A Walker in the Suburbs

Once you look for them, they’re everywhere. The giant oaks that give our neighborhood much of its character, that shade us in the summer and through whose branches the winter wind blusters and moans — these trees are dying.

We have two dead trees in our yard now; we’re waiting for the winter discount rates to take them down. But we’re not alone. On my walks through the neighborhood I spot more dead or dying trees than I can count. It’s the drought, arborists say. Or it’s simply their time.

Dead trees have been in the local news recently, too, since a 140-year-old oak with root rot blew down in a storm, crushed a car and killed its driver. This sparked a search for other ailing trees on state rights-of-way. And now chain saws are buzzing all over Fairfax County.

I drove past a work crew yesterday at an intersection where I often stop. What used to be closed and private is now open and exposed. It’s safer now, that’s true. But it has lost its character.

The other day I cleared a three-foot square patch of ground to plant a crepe myrtle we bought over the weekend. I’ve wanted crepe myrtle for years, admired the pluck and the late summer color of the tree. We may not have enough sunlight for the plant but we decided to take the plunge anyway. All we have to lose is a few dollars and the time we spend planting and watering.

The plot where we planted the crepe myrtle is a three-foot square in front of our deck, a spot once inhabited by bamboo. I didn’t know just how inhabited until I started to dig and found root after root after root — although to call them roots does not do them justice. They are actually runners with roots attached, and they claim the soil with a vengeance.

I shoveled and yanked, pried and sliced; I struggled an hour and a half with a job I thought would take me 15 minutes. And the whole time I was thinking: So this is what rooted means. Not just planted or anchored, but bound to the earth with every fiber.

Every year at this time I think about the order of spring colors. The yellows come first — forsythia and daffodil — followed by the pink of the flowering cherries and the blooming oaks. If we’re lucky and it doesn’t warm up too quickly, spring in these mid-Atlantic climes will last six to eight weeks. The light hues will give way to vivid purple and fuschia from the tulips and azaleas. Spring is a three-act play of color. And one of its opening scenes is the willow tree. It is the billowy curtain that sways in the March sun. Push it aside, hear the hum of summer in its bended branch.

Spring may be here, the trees may be budding, but branches are still gaping open-mouthed from their winter wounds. Split, shorn and lightened by a snow storm that happened almost two months ago now, the trees are ready for new life. Ready for their camouflage of green. In a few weeks the damage will be obscured. But I will remember the broken places. I will feel tenderly toward those trees.

On a late afternoon walk against the wind, I see the forested section of Folkstone with bleak clarity: the trees beside the houses, the tall trunks, the unrelenting verticality of the winter woods.

In the summer you can lose yourself in green; in winter the gray limbs do not hide the split-levels and center-hall colonials. You are in a neighborhood, all right. You are not in a forested idyll. The trees are a slim buffer, a thin no-man’s land between property lines. In the winter it is harder to pretend.

As we rush toward the solstice, as fall gives way to winter, consider for a moment the nearly bare tree. Dark trunk, tangle of limbs and — like so many prayer flags flying — the last autumn leaves, slender salutes to a fading season.

After months of having more leaves than we can count (or rake), the scene is as much about the absence as the presence, as much about the silence as the music. It is as if these last few leaves, so sparse, so perfect, so wan and lonely, are saying, here we are — look longingly on us world. You will not see us again for many months.

They are the last curtain call, the single painting on an expansive wall.

In the 21 years we’ve lived here we’ve lost a lot of our big, beautiful red oaks. They have been toppled by hurricanes, blown down by heavy winds and parched by heat. The first tree experts we called in were sensitive folk with college degrees and a calm, Zen-like manner. They didn’t so much diagnose our trees as they did feel their pain. More recently, we’ve hired daredevil cowboys who would as soon fell a tree as look at it. In other words, our attitude as tree owners has paralleled our evolution as parents. The longer we’ve been doing it, the more casual we’ve become.
Until now.
Something is killing our trees. We’ve lost five in the last two years, and hey, we don’t have an infinite number here. So yesterday another tree expert visited our house. What’s killing our trees, he said, is drought. Let the watering begin.