Learning from Land

I found a desiccated maple leaf while sweeping the patio. It was this season’s leaf fallen months before its time. It still held some green, but had fallen weeks ago and lay flat on the moist bricks and was eventually covered by the bay leaves that perpetually fall to the ground. The current state of the leaves still holding onto the tree are bronze and crisp.The small leaf I placed next to the healthy foot-wide wide specimen is a toasty brown. It too has faded, but not much from the bright burnt sienna/ bronze color it held when it was still on the dying tree. It turned a dull umber when it died prematurely and fell off the canopy onto our back deck. It would be one of the last of the piles that had filled our decks and patio each Autumn for over three decades.

For 35 of its estimated 150 years we have cared for a Big Leaf Maple, trimming its branches for safety and even watering it when it showed stress during long periods of drought. We’ve swept its prodigious annual leaf fall, repaired decks and our roof when it massive limbs fell, rebuilt our deck railing to accommodate it’s growth toward our house.

We championed it, we belonged to it. It kept us cool in the summer. It’s gigantic leaves would not release from their branches until they wilted and then fell into the mix of bay leaves, redwood bark, tiny cones and soft needless leaves—though its layered canopy became one solid  umbrella often robbing our cellular signal when the leaves when in full bloom. And when the leaves did fall in late fall it gave us a better phone signal and a patio with ankle-deep leaves and other tree debris. The long strings of catkins flowers please shortly the leafing started in early March. By April our roof, gutters and deck surfaces were covered with crunchy, winged seeds.

What happens when a massive tree that despite much human intervention begins to die—its branches leaning over the house below—our house! A tree that has been growing since before our house was built, before our community was established. A tree we have loved for over 35 years; a tree that is also endangering our neighbors, though they hardly realize it. A tree that has stored an estimated thousands of pounds of climate-saving carbon in its trunks, branches and massive leaves.

A tree can be a giant. Trees in a neighborhood can be road markers, scenic guide posts, screens for privacy, swing holders, tree fort foundations and view-blockers. But not this tree. This tree is so large, its canopy so high in the air, that few people in the neighborhood can actually see it on the steep slope where it grows. It is only from the valley below that one can see its height and understand its broad spread in our neighborhood. A tree that is over 150 feet tall and nearly as many years old.

We have lived below the sweeping branches of the largest Big Leaf Maple in our county for 35 years. When we moved to this former summer cabin, the tree was already massive—a 13 trunk cluster that leaned out over a steep downhill mid-way uphill on one of the foothills on the north side of Mt Tamalpais. The area is dark, shaded and cool most of the year. It is a part of the landmark mountain’s watershed that few people recognize as such. The tree grows on a steep hill 500 feet below the valley floor. In the winter, ephemeral streams burst with water—clear and foaming white at each rock or though culvert openings under the road. This moisture helps explain how a riparian tree grew so mighty being sandwiched into the spaces between two small houses.

But for us, the tree has become an intimate part of our live. So many family and friends dinners have occurred in front of its massive trunks that pass within inches of our dining room windows. For many video calls, medical appointments, project pitches, the Big-leaf Maple became the backdrop of our lives. During the pandemic we fought the continual isolation by bringing writers, artists, readers and doers into our lives via virtual experiences—all in front of our beloved tree. But something was changing.  The tree’s cycles last longer as if was in constant motion above us. The months between dropping leaves and flowers and shedding seeds are fewer each year.

I am already getting nostalgic for the views I know we will lose. For over 34 years I did not take this viewpoint for granted. But seeing the whole tree requires one to walk up to the street or strain one’s hear so far back as to get a cinch in your neck.

There is a woodpecker high in the canopy of one of the dead parts of the tree, busy looking for bugs. The bird's rhythmic pattern jumps from one spot to another indicating few meals so far. Perhaps it is a little early. Today as the winds were building we could see the trunks sway—not just the canopy, but down lower below the roof line of the house—the telltale sign the tree is in trouble.

