Things No Longer There: A Memoir of Losing Sight and Finding Vision

3. Saving a Tree

28 Saving a Tree No sooner had I begun exploring the theme of “things no longer there” than I began seeing examples of it everywhere. I wrote this backyard story when I woke one morning to find the geography of my daily landscape changing. Though the story is about saving a tree, it is also about saving one’s own inner memories. In the yard behind my house is a big, misshapen Monterey pine towering high above all the houses nearby. The tree’s upper limbs are green and reach toward the blue sky. But the gray lower limbs and trunk are shorn and bare, as if someone took a chain saw and sliced off all the growth further down, leaving only that bright green canopy on top, which is in fact what happened. Several months ago, some men came out—those hired hands, hired guns—and they started to chop the tree down. I woke that morning to the sound of a snarling saw. I looked out my bedroom window and saw nothing. Then I heard the saw grinding loudly and continuously. I called my neighbor, a woman who is a gardener and knows trees. “We’d better go,” she said. “They can cut down a tree in twenty minutes.” three 29 Saving a Tree I met her out front and we went around the block. There, in the rear of an overgrown lot, a square-chested man with a broad leather belt around his waist and a bright-orange chain saw in his hand stood holding the saw above his head against the gray trunk of the tree. He had already cut off three lower limbs. “Stop,” I said. “Can’t,” he answered, holding the saw poised, ready to strike again. “This tree’s going to come down.” “Who hired you?” I asked. “I can’t tell you that.” “We like this tree. I want to call whoever hired you. Maybe you can just trim it.” “No time,” he said. “I have to get this job done.” He looked around at the three other men in his crew, who were already hauling off branches. “I’ve got to eat,” he said. I was shocked as much by his rationale as by the tree coming down. How could I argue with a man’s right to eat, or with a chain saw? I felt like all the radical environmentalists I had ever heard of, who might lay down their lives to protect an endangered species. He pulled the cord on the orange saw once again, turning it on. I saw myself going up to the tree trunk, standing between it and the man with the orange saw and its three-foot extended blade, daring him to cut. But I stood still, at a distance from the tree, and instead, I started talking. I started carrying on like a woman facing a man with a gun, a brick wall, an inexorable force, an army marching to war. I felt quite hysterical and I did not like the feeling. I did not want to be an impulsive woman facing a recalcitrant and bullying man, matching him word for word, sentiment for sentiment. “I’m going to cut,” he said. “No, you’re not.” He raised the saw up in the direction of a lower limb. “You’re really tough. You’re just a big man with a saw.” “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Neither do you. The neighbors like this tree. It protects us.”  “I’ve got another job this afternoon. I don’t have time for this.” “Do you get pleasure out of cutting down trees?” “Why don’t you go home?” “I am home.” “It’s legal,” he said. By this time, my neighbor had visited an adjacent house and found out the name of the contractor and of the owner of the lot. “I know who hired you,” I said. “I’m going to call the owner. Stop cutting while I call.” “I’ll give you twenty minutes.” “Half an hour, and I don’t want to hear that saw. I’ll be right back if I hear that saw.” “Fuck you,” he muttered loud enough for me to hear. “You too,” I called back. He lowered the orange saw with its long, chain-linked blade and laid it on the ground. I walked quickly back around the block with my neighbor...