THE TREE AND THE BUCKET TRUCK

If you look for my house on a satellite feed, all you’ll see is trees.  You can spot the Southern Baptist Church next door because they cut down all their trees and wanted to cut mine, too -- that is, the ones on the property line.  Zillow claims my house is worth $125,000 which is laughable.  The county taxes me for $40,000;  I paid $30,000.   What I have learned about old houses is that you will need an equal amount after buying the house because so much maintenance has usually been deferred.  They’ve often been granny houses or rentals.

The north side of the house is full of trees, volunteer poplars that I like to call “populars.”  They aren’t big around but there are quite a few of them and they crowd up against the house.  Lately one has grown a branch over that lies on the old original cedar shakes and when the wind blows that branch beats and pries.  It’s a little bit too high up for me to get it with a ladder.  If the shakes are stepped on, they split.  Also, they are VERY slippery.

The south side of the house has the big cottonwood that is so important to me and that the minister from back East wanted to cut.  It’s a silverleaf cottonwood.  There are a lot of them throughout small Montana towns, brought in by some ambitious person from their home ecology, which is down in coulees along creeks.  On this dry windy prairie they are always a little stressed, especially if not regularly watered.   The high parts die easily, pronging into the sky and tempting the lightning.  If they are cut down or fall down, they will grow a new trunk or rather multiple trunks.  I suspect that a tree expert would know what year that fellow selling trees came through, because most of them are about at their growth limit.  My guess is that it was in the boom after WWI.

My populars are much smaller trees, in a grove that planted itself.  In fact, if I let the volunteer starts of both species just grow, I would be in a jungle.  I knew I had to somehow get rid of that branch that thinks my house is a drum.  But I didn’t know how much it would cost and at 76 I don’t handle heights well anymore.  (I’m also at about my growth limit.)

I was reading the newspaper -- I get to it late in the afternoon  after my blog is written -- when I slowly realized that what I had thought was a weed eater was actually a snarling chain saw.  Quickly I scrabbled around for outdoor shoes and straw hat, piled into the pickup and began to search the streets of Valier.  I figured someone was limbing trees and they might be willing to swing by to deal with that destructive branch.  Too late.  Only a neat pile of sawed branches.  At least they had done a respectable job.  Some people confuse trimming with assassination.  Control over a living thing!  Bwaaaahaaaahaaa!!

In a day or two I heard the saw again, or maybe I didn’t.  I couldn’t find any crew.  Finally I found a woman who had gotten some work done.  She couldn’t remember the name of the outfit or the phone number, but she had contacted them by putting a sticky note on their parked bucket truck.  And she was pretty sure they were going to a place next that was only a couple of miles out of town.  They were, I found them, and they soon drove up.  In fifteen minutes the offending branch -- plus a few others that had died in last winter’s lethal weather were on the ground.   

The arborists were two young men from Missoula, each with a fairly new powerful truck, sharing a red Australian heeler dog named for a Norse warrior (“Thor,” I think.) but as benign as he was muscled.  Sort of like Brad Pitt. The truck license numbers began with “4” which is Missoula and below is their flyer.  The phone number is their “mission central” where they check in for assignments.  Whoever made the flyer evidently had the idea that a bonsai might need trimming, and I suppose they do, but it’s not necessary to have a bucket truck or a chain saw.  Manicure scissors will do.  If you fail to write down the contact number, they show up all over Google and even Facebook.

The bucket truck has been parked in front of my house overnight while they go back to their motel.  They quietly drove off a while ago.  I’ve begun to wish I had a bucket truck.  Think of being able to go high to take photos or pick kittens out of trees.  I didn’t interview these guys much and now I have mixed feelings.  I’d like to know more about them but I sort of like the mystery.  It’s a summer tale.

Maybe I’ll invent a story: two brothers inherit a bucket truck and take off across the continent.  It would be a road trip that includes a lot of stuff about the geography of trees, species distribution and the practice of prairie vegetal architecture: shelter belts, wood lots, homestead groves, erosion control, pheasant and deer habitat.  You could make it sinister if the guys compete for a woman they meet and one sabotages the bucket.  But maybe it would be better to play it romantic and describe making love in the bucket.  Sort of like Canadians making love in a canoe.  Carefully.

Back to reality: I have a pile of gnarly branches in the back yard that I’ll gradually break down and burn on rainy mornings, which do come in summer, interrupting the heat briefly.  High prairie mixes its seasons.  At the moment we have one of those arctic intrusions that are deadly in winter.  I had to put my extra comforter back on the bed.  But fifty degrees is pleasant sleeping weather.

And it makes me sleep a lot better to know there’s not a tree knocking on my roof, wanting to get in.

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. . .