When the bulldozers come

Originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer

I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.

So goes the oft-quoted beginning of New Jersey poet Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees”. But as for me, I think that I shall never see a church as lovely as a tree.

Particularly the one just erected on a neighboring property where a small forest used to be.

Here’s the church, the flying-saucer-shaped new home of St. Theresa’s, an area parish that apparently had more parishioners than parking spaces. And here were the trees. Stately pines, cedars and oaks that had prospered on this 20-acre wood.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast

It was with a heavy heart that I had resigned myself to the ravishing of this once-lovely woodland, much of it now stripped to dirt.

But the work, as it turned out, wasn’t quite finished. On a perfect, blue-sky morning less than a week after Arbor Day, I awakened to the sounds of sawing and crashing. Devastation: Phase II had begun to make way for additional parking and a Sunday school.

A giant machine, containing a saw inside its jaws at the end of a long “arm”, was plowing its way toward my part of the fence. Some of the trees in its path were simply snatched like sticks. Others swayed to the side, as if trying to escape.

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray

I stood at the fence and waved my arms at the driver. As he made a turn, he saw me and stopped, turning off the engine. He slid out of his cab and bent down to move a turtle away from his big-yellow machine.

He walked over and sighed. He had seen this action before. People standing at fences, waving their arms, suddenly realizing the view from their backyard had turned from forest to open air.

“I thought you were finished here. What about the 50-foot buffer?” I shouted at him.

“This space is your buffer,” he explained. The air qualified too, as did a dead bush.

He told me about another job involving an incident with a woman in a nearby town who had chained herself to a tree.

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair

“The fire department cut her free and she was arrested. And the sad thing, now that lady has a criminal record and I continued right on with my work. When the bulldozers come, it’s too late.”

During the lull in the noise, a lone bird started singing. One of the tall pines still standing right in front of his machine swayed slightly in the breeze.

Upon whose bosom snow has lain,

Who intimately lives with rain

This tree had no say-so in its fate. Even in California, perhaps our most “tree-hugging” state, tree rights have not advanced all that much. In his notable 1971 essay, Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects, professor and attorney Christopher Stone proposed that guardians should be allowed to speak for the “voiceless” natural elements in the world. Legal rights, he noted, are already conferred on numerous inanimate objects, such as corporations and even ships.

Furthering that thought, in a unique dissent in the Supreme Court decision of Sierra Club v. Morton, Justice William O. Douglas argued for “the conferral of standing upon environmental objects to sue for their own preservation.”

But such eloquent pleadings were no match for the operator’s simple observation: “When the bulldozers come, it’s too late.”

By this time, two more men had arrived. One of them brought a site map, which he unrolled on top of the fence. Everything was in order, he assured me. He then pointed out three trees they had decided to leave standing after a recent walk-through. “It’s not finished yet,” he added proudly, “There will be landscaping!”

There was nothing left to do or say. When the bulldozers come, it’s too late.

The operator of the big machine climbed back in to finish his job. The interruption had been but a brief reprieve for the tall pines. For a few moments more they had been allowed to stand, reaching closer to the heavens than the circular church for which they were about to be sacrificed.

As I walked away, all I could think of was the conclusion reached by the poet who was himself cut down in the prime of life during World War I:

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.