With a Little Help from Their Friends

How frequently, in married life, or non-married life for that matter, when we say to the handiest person nearby something like, “We really need to do such and such…” do we actually end up doing it and, furthermore, end up enjoying the process or the accomplishment or both? Wishes are easy; fulfillment not so much.

Nonetheless, one thing I’ll be giving thanks for this coming week is that my husband and I managed to spend some quality time with our birch trees down by the pond, correcting their posture.

Emily Dickinson wrote, “I dwell in Possibility.” For most of this fall, I dwelled partly in the possibility that we would actually follow through on this particular venture. The project hovered on the horizon right there in plain sight, waiting to be done, about to be done. But then, suddenly, tending the trees felt much more like a dream that wouldn’t come true. Who was I kidding that we would, one day, leave the regular tasks that harnessed us, look at one another and say, “OK, it’s time; the birches are calling and we must go.”

Every day for months, really ever since the heavy snow and ice of last winter, we’d been observing their glowing white trunks, dramatically curved — some of them, anyway. Others still stood straight and true. I didn’t need ol’ Robert Frost (he’s perennially hanging around our place, I swear) to tell me that they, even minus the flowing hair tossed over, resembled a gaggle of teenage girls. You can almost hear them whispering to each other. I’m not part of the clique, but I still think of them as my friends in a certain way, and I like to go down to check them out every morning, see what the buzz is, who’s in and who’s out.

I need to give a few disclaimers here. First of all, we didn’t straighten all of the leaning ones; some were taken down, and now each beautiful log will become kind of like “the gift outright” to our woodpile. Second, we didn’t actually ask the trees if they wanted to change their way of life, we just went ahead. They looked like dancers struggling to hold a too-difficult pose, and the coming winter would surely keel them over. Third, my husband did way more of the work than I did. He got the right kind of steel cable, and the little clamps that help make loops (along with pieces of hose for cushioning) with the cable; he also went up on the ladder to do the tedious attaching and then drove the tractor that pulled the other end of the cable firmly but gently, coaxing each limber individual to please point straight to the sky.

What did I do? Well, I held the ladder of course. And occasionally rummaged around in the leaves for fallen clamps and nuts. And let’s not forget, I also offered opinions about which anchor trees we should use. Oh, and of course I repeatedly threw sticks to Rocky to quell his barking. I felt a little bit like an acolyte at the altar, actually, although I’ve never actually done that.

The ladder was pretty amazing in both its lightness and its stability. I bet if he (all those straight lines, all business, no curves) could have talked, he would have told me to go find something else to do—“I got this covered; your guy is safe up there.” Once in a while, though, a strong gust of wind would come up out of nowhere and all of us would do some shaking. No way I was leaving. Besides, those moments when a tree found its way skyward were really magical. Our plain ladder didn’t look anything like the version of Jacob’s Ladder portrayed in William Blake’s painting, with luscious curves and angels everywhere, but it did the job.

Each tree went through a two-cable process. Once again, physics explained everything. The first cable went from as high up the tree as the ladder-climber could get and then diagonally down to the rear end of the tractor. The tractor moved, the cable tightened, and the tree obeyed orders. Only then, with tension in place, could the second cable— this one the real McCoy, going from tree to tree – be added. Then, just as my husband predicted, the stress shifted over. After all, there’s no free lunch—when it comes to straightening trees, somebody has to bear the brunt.

Once we had a few key trees in the clump righted, it was almost a piece of cake to attach a couple of outside way-over ones to the newly supported insiders.

If I didn’t know better, I’d even say that the whole process gave some indication of how people might use the collective strength of a group to help their neighbors in need. But this might be leaning too far, so I’ll just stick to the goodness of the mix we had out there of husband, wife, dog, tractor, ladder, sky, and gleaming trees.