Trees

The house where I grew up was an average building. To look at it from the road, one would think it a two story building with an attached car port built on a slope. As you would approach the door in the car port, you would begin to see the trees in the back yard. That is not to say you would miss them on the way down the driveway, this mountain is covered in trees What would be missing until you approach the house is the feeling that the house had somehow stolen its footprint from the surrounding forest, and the forest wanted it back.
The basement was always damp, the rainforest around us made it impossible to keep anything in one piece for very long. Eventually rot would begin where moisture collected and the object in storage would become a dead thing, returning to the earth from where it had come. Even so, there was a storage room, it smelled of rot and anything that was deposited there was doomed. It seemed that the battle against the forest was never ending; the damp was never going to go away, so we raised items that we wanted to keep off the ground to postpone the inevitable rot.
The front yard was covered in a lawn and garden of pleasant colours, but the back yard was Green. This was the kind of green that can only be achieved by hundreds of evergreens fighting for position over decades. This slow, beautiful battleground was the adventure playground of my childhood. We played in the underbrush, beneath the trees, their trunks growing in every direction. Climbing and screaming we would make as much noise as we could, away from the critical eyes and ears of our parents.
The evidence of the never ending battle for survival was all around us, we used the corpses of the fallen as our trenches. Described to us as nurse trees, these dead cedar trunks turned red as they rotted and provided nutrient rich soil for mosses and the next generation of evergreen combatants. We were dwarfed by the second generation growth, trees that were taller than houses and broader than two people. They filled us with a sense of awe. The respect that we gave the forest was understood by all in the neighbourhood, not for the yet unrecognized environmentalism that was developing in each of us, but the fear that some how the trees could one day seek revenge on the bad kids who tried to harm them.
The evidence for the power of the forest was best represented by the oldest stumps that had been cut a century before. We used these huge skeletal remains as forts; all that remained of the stumps was the outer ring of wood, the hardest part of the tree. The rest had returned to the forest floor. They were the perfect hiding place, holding four of us easily, we marveled at the imagined size of the tree in its heyday. These stumps still bore the scars of their final battle, the notches near the base where the lumberjacks inserted their springboards and used the two handed saw to fall them were still plainly visible. They were the subject of much discussion, that is, until we attended school and were told all about the lumberjacks and the tools of their trade.
I can remember talking with the other kids in class that day, we finished watching the film on the old logging industry and looking at the black and white pictures of the men, long dead, we could see the looks of triumph on their faces; they were showing us that they knew their mastery of nature was complete. They stood in front of a recently fallen log, it dwarfed the small group. The saws, axes and springboards looked like toys compared to the size of the now dead tree.
We all knew where we wanted to go and spent the rest of the school day willing the clock to hurry its journey to three. After school, we ran home and headed out on our daily journey into the forest, having one destination in mind. I wish now that the teacher had seen us in the forest behind the house later that afternoon; she would have thought her career a success. We all stood in a semi-circle around the ancient stump, all the marks had meaning to us, and we could see the falling process represented clearly before us. The v-cuts for the springboards and the final saw strokes to fall this ancient giant were plainly visible. I imagined the group of lumberjacks standing before this stump as their picture was taken. We all had the same thought in our heads, “If they cut the trees down and looked so smug about it, why is the forest back while they are gone?” We searched in vain for any evidence of their life in this place, but all there was left was the few stumps with the telling marks.
The forest fought back and won, our homes had been cut out of the second generation, and the third generation would eventually arrive and reclaim what it feels it needs. We were squatters on this earth, we could try to rule every living thing if we wanted. The trees would return after we have had our time to continue their never ending struggle.