The Tree: A Farce (Week #49 of 52 Mini-Essays Project)

In which our dramatis personae learn the value of a fallen pine

Apr 9, 2023

It’s not like I knew it well, the tree that came crashing down in our back yard, into our pool, causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage (ripped pool cover, torn lining, damaged concrete) and crushing the three beautiful dwarf maples that had stood like glamorous showgirls by the side of the pool, waving their foliage at swimmers and loungers and the empty back yard in winter. (Tree-on-tree violence—it’s never pretty.) For that matter, neither had I developed an intimate relationship with the other giant tree that went down in our back yard a couple of months earlier, toppling our fence, taking out a power line, and causing a neighborhood blackout on Christmas Eve. We were conveniently out of town for winter break, but our neighbors across the way were really sweet about it, said that they played board games as a family by candlelight, and they enjoyed it so much they’re going to make Electricity-Free Christmas Eve a new tradition.

Those two run-of-the-mill pine trees were not nearly as important to me as Amos, the 150-ish-year-old red Southern oak who lives in our side yard, up on his own pedestal and surrounded by a glorious carpet of moss. Amos was one of the main reasons I agreed to buy our house—not that you can own a 150-year-old oak tree, of course; it was more like I just wanted the right to hang out near him for a little while, for the fraction of his long life that we would live in the house that happened to have been built next to his spot in the forest. The forest is gone, obviously; our house, and a whole neighborhood, live here instead, and the majority of Amos’s colleagues are gone now too. Even though our house is in a comparatively wooded area, with lots of old-growth hardwoods and towering pine youngsters, it’s still mostly houses and roads and driveways and expanses of bright poison-green lawn, with a few arboreal old-timers dotted around the perimeter. I often wonder why Amos was spared the axe when the neighborhood was developed. Our house was built in 1962—the same year James Meredith integrated the flagship state university across town—which was both a long time ago and also yesterday. But Amos must have been more youthful and slender 60 years ago, less impressive, and I wonder what it was about him that made the developers decide to allow him to stay, guarding over the new house on whose property he suddenly stood, watching the children grow up and move away and the parents age and die and the new people move in and then the cycle repeat itself however many times it can in six decades. (Not to get too grandiose about it—it’s not that long a time. Not even all that long before I was born, to be honest.)

I feel like Amos kind of knows who I am, in the way that a dim-eyed, dignified patriarch is vaguely aware of the birth of his latest great-grand-child. He puts up with my sentimental nonsense, my going to him in the dappled mornings and circling my arms around him (or rather, a very small fraction of the way around him

), saying hello and telling him how much I admire him. He is tolerant, and patient, and knows on some level that this weirdo tree-hugger person will be around for only a little while longer. The trees that recently came down were babies by comparison, loblolly pines planted by the bazillions, first for timber and later as a cheap, fast-growing landscape tree in suburban developments.

No, I had no particular attachment to them, other than vaguely appreciating the shade they threw across the yard and pool in the depths of August. Maybe it was their youth, their inexperience, their lack of deep connection to this particular place, that caused them to give up so easily and come crashing down well before their normal lifespan was up.

That said, only one of them came down under circumstances that could be described as “natural.” Last Christmas there was an intense cold snap and a violent wind storm, and the tree that took out the area’s electricity had been dead or dying for a while. (That cold snap also decimated other flora in our backyard, and the entire region. We’re all still recovering, holding our collective breath as spring creeps across Lafayette County, bringing thousands of tiny yellow flowers to the graveyard, waiting to see what will come back and what has been lost. Not to get too sentimental about it—most of the stuff that was killed by the unseasonal cold was ornamentals from Asia, highly groomed non-native plants like camellias that will be expensive to replace but whose absence will not fundamentally alter local ecosystems.) That tree had a strange life, even stranger than Amos’s—but not as strange as the life of the tree that obliterated our pool. That one did not come down in a violent storm, but rather through the actions of a professional we hired to fell it. It had been severely damaged, probably hit by lightning and then hollowed out by an enterprising woodpecker fella, and according to the tree removal professional it needed to be professionally removed as soon as possible, by a tree removal professional such as himself, before it “caused a lot of damage to those Japanese maples and even your pool.” I suppose we can thank him for alleviating our suspense? No longer do we have to wait for that particular shoe to drop, for it has been dropped straight into our pool.

