Читать книгу Here on the Coast - Howard White - Страница 12

It’s a tough time for trees here on the Sunshine Coast. There’s the clearcut up in the Chapman Creek watershed, which most of us will never see, though we may eat bits of it when we down a glass of that foggy-looking water. Then there’s the great swatches of forest that are getting mowed down to make room for new subdivisions, which does significantly de-green the part of the landscape we move through. But the ones that hurt most are the ones we have around our homes providing shade and privacy, serving as hotels for squirrels and birds and offering sturdy limbs to anchor swings and treehouses. These are the trees we get to know as individuals, almost as family. You see them in old pictures when the kids were small and before the house had been re-sided, looking just the same, providing a reassuring thread of continuity through changing times, just as they’ve done for hundreds of years. You get attached to them. Plus we now know that it takes one hundred square metres of forest to neutralize the carbon emitted annually by a single car, which makes every tree the more precious.

But the past several years of freakishly high winds have brought a lot of these old friends down across people’s roofs, and even the sturdiest-looking specimens have come under suspicion. And falling isn’t the only hazard being looked at in a new climate-change light. Anybody who thought the fire hazard presented by trees standing too close to houses was something only communities in dry Interior forests need worry about got their eyes opened in 2019 when Sunshine Coast rainforests began exploding all around us after a record dry spring. Fortunately, midsummer brought enough rain to dampen things down, but only a fool would bet against the dry weather returning, and the BC Forest Service is recommending a tree-free zone of thirty-three feet around buildings.

We had a beautiful cedar about four feet through standing between our place and the neighbour’s that suddenly became a point of contention. Their arborist said it was a disaster waiting to happen, while our arborist said it didn’t pose any more risk than any other tree and that’s what insurance is for. What sealed the old tree’s fate was my neighbour saying it kept them up on windy nights, driving the kids to huddle in the farthest corner of the house. That triggered a memory.

Back in the 1950s our family home had a big old grandmother cedar in the front yard that probably could have neutralized the emissions from a school bus just by itself, but we didn’t know about global warming then and my dad probably would have given it the chop except that it had a hard lean out over Francis Peninsula Road and not even the best faller could set it down without taking out the power lines. The only solution was to deconstruct it bit by bit from the top down, but the only people who did that in those days were BC Electric and Dad reckoned he would leave it to them. It had such a hard lean away from the house that it didn’t appear to pose any risk to us. Still, when the wind blew, we thought about that tree. It was hard to ignore because it had a schoolmarm in it and when it swayed it squawked.

I shared the upstairs bedroom with my kid brother, who was about six, and this one windy night the tree was squawking so loud he got scared and crawled in with me. I told him there was nothing to worry about, given the direction of lean, etc., but I was only half convinced myself. The storm kept rising and the schoolmarm kept squawking louder. There would be a long, drawn out squee-eee-eeek, then a pause as the tree reached the perigee of its swing toward us, then a long squaaa-aaa-aawk as it swung away toward the road. You couldn’t help holding your breath during that pause at the end of the squee-eee-eeek, waiting for the reassuring squaaa-aaa-aawk that signified it wasn’t coming right down on top of us. I was in the midst of recounting the physics of the situation and telling myself I was silly to be so scared when one squee-eee-eeek was punctuated by some loud cracks and whump! the ceiling of our bedroom crunched down, pinning us to the bed.

Physics be damned, the old tree had fallen straight backward against the lean and taken out the back half of our roof. Apart from being terrified, we were none the worse for wear and actually enjoyed considerable celebrity when the Coast News reported the incident the next week. Dad rebuilt the roof using wood from the tree and bought a nice little Austin with the insurance money, so we actually came out ahead on the deal.

But that’s the dang trouble with trees. You just never know. There’s always the chance of a freak gust that will strike them from an angle they’re not braced for, and this hasn’t just started happening in the last couple winters. In the latest old cedar question, I had been hanging tough with an offer to top it so it couldn’t reach the neighbour’s roof, but the idea of scared kids huddling in their beds got to me. I gave in and let them take the old beauty down.

But I think of it every time I open the door, and I think of all the other fine old trees that are getting whacked down along the coast, either as falling or fire hazards. You can hear a steady chorus of powersaws.