Throwing Shade

Photo: Grant Durr

My office window looks south out onto the back lot of my apartment. Ringed by a wooden fence, the lot contains a small blue shed my downstairs neighbors use to store their children’s bicycles, a trampoline, and other toys that inevitably lay strewn across the grass in the warmer months. The lot backs up to those of other single-family homes the next street over with their own sheds, porches, and hasty landscaping now a waterlogged and indistinguishable brown. The two story to the right is made of rough bricks painted white and sided with vinyl from the eaves up. A hazy sun shines through bare maples and the blue chill of February in a moment of respite from the harsh gray wind of Buffalo. Languid streams roll off the corrugated roof as if in slow motion, falling toward the ground as drops of light. Slow perspiration of waking up, the first signs of spring.

The rip of a chainsaw. Close, but behind and down the street somewhere. They just reopened the Inn on the corner after all that work. That one with the sign on the door “Temporarily Closed”. Looked like a squatter’s place for a while. Peeling paint and windows foggy with dust. Table saw and boards I saw through one of the windows walking by, then again a couple months later not moved. That tacky backlit sign on a pole with the cartoon guy with the big hat and smile, holding a pizza in one hand—or is it a pie? The kind of place bikers would go. I wonder what they’re doing now.

Another rip and long whine as the engine strains.

I was surprised to see activity this fall. Some pickups, a Bobcat, a pile of gravel in the corner of the parking lot. An orange extension cord running from the electric pole in through an open window. For a solid two weeks I saw a crew, heard vacuuming, sawing, a woman talking and giving directions. Then quiet, then OPEN. Just like that. New pavement and everything.

I hear the rushing crackle, then thud, of a limb hitting the ground. On grass.

I push back my chair and walk to the front room that looks the other way, out onto the street. I put my hand on the sill and lean with my face near the glass. A large truck, yellow and red, is idling in the street next door, its hollow rattle vibrating the pane. There’s a guy in a hardhat and coveralls waving directions upward with gloved hands. I turn, walk to the door, then down the stairs and out the front. From the bottom of the concrete porch steps I can see another man in the air, leaning away from a decapitated silver maple by a strap, a chainsaw hanging from his waist.

I walk up. Groundie is young, maybe 25, but stocky, the type that ages quickly. He lifts his forehead at me, then looks away.

He looks back when he doesn’t hear my footsteps. Wide, young eyes. I lean forward with my hands in my pockets. “What’s going on here?”, I say, gesturing upward.

“What do you mean?” He turns more fully toward me.

“Why are you taking it down?”

“Hazard to the power line,” he says in a drone, then turns back.

I look around at the small area of grass between the house and the road. A few limbs a foot or so across, wood chips, an oil can. Up, fresh scars where the branches were taken. His buddy in the tree, skinny and about the same age, maybe younger, fiddles with his harness and remarks about the saw, and the Sabres defense.

I return to work. The chainsaw continues until midday, then a break. I make myself lunch and walk to the front window again. The truck is gone, all quiet. I’m glad I can’t see the wreckage from here.

Not long after I sit back down, I hear the beep beep beeping of a truck backing up. In MY driveway. From the window I can’t see the parking area out back between the roof and the fence but I know where it is, and I stand and watch as a full dump truck, complete with crane arm behind the cab, backs right across it, through a gap in the neighbors’ fence that normally corrals their two collies. Must have notified the landlord but not me. For the rest of the afternoon more ripping and whining. A lot more. Until finally around four Groundie mounts the crane and swings it over the fence. He opens the jaws and clamps them around a giant piece of trunk, four feet across at least and another four thick. It barely grabs half of it, truck leaning as the weight rotates. Like a bird's nest at the end of a too-long branch. Thunderous crash when it’s dropped into the bed. They load her right up, the whole thing in two trips.

Last summer the chainsaws were on the other side. I went for a walk down Union toward Main during my lunch and saw another truck across the street. All yellow with hydraulic legs placed down on the sides, a row of orange lights up top. A few guys in neon vests standing, one leaning against a shovel, around a stump. Only six or seven inches diameter, in the narrow strip of green between the sidewalk and the curb. I made it to Main, turned around, and came back. The next day I did the same walk. The crew was still there, but had moved down a yard or two, toward me. Sawdust. Another casualty. On the way back I walked slowly, inspected. On every sidewalk tree from where they were working to the corner of Hawkins, an orange X had been spray painted facing the street just below eye level. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything the next day as they took two more. Or the third. Or the fourth when they left the whole block bare but for bits and pieces. I walked back from Main on that side that day, making a loop, over sidewalk humps heaved up by roots over the years. The stumps, flush with the ground, seemed to beg to me. For what I don’t know. Mercy maybe. I could feel their rawness, taste their aromatic flesh in the air.

I've lived here for a year now and have walked these streets nearly every day. A small town, suburban but with charm. Tight knit. The houses are old but well kept. There's money here, but not in a showy way. Just that you can tell they've got something that they don't want ruined. Good restaurants, an independent bookstore and cinema, a farmers market in the square on Sundays where you can find handmade goods, flowers, and local honey. Jobs. Good schools, even crossing guards. A place to raise a family. When I'm out I see mothers pushing strollers or couples with dogs. They don't seem to mind the bumps, although I didn't ask.

Almost a year now since the trees were taken. On my walk there are trucks along the decimated stretch, orange cones squeezing traffic into a single lane. The sidewalk is gone, infilled with gravel and lined with two by fours fastened together with jigs. A crew of four or five guys is milling around. One behind the wheel of a cement mixer, head turned out the window as it crawls down the street. Another standing ankle deep in gravel, directing a slurry of concrete into the forms. Two more following with shovels and squeegees, padding and smoothing.

Then a few days later I'm home and a crew shows up again, my neighbor on the other side this time. Their target: a senior silver maple standing in the front yard, between the house and sidewalk. A monster, five feet across and two hundred years old, perhaps. All day they climb and saw, loading branches and limbs into a truck bed. I get it. It was rotten. One look at the gargantuan cross section of trunk left when they were done could tell you that. Left standing at about four feet in height, with an irregular V-cut used to fell the largest pieces safely away from the house and driveway. There is a chainsaw gash a foot or two lower where they tried to cut it off, made it about a third of the way, and gave up. Just too big. The bark looks otherwise healthy, scaly gray with shavings like peeling cardboard, a characteristic acquired with age. The innards, though, now exposed, are spongy, dark, and totally empty in the middle. It crumbles in my hands.

Necessary work, I know. What it takes to keep the lights on. To keep things going. I'm not about to confront these guys for just doing their job, or blame the homeowners for calling them. What good would that do, anyway? What difference would it make? But a true vocation should be more than just a job, a way to make a living. From the latin for voice, it implies a calling. Listening to something inside that points us in a particular direction, for no other reason than innate need. A hunger in the bones. That's what I feel standing there. The need not simply to obstruct but to notice, to ask what things are worth.

I walk on, feeling one of my own limbs has been carried away. At the corner I take a right. The long way, where the sidewalk heaves in the shade.