Contributed photo via Sandy Stott
Every so often, when I’m walking in local woods as the season shuts down toward solstice, I come upon a decorated tree. Usually, it’s a fir of some ilk, though a few times I’ve found baubles on a short, bare-limbed maple. And twice now, a fir has been strung with a few strands of lights. Which glow or wink for a little while before the cold and the constant ask for power drain their batteries. Clearly, an elf or elves are about.
Even as I’m not much for importing our neighborhood customs into the forest (do we really think we improve on what’s already there?), these tiny, dressed trees make me smile: they are a little cheer when the season tends toward drear, and they are complements for the slanting daylight, for me, the year’s finest.
A few November’s ago, one such tree appeared in the extended Commons in Brunswick, the 100-plus acre addition to saved lands to south of our Town Common. As I walked by the tree, it got me thinking back to a small family foray into growing Christmas trees, and especially into the last tree gathered from it.
All this was decades ago in New Hampshire. My parents had just bought an old, wood-heated saltbox house (with 2-seater outhouse), and across the dirt road from it, was a deeply furrowed, failed potato field. One day, my father, summing up our family workforce of four, with its nine- and 12-year-old sons, announced that we were going to plant 1,000 Christmas trees there. He figured that by the time my brother and I reached college age, the trees would be ready for sale, and they would finance our college years. (This was during the era when college tuition still fit easily into four figures.)
Somehow he’d gotten the state forestry service to sign on to this scheme, and the boxes of seedlings appeared on a hot July day. We set to work inserting them one at a time into slits opened in the earth. Row after slow row, this went on all day…and the next. My brother and I kvetched, my mother took occasional cigarette breaks, my father made sure we kept on.
In subsequent summers, we cleared weeds and competing seedlings from around the trees; most of them kept growing. The future arrived when I was a freshman in college, and, even in those days of affordable ed, the trees couldn’t meet the bill. The local Lions club did sell them in town, and the few hundred dollars per year we received must have bought something, but I made more in my scholarship job as campus mailman than the trees contributed.
Then, the remaining trees grew too large, and the only Christmas cutting left was our family tree, often now a top from a too big fir.
One December in my early 40s, wanting to impress my bride, I drove north to get our tree. Once in the old field, we scanned the 30-foot remainders, and, after some time, decided the top of one would be perfect. I took my handsaw, fought my way in through the lower branches and began to climb. This was shaky, fraught work, but I eventually got about 15 feet up and assessed the next step.
I would cut the top off, but I also knew I needed to be careful to have it land on its side. If it pitched over and landed point first, we would have a pointless tree, which is exactly that, no tree at all. Having thought this through, I began. Sawing softwood is easy, and I was quickly at the point where a few strokes would finish the job. Cut, cut; I was through! Right hand on the tree’s top, I carefully pitched it out parallel to the ground and watched as it begin to fall. Yes! I thought; it will land well. Yes!
Then I looked at my hands. The right was empty of the pitched tree; the left held the saw; neither held onto the remaining tree. As I began to tip backward, I tossed my saw, clutched at the tree. Only air. The sky seemed to lean close to watch. The fall took some time, enough to wonder how hurt I’d be. Then, I landed.
I lay there receiving messages from various precincts of my body; early indications were that I was alive, maybe not injured. A little winded from impact, yes, but okay. I stirred; my wife hurried over. She looked concerned. But as I shifted, began to gather myself, she shifted to laughter…a lot of it, enough for three people, I thought.
“That was spectacular,” she said. “Darwin Award-worthy.” And she sat laughing in the snow. That six inches of new snow and the grasses matted beneath had clearly cushioned my fall, saved me. While I was a little body-sore for a few days, I was okay.
The treetop was pointed and fine too; it winked and gleamed throughout the season. But it was also the last brought in from that childhood field, perhaps the final step in my education.
Still, each year when the lights go up and dusk seems to begin just after noon, some forest or wayward tree reminds me of that tree, this story.
Sandy Stott is a Brunswick resident and chair of the town’s Conservation Commission.
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