An Old Rant (my neighbor mutilates his trees)
An Old Rant (my neighbor mutilates his trees)
Rough #3
This 25-year-old rant is from another time and place (it’s NOT about my current neighbors), but it still feels fresh and true to me. I was reminded of it this week as I was admiring the trees on my current little lot, the ones that were here before me and the ones I’ve planted, noticing how big some of them have become, and loving the way they glow when the sun hits them right.
Not everyone sees them as I do.
Circa 1997, while we lived in Fairmont, WV (transcribed from my handwritten notes)
My neighbor mutilates his trees.
A once beautiful little honey locust that he planted in his yard when we moved here — mercilessly topped each year, and now an 8-inch diameter trunk and only 8 feet tall. It valiantly comes back with a burst of beautiful branches each spring (though slower now, I think), and each fall he cuts them off again.
The same thing with a pair of pitiful birch trees next to his house. He told me about them once, about how things haven’t lasted as he wanted, that they are sickly and almost didn’t make it through the winter a couple years back, and how he treated them with some chemical that kept them going. Of course they’re trying to endure the same abuse the honey locust gets.
And there was the sassafras tree that was somehow unscathed for the first couple years we lived here. I had the naïve thought that it might escape butchery, because it’s out at the corner of his lot, next to mine, behind a little toolshed where he can’t really see the offending free-growing branches. It was becoming an admirable little tree. But I was wrong, of course. Last year, off goes the top.
Seek first to understand...
But it’s beyond me to understand this man or his kind (he is by no means unique). This is how he wants things. He sees no ugliness in what he does. He didn’t shudder at the thought of trimming the row of beautiful rhododendrons against the side of his house just as they were beginning to truly flourish (and hide some of the white vinyl siding). Instead he happily chopped and chopped until he had a neat little hedge. I wanted to cry; he proudly pointed to his work and said “they was getting a little high.”
It’s ignorance, it’s ugliness, this dominance of nature mentality, the manicured lawn ideal, where a tree or a bush is nothing more than an ornament on a chemically maintained monoculture yard — a bit more work than a plastic ornament, but a bit prettier, and with no more value to the owner.
I do penance and mitigation for my neighbor’s sins. There was one tree on our ¼-acre lot when we came here. I planted and planted, and now I have some nice-sized, healthy trees across from his mutilated ones. But I can still see them over there, like the sociopathic neighbor boy Sid and his mutant toys in Toy Story.
I’m a libertarian, basically. But I can’t look over there without thinking that no one should be allowed to do such deeds. Perhaps if you cannot be responsible with land, and aesthetic in some way, you shouldn’t be permitted to own it.
I hope I’ve become more serene since I wrote that, a better Stoic. I think the actions of other people are more likely to make me sad now than angry. But I’m still doing penance and mitigation, still planting trees, still trying to model a better path. A lot of us are, and sometimes it feels futile, but we persist. And I feel the balance is shifting, that as the years go by there might be more of us and fewer of him.
