Last night the hemlock tried to nail the house again. This time it failed.
We live in an area that is mixed rural and forest. Just down the street is the river, and across the river is an escarpment that’s the outlier of the Cascades. Western Hemlock, Douglas Fir, and Big Leaf Maple are the most common big trees here, with scattered alder and cottonwood in the understory, especially of disturbed land. The trees used to grow big here—we started as a logging and milling town until we ran out of trees, then switched to agriculture—hops and dairy as the most common. Now we still have some dairy farms, but we’re mostly a rural area becoming an outlier of Seattle, a bedroom community for the tech workers at the big companies downtown and around the lake—Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and lots of smaller outfits.
My home sits on a lot that was cleared back in the 70s except for a half-dozen maples and two hemlocks. In the past 25 years I’ve taken down five of the six maples as they were beginning to split apart, dropping branches onto the house and spearing the roof. I miss the shade, but I’d rather have the trees miss the house. Ten years ago one of the hemlocks broke halfway up during a windstorm and dropped onto the house, destroying only the corner bedroom, but leaving a 20 foot stump.
The stump became a favorite spot for squirrels and birds. For a while there was a huckleberry bush on the top. But the stump’s been slowly decomposing, attracting woodpeckers and other birds seeking the grubs and bugs burrowing into the rotting trunk. There seemed to always be squirrels, too, digging into the trunk to create holes. I don’t know why; maybe it’s something squirrels do to hide their own food, or to look for something they buried earlier and forgot.
And last night it was finally too much. Maybe it was the near-month long freezing and thawing we have had since the storm in February that dropped almost 3 feet of snow. Maybe it was just so weakened by the rain and the winds and the burrowing animals.
But it dropped with a thump loud enough to wake me around 2 a.m. I looked around the house to see if something had fallen, saw nothing, and went back to bed.
When I awoke this morning I saw this:
It fell last night, in the same direction as the previous time, but this time it was not long enough to cause any damage to anything other than to the lawn.
I just laughed. “Back when you were tall and powerful you tried to take out the house, but in your power you went too far, and in your second attempt you failed.” I might be crazy that I talk to the trees, but that’s how it is here sometimes.
I thought about this as I’m working on some essays for a friend who requested that I write out some of my journey for him. One thing that I am discovering is how much of my life was controlled by the Big Things and the Tall Things and the Scary Things. Things like respect and social acceptance, and toeing the line and following the rules, and not rocking the boat and not disturbing the peace. The BTST had me inordinately convinced I could neither speak out nor act out. I would lose too much and I would be hurt too badly.
When I took the first steps about ten years ago to do so, to speak out, the BTST did try to take me out. I lost a lot of friends, personal and church. I lost a lot of connections in family relationships. I completely threw away all my accomplishments in the political sphere. But for the most part, none of it really mattered to me anymore.
There was still a stump there, though, of the BTST . Still a sense of using only words and stirring up only emotion.
Recently I was challenged by someone whom I discovered only last month, Andre Henry, who shared his story of grief and collapse at the betrayal he experienced when he realized that, deep down, his friends had never really listened to him. That got to me, on how we can be allies to our friends and yet never really believe them. His grief shook me out of my words. It’s time, I thought, to go the next step. To really act.
Now, I’m sure that acting out my commitments will bring more changes. I’m sure that there will be similar pushback and disapproval from those who have joined my journey but who are not sure that action is really needed. I’m sure that the BTST are still going to try to bring down the house.
But you know what? That BTST is just a stump now, and if it wants to try to stop me—well, I’m gonna laugh. I’ve seen it do it’s worst, and yeah, it damaged the house, but we rebuilt, we have insurance, and we’re safe. And it’s just too short to matter anymore.