Trees—Wait, Make That Elms

 

     It must have been back in the school year ’61-’62, I believe it was.  We were talking about our trees in the classroom.  Mr. Ekgren, our English and wood shop teacher, looked up and said, “What trees?”

    “Why Mr. Ekgren,” someone said, “all those trees,” and pointed out the west window.

    “Those are Chinese elms,” he said.  And so they were, all but a few locusts lining the east end of the Self lot across the street.

      Mr. Ekgren seemed to sense our ignorance. (We were too polite and restrained to ask him if he couldn’t see the trees for the forest, not to mention that we knew from experience that he had a fierce temper and could resort to violence in the right circumstances.)

     “Back in Minnesota, elms are weeds.  Every spring you must go along the fence rows and kill the elms or they will take over everything.  They will grow everywhere, in the rain gutters, in the flower beds.  They are nothing but weeds.”

     That gave us all pause to think, for we all knew something of the struggle to grow a tree on the high plains. 

     It must have been in the early 50’s, an early spring day when Dad and Mom went to the lot north of the house, Dad in his old distillate-stained overcoat, Mom in  her old red cloth coat and floppy bonnet, dressed against the bitter south east wind.  I don’t recall the conversation, but I think Mom wanted Dad to measure so that the trees were evenly spaced.  I’m pretty sure Dad didn’t see the sense in that.  He could step it off evenly.  He did that all the time with fence posts.  Besides, they were just going to put these sticks in the ground.  They wouldn’t grow.

    So off Dad stepped.  I wasn’t involved, too cold and nasty out there.  He went west pretty-well parallel to the house, stepping off  5 or 6 steps, stop, dig a hole, stick a stick in the hole, cover it up with dirt, step off again.

     That went pretty well.  But then he went back to the southeast corner and went north.  That east line wasn’t quite square with the south line, resulting in the “trees” in the northwest corner having quite a lot of space between them, while those in the southwest corner are crowded closer together. 

     Well, those “sticks” took off and grew, nearly all 100 of them, 10 rows of 10, all except those in the northwest corner (too far apart?).  Collectively, they became known as “the trees”.

     At first, there were problems cultivating.  Hoeing was too slow and depressing.  You never got done.  Uncle Ricky tried a sweep fixed to an old two-wheel cart.  Too slow.  Dad ran the oneway through them.  That left dirt piled up around the trunks and a hollow in the rows between the trees.  So Uncle Ricky took an old horse drawn tandem disk apart and tried pulling the back half, the half that pulls the dirt from the outer ends toward the center, through the rows.  That worked fairly well, but it was impossible to get very close to the tree trunk because the disk wasn’t as wide as the tractor wheels.  So the elms grew out of little hills.  Heavy rains left puddles in the center of the squares formed by four trees.  It is that way to this date. 

     After the ground had been cultivated, it was a great place for us to farm and build roads with our toy trucks and tractors.  The sapling trees provided a little shade with a breeze on hot summer days.  The damp soil we dug up contrasted nicely with the dry dirt on the surface as we paved our miniature roads.  It was a welcome change from farming the linoleum with our Tinkertoy equipment in the upstairs playroom.  We actually got to move some real dirt with our dump trucks.

      In a few years, cultivating was a moot point because branches shut down traffic through the rows.  Watering was another problem.  The squeamish had best skip this part.

    We had an old well converted to a cesspool.  It wasn’t terribly deep, and whenever we had sewer troubles, we had an old bucket on the end of a chain.  Down went the bucket.  Up came a bucketful of waste water, odiferous waste water.

     Sometimes, we dumped the water out and let it run away.  But why waste water?  A fifty- gallon drum in the back of the old Ford pickup sometimes, other times on the Farmhand fork (much nicer—you could set the fork on the ground not have to lift the chain and bucket so high) served as the water carrier.  Fill the drum by using the chain and bucket.  Drive out among the trees.  There were various stratagems to get the water out of the drum and onto the trees.  The one I remember was me up in the pickup, using a fruit juice can to dip the effluent out of the drum and pour it into buckets.  Uncle Ricky would take the buckets and give the trees a “good sewer-juicing.”

