Up close beauty

It used to be a better view

Years ago, we bought a densely wooded lot in our town and built the home where we raised our children.  

I visited the site the day they cleared, and found the builder standing alone at the edge of the area, arms crossed, eyes scanning the terrain and the stumps and stray limbs that lay everywhere. 

"It's so violent," he said quietly.

He was right. There's no other word for it. When healthy trees come down, there's no other word for the sight and sound of it.

Eight years ago, we sold that home and moved to a smaller, secluded property in the woods.

I had to get used to it – the trees on all sides were right there and I felt crowded.  But because I am also a solitary person who loves privacy, I loved the tranquility inside my circle of trees. For eight years, I have done my most thoughtful work and found the easiest connection with my soul looking into those trees.

Our neighbor wants a better view.

Two Sundays ago, he dropped by.  "Hey," he said, getting out of his pickup, "Just want to let you know, we'll be clearing some trees. Actually," he chuckled, eyeing his property line, "a lot of trees."

We are on a hillside which rises behind us to a ridge where three houses sit in a row, all with views out to mountains far in the distance. In front, our property slopes to the street below. One neighbor behind us has cleared everything down to our property line to enhance his view, leaving us with a skimpy barrier of only a few trees. His neighbor, our Sunday visitor, would follow suit, clearing  straight down to the road below.   

He had a few acres - birches, hemlocks and oaks. They'd all go. And like our barrier disappeared behind us, so would our barrier to the right be thinned to almost nothing.

"Happy to take some of yours too, if you want, I'd be willing," said our neighbor.

Of course he would be. What's better than a better better view?

It began at once. From a bedroom window, I saw the glint of equipment through the branches, and felt the earth rumble with the vibration of treads. I heard the sound of saws and the whine of mammoth earth-clearing machines as they crawled up and over the hilly terrain.

It's hard to watch. Machines rumble through with extended arms that grasp the tree around the trunk like a brute seizing a victim's neck. Then, they yank, and finally rip the compromised tree from its roots.  When those trees are first torn from their place, a disturbing moment follows when the jaws of the equipment shake them free of any remaining connection to the earth.

Four days later, a forest was gone, and a fence of spindly survivor-trees stood swaying alone.  

It's his property, of course. It's his right.  

Little can be done to thwart the will of such people once they have the money and opportunity along with the legal right to do as they see fit. But there is only one kind of reasoning that grips people who remove real beauty to look at the picture of it, too far away to be real or flawed, and it is: because they feel like it.

It's so violent.