Forgotten Unicorns, or Where to Know Where
The most exhausting day of work since summer came in cutting down the "Trees of Heaven" (more like trees of hell) along the steep south slope of the property. I killed those trees first a month prior with a surgical kind of poison I learned about from the Penn State extension, College of Agriculture site. If you went down and just hacked away, as had been done, the plant signals the trauma and responds by sending up multiple shoots from the submerged root structure, turning the initial invasion of two or three plants to a platoon of, what was now, 30 to 40 shoots, tree trunks, branches and leaves each blocking the light over the native species beneath. These invaders came in with loads of broken concrete and asphalt fill some years prior when we finally removed the decaying underground pool. Those weed trees grew, posing as Sumac, poisoning the beauty of the native forest, clinging to the volcanic stones beneath those opportunist roots. Still the veracity of life proved nearly unstoppable as a nearly unpassable craggy of bramble, thorns, vines, shrubs, and one small but fierce maple fought it's way up alongside the faster growing and light-greedy Sumac from Hell. The surprise I encountered was the exhaustion and pain it took to clear that small slope of invaders and subsequently gather and arrange the remains on the steep forest floor below the decline. By the time I had finished I was drenched in sweat, despite the cooler autumn days. Of all of the projects of summer, including the Stairs to Nowhere, 15 steps made from thick reclaimed pallet wood providing access the lower property (named subsequently and more precisely with the alternative spelling "Stairs to Know Where"), this was the most grueling and exhausting. Clearing the invasive growth along, what would seem an insignificant slope to gain access to the now dead, still standing, trees, was a challenge not calculated. The slow descent, clearing of pathways, securing of footing and, as safely as possible, chain-sawing the soft, but thick enough, trunks, planning the direction of the fall, felling and moving the intact pieces, required a kind of grit I had not anticipated. The stairway construction too were grueling but could be developed in a kind of rhythmic meter, one or two steps at a time and with a controlled construction. This work in contrast, clearing the slope of certain plants, was exhaustion and danger seemingly innocent, but ultimately not. My brother, referencing biblical warnings, called it "toil". (Gen 3:18 "Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produced thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat of the plants of the field.") Along with this and not so calculated at the start of this effort was my daughter's reproach.
"Daddy! Daddy!!" I head her scream over the loud hum of the chainsaw at work.
"Yes?" I called back, killing the chainsaw motor after felling the last tree in the first cluster.
"Daddy, how could you kill those tress?" she asked in bold anger.
"Honey, these are invasive species. They kill the other trees by stealing their sun. Do you see how many thrive here?", I said.
She nodded, looking down from the edge of the recline, but wasn't convinced entirely and neither was I at some level. I was killing one species for the benefit of the others mostly for its offense to my idea of beauty and harmony. I was sawing down dozens of young trees, after killing them with poison in order, mainly, to restore the view. This was an exercise for beauty, to "restore", a design exercise. I put back on my fogged and sweat dripped eye protection, yanked the cord until the motor hummed back to life, and finished the job. Then I climbed back up, thorns poking through my trousers, surprisingly exhausted, and surveyed the scene. Despite the violence of the eradication, the area was visibly improved, more "natural" though, in all reality, I had no clue which of the many plant species under that canopy were in fact "native" to the land.
I surveyed the surrounds more information in the dense ecosystem around our home, from the many legged crawling things that appear from the damp basement to our newly re-discovered Redback Salamanders, to the occasional bear, bands of deer, sly fox who appear mid day to harvest the neighbor's chickens, the active night skunks that occasionally spray the neighborhood dogs, and the vast array of birds, even hawks and eagles circling overhead in search of rabbit and rodent. I looked around for still yet more examples and spied the frog perched atop the pond stones beneath the feet of the Virgin Mary effigy, a station that remained of our near ancestry. The frogs, two of them, learned over time, to ignore the many non-threats around, to the point where they don't even budge when the lawn mover is passing half a meter from the water. No movement or change now to the people, dogs, cats, "Harry Potter" our resident ground hog, the squirrels and chipmunks, the steady flow of domestic and wild birds. With the domestic pecking below the feeder and the wild ones each harvesting from their respective stations, and largely in turn by species above, especially when being fed by the premium feed - woodpeckers, wrens, finches, jays, crows, grackle, bluebird, cardinal, oriels, and the vast array of migrating birds that seem to find temporary station near our low Japanese Maple orbit, squirrel proof feeder. When fear is removed and something akin to trust is present between the species, even potential predators and prey, there is an essence of "the garden", the origin, a place before the "toil" my brother keenly celebrates when the tending pain surfaces. Like, when a week prior, we moved several cords of wood, gripping one or two pieces at a time, loading them in the pickup and unloading at destination. Being the passenger in the cab, it happened I was tossing the logs using mainly the left hand which would not be even remotely noteworthy save for the subsequent days of swelling and pain for using the muscles like a lobster claw for those several hours. Even after a full summer of exercise and physical labor, this new gesture was enough to culminate in swelling and pain from the routine. Still in the midst of this, I couldn't find a sufficient answer and why I couldn't so simply answer "for the beauty of it" and speak that simply to my daughter. I was killing in my arrangement of the land, "my" land, here at our address "Tecumseh Path", Tecumseh, the great Shawnee leader killed in the war of 1812, defending his people's native lands, working with the British to 'retake' their right to rule and sovereignty from those who currently occupied the space. A thoughtful rendering of such, immortalized in account, among our recent time, by Jacob Lawrence, in a painting we saw and recognized by name, Tecumseh, in that grand temple of cultures, on once wild Manhattan island.
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