     Associated in my mind with “tree-watering” is a small pox vaccination.  In those days, the doctor scratched the skin on your arm up near the shoulder.  He then spread the serum on the scratched patch.  We kept it covered with gauze and tape.  A cheerio-looking purplish puss pocket would grow out and shrink back and eventually disappear over a period of weeks.  Many of us old folks still have that scar from that cheerio on our upper arms, indicating we are immune to small pox.  I’m not sure how they do it nowadays.  Maybe they don’t.

    Well sir, I had two of those cheerios.  All of us boys were inoculated at the same time.  We all had the shoulder cheerio simultaneously, but I developed a second one on my left wrist, right where my watch band goes.  Of course, I didn’t have a watch to wear in those days.  But when the cheerio on my wrist developed, Mom made me wear a gauze and tape patch on that one, too. 

   Now those purplish cheerios had a nasty smell which you noticed whenever you changed the dressing.  But I didn’t have to change the dressing on the wrist one to enjoy its disgusting odor.  It was available at any time by raising my wrist to my nose.

     What I remember is dipping the sewer juice out of the fifty-gallon drum, using my left hand part of the time, to hold the fruit juice can.  Which was more disgusting, the smell of the sewer juice, or of that small pox blister?  And how did I get that second blister?  Was it related to the sewer juice job?  I don’t know, but I often suspected they were related.  How did we survive all that?  Or are we as healthy as we are because we were subjected to such nastiness and our immune systems learned to adapt?

      I remember one sewer backup that had to be drained in the basement.  Dad would loosen the cleanout plug enough to let the liquid escape.  He placed a wash tub beneath the pipe.  When it was full, he tightened the plug and he and Uncle Ricky carried the tub up the outside steps into the tree lot.  Uncle Ricky insisted that most of the waste be poured on one tree three rows in.  Sure enough, that tree soon grew head and shoulders above its compatriots.  We called it Ricky's tree.  It did survive the sixties, but now is one of those awaiting the snarling buzz of the chainsaw.    

     Well back to the elms.  They provided us a lot of work and a lot of entertainment.  It came to pass that you couldn’t see through the tree lot, let alone drive through it.  It made a dandy place to play hide-and-go seek, or “cowboys in the dark”.  It was a great place to hunt sparrows (and a few other birds) with our bb guns.

    One time Brother Dave broke the bone behind his little toe and had to wear a cast and use crutches to walk.  He found out soon enough he could walk on the cast without using crutches, but he was severely warned he shouldn’t do that.  So he would drop his crutches, pick up his bb gun and disappear into the trees.  When he had enough bird hunting he would yell for Sister to find and fetch his crutches for him so he could three-leg it out of the shelter of the trees.

    Then came another great debate between Mom and Dad: to trim or not to trim.  Mom said yes, Dad said no.  Mom won. 

     We sawed branches away from the trunks to a height of four or five feet.  We used handsaws.  Worse than sawing was dragging branches out of the forest and piling them up.  We had a couple of huge piles for a year or two, until they dried enough to have a huge bonfire.  No more hiding in the trees.  You could see through the rows.  And the wind could blow through them too.  We didn’t realize we had gotten used to being protected from the north wind.

  Another big change came when many of them croaked during the sixties to Dutch elm disease.  The little wood burner in the kitchen has been amply supplied with elm firewood.

      I replaced most of the dead ones with cedars, trying to get them in to a straight line but having to follow Dad’s “footsteps.”  It took a lot of work cutting and hauling the wood and the branches, digging out the roots.  An overhaul of the septic system and the installation of a leech field rendered the former watering method inoperable.  Enough garden hose and some wet years helped the cedars thrive and once again the wind doesn’t blow very hard from the north. 

    Sixty years have come and gone since those “sticks” went into the ground.  Fifty years is about the life expectancy of an elm.  The twenty or so that survived the Dutch elm disease are starting to succumb to old age.  I bought a good chainsaw about fifteen years ago.  We had a McCullough before that.  Cutting a tree down is lots easier.  But disposing of the branches and stacking the firewood remains a time and energy-consuming task.

      Some just get a trim job, like the dead ones hanging over the garage roof.  The tin suffered a couple of dents during the operation.  I used the fallen branches for roof protection, but some of the falling wood found its way through the padding.

    Yet to come, the felling of this old friend, but that’s another story.  Would Mr. Ekgren consider this spruce a tree, I wonder.