Ninety years ago, my grandparents bought a swaybacked farmhouse and 20 acres of land in Orleans County, Vermont. Cedarhurst Farm, as it was known then, sat atop a sloping meadow along the shore of Caspian Lake. Today, all that’s left of the original farmstead is its 19th-century barn and two namesake ancient white cedars. Most of the property, including the small cape my grandfather built to replace the ramshackle farmhouse, has left our family now. I’ve spent a good part of every year of my life in this place. I was conceived there, as was my daughter; my parents are buried in the cemetery a short walk down the road. I miss being able to wander freely through that landscape.
The loss I feel most keenly, however, has to do with trees. I often recall the half-dozen elms that lined the Bayley-Hazen Road where it cuts through the property, their stark trunks silhouetted against the snow in black-and-white photographs from my childhood. I was in my 20s when they all died. I remember dropping the last of them on a parched August afternoon. It was one of the biggest trees I ever felled, and when it hit the ground, its crash vibrated up my legs. I didn’t think it possible I could forget the dank, pungent scent of freshly cut elm, but that olfactory memory has vanished, and I will probably never smell American elm again.
Sometime in the early 1990s a mountain ash seeded itself where the meadow butted up against the lawn. Its brilliant clusters of red berries outshone all the other reds of fall and seemed to drain the color from the starburst-crowned beech next to it. Dwarfed between these two wandering outliers sat the well house – its northern eave adorned with fallen berries, its southern plastered with yellow pinnate leaves. Now I can catch a glimpse of the beech only from afar, and soon, I suspect, the mountain ash will reach its life expectancy. Their spectacular beauty haunts me.
Across the road we still own a couple of acres of what was pasture when I was a boy, but succeeded to dry cedar swamp after a neighboring farmer’s Holsteins that grazed there were sold off. The lot is bordered on the west by a hedgerow of black spruce, cedar, balsam fir, ash, and a couple of wild crab apple trees. Subsumed within this hedge runs a 150-year-old chestnut rail fence – some sections pinioned 5 feet off the ground by the riotous growth. Even though moldering and furry with moss, they haven’t completely rotted away.
To me, no other tree projects as much understated strength and grandeur as does a mature white ash. One my father planted in the 1930s still towers over the barn. To some, this New England stalwart may seem pedestrian, but I always thought this ash announced our former home with as much stateliness as a flowering magnolia might welcome a visitor to a Southern plantation. Today, however, I cannot help but view it as a sentinel on the lookout for its species’ demise. When I walk by it on the road, I lean in close, hoping not to spot telltale holes of the emerald ash borer.
One summer when I was in college, a neighbor hired me and a friend to take down a dying ash on his property. It was a difficult job because my chainsaw bar wasn’t long enough to cut all the way through the trunk’s enormous girth. Eventually we toppled it and spent a week splitting bolts and stacking cordwood. For the longest time, whenever I’d drive by that woodlot, the gap left by this magnificent tree would startle and trouble me, like seeing a familiar smile disfigured by the sudden, violent loss of a tooth. When my father’s ash meets its end, I suspect it will provoke the same response.
We grieve when a piece of land that is dear to us passes out of our lives. Witnessing a beloved forested landscape diminish or irreparably change during the span of a lifetime can elicit solastalgia – a form of emotional distress and bewilderment that arises when one’s home ground becomes unrecognizable through environmental change. I am grateful for these trees with whom I grew up, but at the same time I grieve that there’s a paucity of healthy beech trees in New England’s forests; that sugar maples will recede northward as the planet warms; that the elms and chestnuts are long gone, and the ashes soon will follow. Sometimes I wonder whether these losses may stand as dark portents for someone whose surname, Olmsted, means place of elm, and whose middle name is Ashbel.