Preserve

Three boys sit on their dirt bikes and watch my dad and me cross the busy street. They each lean with a foot on the ground and a foot on a pedal, positioned on the grass between the woods and the street where they can watch traffic and where traffic can view them. They're expressionless, bored, half my age at the most. One wears a hooded sweatshirt under flannel, the hood up, and smokes a cigarette. I wonder if they're looking at my dad's rectangular cardboard case that he made to conceal the saws. I think about moving to my dad's left, between him and the boys, from a sense that they might try something, that they might say something rude, even to an old man. Maybe flick the cigarette at us. When we've crossed, before we head into the trees, my dad gives them a nod and all three of them nod back.

We push through some chest-high scrub and I ask him if he knows those boys. He laughs. He lifts the case. "They think I'm a painter," he says. He tells me that they've seen him enter the preserve here often, and one day they finally stopped him and said that they'd been wondering what he did in the woods. One thought he was a scientist. Another thought the cardboard case functioned as an easel and holder of paints and brushes. I'm not shocked that they sized up his trim white beard and wild eyebrows and, despite his rugged clothes, assigned him these dignified jobs. They could spot an academic.

But we're not here to paint. We're here to murder an elm tree.

I look back to see if the boys are following, but all I can see is brush, and above that the power lines that hem in this forest preserve. The sky is covered with thin, pearly bright clouds. I go back to following my dad's tan Carhartt coat, his brown canvas overalls, boots. The bigger trees, still without leaves, stand in front of us. They spread out against the clouds like black coral.

I ask my dad if he thinks the boys are the ones who ratted him out to the local board that has control of city parks. "I doubt it," he says. "I don't think those guys are exactly arm in arm with the authorities."

The board sent him a letter saying that they understood he was making "alterations" to the preserve that were illegal; they suggested that he, of course, just hadn't been aware of the legal issues. When he didn't stop, they sent another. And another.

He wrote back on his best university stationary to explain his approach. He put a bottle of good whiskey in the mailbox of the head of the board. When the board remained unmoved, he just started parking his Volkswagen camper farther from the preserve and hiding the saws in his case. "Those people don't know shit about trees," he says.

We're looking for an elm my dad has had his eye on, toward the middle of the woods where it'll be hard for anyone to spot us.

We pick our way through saplings and briars, dead brown stalks from last year, the smell of moldy leaves and dirt. Most of the big trees are oaks. I tell my dad that on my drive over, I heard someone, a psychologist I think, say on NPR that the "depressed individual obsesses with minutiae." I tell him how I've been following the Detroit Tigers' spring-training games, the battle for the fifth spot in the starting rotation, the new backup catcher's strained groin (the result of off-season hernia surgery), the two-strike approach of our slick-fielding third baseman who has a history of striking out too much for a career .238 hitter. "I turned the dial to the other NPR station," I say. "The one with less talking and more music."

My dad says that he stays with the talk station because the music doesn't distract...