Deirdre Lockwood

The fir I linger on at the end of one of these poems now makes me wince when I look at it. Decapitated in a bomb cyclone windstorm last November, its crown now looks like a stump, with a jagged, toothlike point where it snapped off and fell.

I’ve since learned that the crook where “one stout trunk becomes two,” or the fork, is a point of structural vulnerability for trees like this, which have, as arborists call them, co-dominant stems.

But the storm also downed many more trees in and around Seattle that night because the wind came from an unexpected direction. As the bomb cyclone spun over the Pacific, the pressure at its center was so low that it sucked air toward it over the land, creating hurricane-force easterly gusts. The trees, who have grown for decades reinforced against the prevailing southwesterly winds—shoring themselves against their ruins—were caught unawares.

That ferocious night I looked out the window of my daughter’s bedroom to see a patch of bright white on the coast redwood next to our house. It was a new wound: it had also splintered at its fork and lost one of its co-dominant stems, which fortunately fell away from our house and safely into our neighbor’s yard. Months later, it started to die, its needles going from green to rust.

“Trees don’t like to lose their tops,” said the arborist who came to look at it. “How would you like it?”

Trees have often felt to me like grandparents who will outlive us—majestic, strong, reassuring elders who make me feel perpetually young and cared for, while also promising a kind of eternal life—a lifespan of greater perspective. We live in a time when these sturdiest-seeming living presences are showing their vulnerability to our ill winds.

It hurts to see them injured, suffering and dying in unpredictable weather—drought, wildfire, extreme storms—tantrums we toddlers have largely thrown. If we can harm our eternal elders, what hope is there for us?