No Se Nada

An old partner in crime from my days in Portland has surfaced in the news.

The story is about a tree. It's a tree I visited a time or two while living in Stumptown. It's a tree you can't miss if you take Hwy 26 out of the Rose City to the coast. You drive and drive and suddenly you see the sign to our left and you think, "Wow. I have stumbled upon the Largest ... Single ... Sitka Spruce ... In the Entire ... United States." (You pause between the words for effect even though you are speaking silently to yourself. It makes you feel more awed.)

Unlike in humans, for trees "largest" often means "oldest." (Unless you're talking about Pinus longaeva, but trolls if you even take that as an invitation to start the hockey stick wars here I'll disemvowel you so fast your fingers will feel numb.) So our friend The Largest Sitka Spruce In The United States is getting kind of old, and it's showing. Hit by lightening fifty years ago, she survived but was weakened. Recently, however, disaster struck. The same storm that killed three Denali-experienced climbers on Hood gashed up our Sitka friend pretty good. She now has an apparent cavity two feet deep and 15 feet long and a bevy of litigation-wary county administrators on her tail. They want to cut the old girl down.

Ok, so they're not being that rash, but it's not stopping the advice from pouring in. They've heard everything from cut it down to leave it be to fill it with epoxy.

Fill it with epoxy? People, please. The only thing you should do with that tree is to let it decide its own fate. That tree is not only a symbol of nature, it is nature. Propping it up with artificial intentions makes it some lame monument to man's meddling, taking away from it its natural dignity. Bronzing that thing for perpetuity would only serve to remind us of our futility, and our fragility.

Why is it that episodes like this bring out the cranks?

Then there are those who want the glory of taking down a giant. "One guy yesterday even brought his photo album in with the pictures of the big trees he's cut down," Meshke said. (seen here)

In order to perpetuate an illusion, no doubt. An illusion that we control nature, rather than the reality, which is that nature controls us.

Cranks aside, the hero in all this is my crusading beer buddy and brother-in-arms, Mr. Daryl Houtman. Daryl bravely fired off email after email to county administrators, the Gov's office and his Congressional delegation, preemptively demanding that our Klootchy Creek friend be spared the axe. Seriously, people:

But there are also Oregonians who want to just let it fall. Daryl Houtman of Portland, alarmed by news reports that the tree might be cut down, fired off an e-mail to Clatsop County officials and members of Oregon's congressional delegation, urging them to let nature decide the Sitka's fate.

"Millions of homes around the world have family photographs hanging on the walls with this tree as the backdrop," Houtman wrote. "Cutting down this dying tree is akin to filling in Crater Lake because it sprung a leak...It makes no sense whatsoever!" (link)

Daryl also reminded me in an email:

I forgot to point out that the Clatsop Co. administrator also suggested dynamite as a possibility... You might recall the famous incident on the Oregon beach when officials tried to remove a dead beached whale by using explosives - you'd think we would have learned from that fiasco!

(Daryl is talking about this episode, which, shockingly, is not an urban legend but really did happen.)

A similar sentiment was expressed in another email that may or may not have been from Daryl:

Meshke received one e-mail from an anonymous writer who suggested, "We should leave the tree the way it is and leave nature (to) do its thing." The note continued: "It's a heritage tree and an icon and it would be a crying shame if we cut it down just because we are afraid the top is going to fall on someone." The e-mail was copied to Gov. Kulongoski and the Oregon congressional delegation, Meshke said.

The answer is clear. Put the epoxy back in the barrel, put the TNT back in the wooden Wile E. Coyote box, take the 2-in-1 out of the chainsaws. Let people jump the fence and be impaled by falling branches if they want. Let our Sitka friend die her own peaceful death.

[UPDATE: the blogging obviously worked. (Far more people read this than read the Oregonian, right?) The County Admin now says letting nature take its course is the most likely choice.]