A Tree Falling

After 30 years of growing, a large limb breaks. Without cause, it shears off in the still evening air.

Diners, nearby but inside, hear it. The host pauses mid-sentence; his guests, too, wait for some follow-up noise. Hearing none, they cautiously return to their wine, re-admiring its taste, not knowing that the old Spanish vineyard has burned.

Another limb falls without warning midday. This one was seen by many, because it was a Saturday in August. People were walking and running, people were towing or pushing their children in strollers or on bikes, sometimes both. There were people shopping at the farm stand.

There were people trying to leave their cars at the farmstead while they headed to the beach, when, suddenly, there came a loud snapping sound. We all looked. You had time, because it took time to happen.

The wood continued to split, splaying slowly downward so that the limb was supported and fell following the arch of its former circumference. We hear its leaves rustling wildly, as they would in a windstorm.

A man jogging beneath leaps sideways. A near-miss, then a final crunch, as the branches smash into the ground.

Everyone gasps. It is silent for a moment: People stop moving. (Except the jogger — he keeps going.)

Then, someone says the obvious: “Wow, did you see that?”

Hearing the tree fall is what gives you time to look and maybe, like the lucky jogger, get out of its way. Or, like the more distant spectator, watch it go.

A tree falling without apparent cause is the accumulation of circumstances made spontaneously impactful: an old injury, an improper pruning, age, insects, over-watering has so weakened the core.

My English teacher, not a biologist, introduced me to dying trees when he mischievously asked his rapt class to consider the sophomoric query, “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is there to hear it, did it make a sound?” We were somewhere deep in Russian literature, I was lost — and he is bringing up the woods? I knew a little more about that than I knew about symbolism or existentialism. Or at least I thought I did.

I am surprised, so many years on, that a tree falling, whether I see it or hear it, or not, seeing a tree toppled in the aftermath, makes me think of that teacher and the good he did for his students. He made us hungry for what he taught.

And so, on the eve of the school year’s start, a pause to praise the teachers, upon which so much depends.