CHAINSAW MASSACRE

Silver leaf cottonwood is a particularly lovely tree with long limbs extended as if for dancing.  I bought my little Valier house in part because of the trees around it, particularly the big cottonwood on the south side that makes shade all summer and branch patterns all winter, sometimes lined with snow cotton.   The growth pattern is a dome of leaves reaching down to the ground, so as to offer shelter to resting animals.  Mostly cats here. The kind of birds in it vary with the seasons: downy woodpeckers running up and down the trunk in winter and small transient birds I don’t recognize in spring and fall.  The doves in the blue spruce seem to eat something they find in the cottonwood.  Neither the cottonwood nor the blue spruce are native to the high Montana prairie though there a lot of them in our yards.  Most were planted about the same time at the urging of state agriculture people promoting woodlots and windbreaks.  Most of them are aging out, including mine, but so am I.

The cottonwood is on the boundary between my property and an empty lot that belongs to the First (and Only) Baptist Church in Valier.  When I first moved here, there were no meters on the water system, so it didn’t matter which of us watered the lot.  These trees are riparian and need a lot of water, but in early days when Lake Francis was formed as a reservoir for the Pondera Canal Company -- there was no problem.   More recently we have worried about drought.  The congregation was small and elderly with the grandson of one family acting as pastor.  The building was aging, though not disintegrating like the previous church up the street.  Two blue spruces were sentinels on either side of the front door and a cluster was at the back door.  A hedge of lilac grows along the alley in back and some smaller trees are on the parking strip where a song sparrow builds his nest every spring and stages his mini-opera all about sex and raising babies.

Suddenly the Baptist Church struck gold.  They cut down all their trees, re-sided, installed new windows, built a porch/ramp on the front, and applied a new metal roof.  And they acquired a minister, who drove up from Choteau where he was previously retired.  In winter he goes south.  At first it was his name that attracted my attention:  John A. Brubaker, who goes by “Pastor Bru.”  There was a man named James Brubaker who lived in Choteau and who was convicted of book theft.  He went into libraries, checked out rare and precious books, and razored pages from them which he sold on the Internet.  http://philobiblos.blogspot.com/2009/11/books-stolen-by-brubaker-returned.html  He also dealt in Indian artifacts and occasionally stopped at the Scriver Studio, which was a kind of social hub for history, art, antiques and hunters.  By now he has served his time in prison.  Pastor Bru says he is no relation.  I don’t know where “James” lives now.

The function of ministers towards their churches is often defined in terms of a pastoral versus a prophetic role.  In the pastoral role the religious leader is meant to comfort and care for people and in the prophetic role the same person is meant to preach morality.  There is a third role which is proselytizing, which means developing the organization itself by converting others.   Ministers are also expected to be humble while their congregations are expected to lift them up and admire them.  The clearest public example of the two styles is Pope Benedict versus Pope Frances.  I speak from the inside -- since I was myself a minister for ten years -- when I say this situation is full of pitfalls.  Pastor Bru is clearly a believer in a literal God, a man dedicated to a Right Wing point of view.  Order, control, domination, self-righteousness.

It entertained me, since we both attended the University of Chicago Divinity School and I’m so far on the Left of the political spectrum that I’m nearly falling off.  But Pastor Bru did not like to have anything in common with a tubby old lady who doesn’t cut her grass often enough.  On Sunday he came over to say that he wanted to cut branches off my cottonwood because it was “impossible” to cut the grass under it. The grass has been cut under that tree for the fourteen years -- since I moved here and probably for a long time before that.  Lately grass-cutting in Valier means sitting on a big riding mower, which puts a person up high enough to be slapped by the lower branches.  It’s unpleasant but not impossible.  Some mowers have jack-knifed off the lower switches.  I thought he was asking to do that.

But he had no intention of discussing anything.  When I balked and stalled, he became angry, pointing out that the tree was on the boundary between properties and therefore he had a right to do what he wanted on “his side.”  This man is elderly and has had a stroke.  He does not manage emotion well.  Neither do I, but I don’t have an excuse since my red hair has turned white.  However, he has the advantage in a nurturing little wife who smooths things over when she can.  Not this time.

Pastor Bru does not see a tree as a living creature to be praised, or even as the work of God.  He does not see boundaries as an opportunity for cooperation but rather as a way of excluding infidels.  I suspect he is aligned with what many have begun calling the American Taliban, those who want to deny schools and hospitals to illegal immigrants; keep all people convicted of sex offenses in jail for the rest of their lives no matter the circumstances or the sentences; deny any murderer from receiving any kind of food aid ever (they just attached an amendment to the ag subsidies to block felons from food stamps); force the young, the pregnant, the old, the disabled, the mentally challenged to live under their control; to do nothing to cure AIDS or any other problem that has a moral dimension; and to make sure we fight every war that protects our national corporate interests.  They are gutting our country, doing to today’s settled Americans what they previously did to the Native inhabitants of the continent, which is to say, take their property and demand homage.  It’s a return to medieval times.  This is not a tree -- it’s a symbol.  Talk me out of it.

So Tuesday when I came back from Great Falls (they waited until I was gone), there was a man chain-sawing the limbs off the cottonwood on the church side.  I wept and lamented without restraint.  To me it was like seeing a human being amputated.  Pastor Bru was safely back in Choteau.  He had instructed a lawn maintenance man to do this.  I do not hold that man responsible.  

When a deceased member of this church left money to install an electronic imitation of a bell carillon that played hymns from 9AM to 8PM, I didn’t object -- though they had it turned up to the highest volume possible.  After all, I knew the tunes, though the UU’s sing quite different words.  And at least I always knew what time it was.  Lately the racket has been quiet.  They say there are mechanical problems.  Last summer the church was struck by lightning:  I saw it and heard the explosion.  With no trees to act as lightning rods. . .