on trees & cutting them down

after all but the big one were felled

after the big one came down

The county road crew has been parked in our wide spot for the past week, working on the gravel road above our house. This has elicited much excitement from Little M as she looks at all the trucks, dump trucks, graders, and backhoes. It has also elicited a few sad moments, as in addition to resurfacing the road they have been widening it a bit in one narrow stretch just past our property line, which required cutting down several trees that literally were right beside the road. By right beside, I mean they had gouges from the snowplow in their trucks, especially the largest & closest to the road.

I'm sad because I hate change, but also because that was my favorite stretch of our road. The trees shading the dirt, the birds always flitting about in the trees, and the feeling that instead of being on a road you were just on a little path through the woods as it continued down the hill from the public land above us. Now the canopy there is wide open and it feels like a highway.

this was taken just after they felled the largest tree, accidentally dropping it the wrong way and taking out a large section of the neighbor's fence!

It reminds me of my childhood wanderings (ahem, trespassings) on neighboring properties. There was once property several over and across the road from my parents land, which I wandered on once or twice, and then came back months later to realize it had been selectively clearcut and was essentially barren. The shock of matching the forest I remembered with this wide open expanse, as I stood in about the same spot, was just appalling. I of course had been on clearcuts in the past, but there is something shocking about seeing such a change and having to match up the images of where you once knew forest and now only saw slash.

Of course, taking out 4 trees from the group near our house, even when one was the largest of the bunch, is hardly that destructive. And I realize that the road is the road. But it is still sad to remember what it once was and see what it is now. I looked back through the last 4 years of pictures and couldn't find just one that perfectly conveyed how that spot felt to me, but below are a few befores to give a sense of what it was like before. It will be interesting to see how the light falls on the house earlier in the mornings due to the loss of these trees in the early spring and fall. Interesting and sad. However, the upside is the county crew let my husband have all the logs, so we now have a large pile of wood sitting waiting for him to chop up for firewood or convince a friend to saw it up for rough lumber, we'll see. He's guessing its upwards of 4 cords, although honestly I think it is a bit more than that!.

the trees behind and to the right of my husband are gone now, as are two of the ones on the left nearest the road.

the patch looks much sparser now than in this picture.