More of the trunks with are shedding bark their leaves shrunken, turned amber—a color never seen in the fall. They are dying—in June—in the middle of their growth and reproductive cycle. This beautiful ancient tree has become a threat.

Several trunks had heart rot which is difficult to control and probably impossible on a tree growing out of a steep slope.

The canopy is so large, so thick that at times we lose cell phone reception in the summer. It’s different this year. In every captured sunrise, sunset, eclipses, aurora borealis’s, lightening and hail storms portions of the tree appear in my photos. It didn’t matter if it was in the western or eastern skies, parts of the tree made itself ever present.

As the years have gotten warmer, the tree stopped displaying the showy autumn leaf color maples display. It holds its dying leaves longer. And now I realize that I have lived with this tree a majority of my own years on this earth.

Some personal background will help you understand how two artists decided to take responsibility for altering the course of a century’s old tree. We chose to direct our art practice to working actively outdoors because that is were we have the most affinity and comfort. In our younger years we went on weeks long wilderness trips, replaced as we aged by simple camping trips where we research projects and search for inspiration. It is our mutually-shared curiosity and experience that brought us to acts of respect for non-human systems. We both knew we could engage with disturbed environment with the knowledge and bravery needed and we have never abandoned these principles.

Building something restorative and purposeful in the environment gets community members passionate about protections and conservation that they themselves can do. It breaks down fear. It is not life altering unless it is embraced as such. Our work helps people connect with wild spaces—uniting in the protection of land and the animals and flora that belong there.

We emerged from COVID not just 3 years older, but feeling old. It would take another year to jump-start our lives again into a positive productive direction again. We walked into the proverbial woods of difficult and confusing times not knowing where and when the path would lead to light again. We focused our thoughts to the local, the land we knew best. We do not live land as in the landed class. Our house sits on hill so steep one wonders why anyone would build on it. But summer visitors did because it is refreshingly cooler than the valley 500 feet below. It took nearly 100 years to turn a typical “summer shack” as it was known, into a real home. All the while evolving next to a growing old-growth tree.

Since no gardeners were around in its early days to train and thin this Big Leaf Maple, it seems to have grown like trees with the capability to grow massive do—leaning out over the steep hill to find sunlight below the dirt path that became the narrow one-way road in front of our house.

I’m now guessing that several years back, there was not enough cold, soon enough in the late summer months, needed to set off the tree’s autumn leaf display. During our first years under its canopy, we guessed when the colors would change; what colors we would see; and when the leaf-drop would begin. The process was months the making. Some years, we would walk the road and trails of this hill looking for the perfect vantage point to gaze at its magnificent canopy embracing our home like a gentle umbrella. One of those early years, during one of those walks, we returned home to a disaster. A massive branch fell on the roof and the deck below. The branch had shaded half of our house.

That’s when tree began its metamorphosis into a cluster resembling a stalk of flowers—tightly bound by the earth—trimmed to keep its massive limbs away from the two roofs it had shaded for over a century. The years of trimming were just holding the inevitable at bay.

I have written about the massive this Big Leaf Maple in the past. I wondered what two people citizen could do. I’ve talked about a stewardship effect that any homeowner could effect. And now that time was here for us. The tree was dying before our eyes. Another two trunks had begun to shed bark. I suppose cutting down the entire tree is a symbol of some kind of transition. Certainly more not a statement than either of us have made in the past.

Logging it in a traditional manner would leave nine large stumps. The slope and angle made it impossible to remove these thick stumps without a small backhoe and crane. That would entail detaching the electrical and phone wires from the telephone pole and sections of our fence.

The problem would be multi-faceted: the tree was on a steep hill, sandwiched in by to build street side of the houses and our garden shed, the canopy leaning far out into 45 degree slope to the neighbors below.

Then there’s the carbon aspect. Can we save at least part of the wood from the tree to preserve its carbon a little longer.