But here is where, I think, things take a turn for the surreal. The tree removal professional may or may not have insurance that he may or may not be willing to use to compensate us. I mean, of course he has insurance, right? He must have some kind of license, and that means insurance. He has a business, and a card, and a very fancy car, and he was recommended to us by the solar installation guy who is helping us switch our pool pump off the grid so that we can (kind of) justify having such an energy-hogging amenity in our back yard. But when I asked Tree Removal Professional about his insurance, he said he wasn’t sure about the details and would have to look them up. This is the last we’ve heard from him as of this writing. He still has no idea of the extent of the damage, and is currently unaware that if he doesn’t have insurance then he’s not going to have that fancy car much longer.

Do I sound vindictive and bitter? This is what I mean about things taking a turn for the surreal. Yes, this dude is a bonehead and he should not have felled the tree into our pool (according to the many tree guys who have been in our yard since the incident, the tree removal professional did a number of very basic things very wrong) and maybe he shouldn’t be a tree removal professional any more and if this incident loses him his car and drives him out of business that would not be the worst thing in the world for the collective sanity and safety of the property owners of northern Mississippi. But I am torn between my anger, annoyance, and anxiety about the costs and my usual, deeply rooted feeling that the entire thing is a farce—all this talking about owning trees and houses and pools and assessing damage and assigning value and blame and figuring out who owes whom what and why. I often have a hard time, in the middle of the night, holding onto the whole concept of the capitalist enterprise and remembering to be angry and go after my stuff. Don’t get me wrong—I am mad, and I miss my lovely yard that was a haven for the birds and the poolside maples and all of it. But I also feel kind of like I am acting in a play entitled “The Homeowner,” and while I am clearly not the villain, neither am I the hero. It’s more like a play by Ionesco or Beckett, where everyone on stage is made to look equally ridiculous.

Take the matter of “value,” for instance. We had to have a professional arborist come over and assess how much the maples and large boxwood hedge camouflaging the pool pump (also taken out in the “accident”) were worth. How do you assess the value of a tree, or for that matter, a shrub? Well it turns out you can (because: capitalism), and there are formulas that incorporate trunk girth, age, replacement cost, labor, etc. So we now have a precise dollar amount for which we can demand restitution from the bonehead tree removal guy. But here is where things get even more surreal. Why is there a difference between the replacement cost of a tree and its assessed value? Why is the latter more than the former? Presumably it has to do with the fact that you can’t do a simple one-on-one replacement of a mature tree; you can only put in a sapling and wait. So the differential is time, and the reason it’s worth anything in dollar amounts is that human beings have decided they own that difference, that maturity, that leafy resplendence, for something that it imparts to us. For a forester, I suppose, it’s timber: the raw stuff out of which he makes his profit and the reason he has any interest in planting and growing trees to begin with. For the suburban homeowner, it’s more ineffable; we are to be compensated for a loss of pleasure we take in mature trees, the shade they throw, the beauty they exude, the mysterious “value” they impart to our properties because other suburban human homeowners will pay more money for houses with big trees in their yards.

This differential, this piece of the assessed price of our trees that is greater than their replacement cost, is nearly as mysterious as the “surplus value” that Marx nattered on about in Capital: “The prolongation of the working-day beyond the point at which the labourer would have produced just an equivalent for the value of his labour-power, and the appropriation of that surplus-labour by capital, this is production of absolute surplus-value. It forms the general groundwork of the capitalist system.” For Marx, surplus value is seemingly mysterious but not really; it’s the difference between the wage that a capitalist pays a worker to produce a widget and the price he can charge for the widget—that differential is created through the worker’s own labor.

It seems mysterious because capitalism is very good at mystifying the exploitative nature of the relationship.

So maybe it feels comparatively odd or counterintuitive to place a dollar value on the growth of a tree, to quantify the amount of shade- and beauty-exuding maturity that has been “taken” from us by Tree Removal Bonehead. That is because there’s a perceived difference between human wage labor, which feels like it has a price, and the “labor” of nature, which we like to think of as priceless, or at least un-ownable. As theorist Jason Moore explains, however, the concept of work/energy “helps us to rethink capitalism as a set of relations through which the ‘capacity to do work’—by human and extra-human natures—is transformed into value.” Work/energy “may be appropriated via non-economic means, as in the work of a river, waterfall, forest, or some forms of social reproduction.”

That same phenomenon is behind the unremunerated labor of housewives and caregivers: as Marxist feminists have been arguing for years, the engine of capitalism depends not only on the worker being paid less than the price of a widget, but also on there being an entire subclass of workers—traditionally women and often including enslaved people—whose labor is paid nothing at all. The insight of Moore’s book is to extend this analysis to the “free labor” of nature.

