland, in which every tree was a protective and protected spirit]. Our tree-shaded streets, Chatauqua Park with its oaks and Henderson Park with its cottonwoods, plus farmsteads in Greene County whose shade trees surround the house – Jefferson territory is not only the center of the universe for me but a haven.
My affinity for trees has to do with growing up in Jefferson under its rows of Dutch elms on every street – which, like the ash trees, died because of an invader that even more so than the ash borer denuded the town. The peak of that first invasion hit in the mid-to-late 1960s, killing enough elms to make Jeff look like the prairie town it started out as in the 19th century.
More than 600 new trees, many of the ash trees, were distributed to Jefferson residents with the help of entities like Home State Bank. The town and its people planted, the canopy eventually returned . . . and then another pest arrived. Once again, Jefferson began cutting down sick trees and this time, replacing with a wide variety.
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My sister and I bedroomed on the second floor of our home, where we were friends of the boxelder trees outside our window.
I spent endless hours climbing those trees and hiding out. And I gazed out my window at them a lot, dreaming my future. I also carried on conversations with the squirrels and birds who lived in them. My sisters and I raked leaves to build living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, closet, front door and back door on the south side of our yard every autumn. And, quite soon in my growing up, spying on my boyfriend as he pedaled by on his bike. My sister and I learned to play our Johnnie Matthis and Little Richard Rock n’ Roll music in front of the window because we discovered that it encouraged second-story conversations with passing bike traffic.
Living my adulthood in climates scant on deciduous trees has made me love 100-foot-tall leafy trees all the more. I was only 21 – too involved with myself to realize what I was missing — when I moved to San Diego: it is a desert town of six to 10 inches of precipitation a year [this counts fog but does not count lawn sprinklers irrigating all yards], and tidy trees that manage to grow to about 10 feet. Then, I lived at a 6500-foot elevation in the Sierra Nevada where 99.9 percent of the trees are conical firs – tall, yes, but cone-shaped, unclimbable. Then I moved to Floriduh, where the main “tree” is a palm — actually a grass, its exoticness losing its romance because it offered shade only if I stood directly under it on the un-sunny side.
Unbeknownst to me in my daily life with husband, children, dogs, job and house, I was simmering all those years, longing for real trees.
Living in my old hometown all summer, I soothed my psyche in Jefferson with its huge sycamores, oaks, maples, catalpas, locusts and hackberrys. I was proud of my town for replacing ash trees bored to death by EAB – the lethal Emerald Ash Borer that “decimates all native North American ash species.” [IA Dept. of Natural Resources]
New street trees – the good ones named above plus plane tree, Kentucky coffee tree and tree lilac – line many of Jeff’s parkings now. They are well taken care of and they and more to come will prosper and save our status as Tree City USA as well as nourish our need for nature.
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In a town thoughtful and forward-looking like Jefferson, I was heart-struck when my friend told me after I left town that the sanctuary of our perfect oak tree on a 90-degree day as my friend and I met under it to take a walk was no longer there. Engineering a sidewalk that would go around an oak in the oak hammock area of southwest Jefferson was not the final decision, if in fact it was considered; thus, “a gone girl” – that oak under which I talked to my friend and that I said “Hello, Tree,” to twice a day as I left or returned to my apartment on the large, grassy, shaded area, corner of Grimmel and Lincoln.
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Since then, ironically, a poet mentor of mine who loved trees has died: Wendell Berry died on August 31, just after I left town. He spent the majority of his 92 years on earth as a diligent Kentucky farmer moonlighting as an English professor, poet, essayist, novelist, cultural critic and environmentalist.
“The grace of the world” is a phrase in Berry’s poem, The Peace of Wild Things. The poem is about finding what we all need right now: solace, quietude and freedom from human anxiety and despair through the existence of the natural grace that is Earth.
I am not blaming engineers, politicians or busy townspeople for cutting down a perfectly healthy giant for a sidewalk that will enable folks to walk a pretty path of many trees. But even as I ask, “What’s one tree, Colleen?” I think about possible adaptations to our shortcuts with nature in this deadly era of climate crisis.
From Wendell Berry: “The care of the earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all, our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
