⁂ To Fell a Tree

I didn’t know how easily a tree could fall.

But I heard the man say, “We can fell a tree.” He was speaking to his son, a few yards off the dirt access road I was walking.

They were off in the proper woods—saplings, ferns, that kind of unnamed ground cover that hides a man to the knees, and a boy to the waist. I had slowed because of the incline here, maybe a 30% grade. A former logging road, just north of Potter Valley, in the Mendocino National Forest.

The boy and his father had found a dead tree. Not a whole one—more like a 9-foot stump, its top 50 feet long gone. But it still stood, somehow, among its living peers. I watched as they leaned their weight against it.

The father was gushing, not about the tree, but about what the boy was doing to it. You could hear it in his voice: he was measuring everything. The weight. The yield. The boy’s strength. He wanted his son to feel it—that he was felling this tree, really felling it.

“We’re doing it!” the boy shouted.

That was the whole point. That sentence was the reason they left the road and risked the poison oak. I knew it, and so did they.

As I turned to continue on, I heard it: the soft cracking, the rustling fall into the ferns. The silence after.

That boy now had a story. By the time they reached their camp up the road—whoever was waiting there—he’d already know how to tell it.

“We fell a tree!”

Or maybe just: “I did.”

A story planted by the father with as much invisible care as the tree itself.

_{Filed under: slice, storyseed, memory-in-the-body}