But back to my trees. Of course I’m being a bit fanciful in likening the growth of the poolside maples (R.I.P.) or Amos or any other tree to wage labor. Yet isn’t it equally fanciful—if not absurd, if not surreal—to talk about owning them, or having a right to that differential of growth in time and being entitled to compensation when it’s “lost”? You can see why I feel like I’m acting in a farce when I get in a high dudgeon over how we were wronged. But make no mistake: the dudgeon is real. I am mad as hell. I am, after all, a child of capitalism and half the time my sense of having been wronged, of ownership, of property rights, is just as strong as the next guy’s. But I’m equally sure that many other people in my situation would also feel that the whole thing was absurd, or that they had no real right to be angry (or compensated). Maybe the only difference is that I have an essay to write and I like over-analyzing things. Perhaps I just generally feel, because of my constitutional makeup and terrible parenting, that I have no real right to anything. Or maybe the problem is, as my friend Mo once famously said to me after a painful breakup, “You need more defense mechanisms.”

When I was in graduate school I briefly dated a man whose mother, years before, had gone into the hospital for a mastectomy and woken up with the wrong breast gone. (This is one of those stories that you always assume are old wives’ tales until you meet someone to whom it actually happened.) I was horrified when L. told me this story, and immediately demanded to know his mother’s response: “Did she sue the surgeon’s ass off? Did she make millions of dollars?” No, he responded. She did nothing. She figured it was an honest mistake—doctors are only human, after all—and she simply scheduled the surgery to have the correct breast removed.

I think about this story all the time. Was she a saint? No malice, no anger, no outrage—just a calm acceptance of contingency and accident. I don’t know that I could ever get to that place of equanimity—nor am I certain that I would want to—but it is instructive to think about the imbalance between our intense feelings of outrage at misfortune

and our insipid feelings of gratitude for all the things that go crazily right in our lives. (The tree didn’t fall on our house. It didn’t fall on a person or a pet. It only fell into our pool. Again, we have a pool. The bonehead tree removal guy just made a mistake—he is only human, after all, just like doctors.)

To a certain extent this imbalance can be explained by the well-known phenomenon of negativity bias. Our brains evolved, according to this theory, to pay far more attention to threats than to rewards; hence, we tend to focus intently on negative incidents or feedback and pay very little attention to the good stuff. (Any teacher who has lain awake at night obsessing over that single snarky evaluation comment in a class of 100 students knows this phenomenon all too well.) My suburban middle-class property-owner brain is primed to pay a lot more attention to the bonehead who felled a tree into my pool than to the garbage collector who invisibly removes my household waste every week without making a big fuss about it. There’s only so much attention to go around, after all. And we’re all tired. I’m personally tired of obsessing over the appropriateness of my emotional responses to things (even though that’s pretty much the Doctor Waffle brand). Right now I’m pretty outraged and a little bemused; I feel a little sorry for the bonehead tree removal professional and a tiny bit guilty for handing him a bill for nearly twenty-seven thousand dollars. But a wee small nasty part of me also hopes he cries when he opens it.

And so we sit and wait.

A bank or a piece of high ground runs back stage from R to LC, with a slope or ramp R leading down to stage level. On the rostrum C is a leafless tree.

A country road. A tree. Evening.

When an arborist recently came to assess the damage to our trees, he won my trust Immediately by noticing Amos, breathing admiringly “And who have we here?” and asking almost shyly if we would mind if he measured Amos’s circumference. Mind?! Like proud parents of a prodigy, we stood by and watched as the arborist determined that Amos was 135 inches around.

Part of the problem, according to the arborist, is that loblolly pines thrive in swamp-like depressions, and when you plant them in a hilly backyard they are going to end up clinging on for dear life.

But should they? The last few months have made those overnight-mushroom subdivisions with mud for yards look somewhat more attractive, at least from a peace-of-mind perspective.

Obviously this is a simplification. The price of the widget also needs to cover the costs of raw materials, capital depreciation, etc. Marx also distinguishes between relative and absolute surplus value, and refers to the total surplus value in an economy.

Elsewhere in Capital Marx makes an explicit connection between the magic of the commodity form and trees: “The form of wood ... is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing on its own free will.”

Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (New York: Verso, 2015), p. 14.

My own beloved spouse is wont to wail “It’s not fair!” in response any number of situations that have nothing to do with justice, from being cut off in traffic to the French rugby team defeating the All Blacks.