For 15 years, it was our neighbor—though I suppose I rarely thought of it that way when it was living, until just before we said goodbye.
“It” was an enormous, ancient-looking camphor tree on the parking strip beside the house just south of us. The species—which sports a huge canopy, crazed, cracked bark, and shiny leaves—is native to East Asia, but was used as a street tree in California because it grows quickly and casts great shade. This was once invaluable for our eager suburbs: Camphors are common Bay Area street trees, even if, for various reasons, they are no longer often planted. The ones in my town, El Cerrito, date from an earlier era, probably the late 1930s and early ’40s, when little bungalows filled our subdivisions, when developers guttered and paved over our many streams. I don’t know, but I guess that my neighbor-the-camphor was planted about 1938, the same time as identical bungalows were first built on our suburban street.
In this newish suburb, another neighbor, older than both the camphor tree and me, is our buried stream. It runs between the south-facing house and ours, its burial making the suburb possible. Even underground, it is a lovely feature—sweet-smelling and gurgling in winter, drying out by May. It’s certain that early on the camphor stuck its roots in that cool drink. That’s why it grew, even for a camphor, unusually enormous. By the time I moved here in 2010, the camphor had already burst its sidewalk box, pushing up a great knobbed base that rose diagonally to its first branching. That base was the right shape for kids of all ages to climb (for grown kids, too). As a new parent, I’d take my toddlers out to walk beneath it. I later helped them play and lean upon and scramble up. Eventually they left me and climbed into the heights above. They weren’t the only ones: By the time my kids were mostly doing other things, a new flock of little ones would visit, circle, climb. The camphor really was inviting. You could sidle up its slanting base, clamber into the first of its branched limbs, and sit above the street, close to crows’ nests, finches, sky. You could lie back and admire its fractal, labyrinthine canopy. You’d hear the wind. You might just pause and be.
Indeed, our neighbor-tree had been a patient, generous citizen. Nevertheless, it’s never easy being a street tree. This one had long since exploded all its containers; its massive roots had lifted and torn both sidewalk and street. It did not show much regard for the gridded life of suburbs, for the shape someone 80-odd years ago had planned for it. It had found a marvelous source of water and sun. It weathered storms. It was a community elder. However, cities are not much for cracked pavements and enormous limbs. They see public danger there (not always unwisely). It is easier to keep our sidewalks flat, our plants in boxes, their limbs relatively tamed.
One day, last spring, the inevitable happened: An official knocked to let us know the tree would be coming down. Did we have objections? I thought about it and wrote a note to our listserv. Would it be possible for the city to study an alternative? Would we be willing to act as neighbors? Could we meet to discuss? I don’t know these people super well, though we’ve had block parties. But people showed up for the tree. A few weeks later, at least 20 of us gathered under its shade, and the city came, promising to study what we could do. People I’d never met talked about what the tree had meant to them—how it entwined with their good memories. Meanwhile, our neighbors to the south were kind and generous—they said they’d be willing to explore alternatives that included rearranging some of the on-street parking and strategies for grading the sidewalk. The city offered to provide some options.
A few months passed. The city did something like due diligence, or made a decent show of it. We waited. They came back. Again we gathered underneath the tree. City officials reported that building a special space around the tree would cost a lot of money. More importantly, they said they’d found rot, deep beneath its surface. They argued that the tree might well become a threat or fall in some intense storm. Our group asked questions and nodded, perhaps sadly. We thanked the city for its time. We seemed to accept this decision. We wrote each other on the listserv, glad we’d tried, glad that in a furious time, something civil had happened.
It probably speaks to these fraught and sometimes tragic-feeling years that having a civil meeting about a street tree with neighbors who all cared about it too felt so good. It was good to have a tree we loved. It was good to have a community who cared about a tree. It felt good that the city showed up to study options. This itself felt rare, a gem worth holding. Still, what happened next amazed me.
The week eventually came that the signs went up: “No parking, tree removal.” By now it was mid-October. Clear, tangerine evening light closed in earlier every night. Any day now, someone would come with chainsaws. Days passed in expectant silence. But as they did, something extraordinary began to happen. Online someone asked if there was a way to salvage trunk bits, and if a local bowl-turner might come collect the camphor burls. Another person asked to save some limbs. The children from down the street hung cards on the tree’s branches. One said “GOODBYE.” One said “THANK YOU.” The cards shimmered in the breeze. My daughter went and climbed the tree again and hugged it. One evening, I also said goodbye. Outside, in a long persimmon dusk, I rested my back against the tree. I looked into its canopy and told the crows (it was mostly crows) that I was sorry, it had been a good run, that I hoped they’d find great nests elsewhere. I admired dappled leaf shapes. I ran my hands over elephantine bark. I thought about how the tree might feel in a meadow, in a forest, somewhere it could feel more free. I was grateful to sit in a suburb, imagining a meadow.
The day they came to cut it down, I left the house. I couldn’t stand the sound of saws, but it was more than that. I felt that I could hear its great crown sigh. We could hear the murder-calls of crows, alarm and flurry in the air. A mockingbird cried on panicky repeat. I swear the underground stream also sounded louder. I came back that night to a Gorgon’s worth of fallen limbs tangled over lawn and street. That was only the first of many days they had to cut—it was so huge, its base so big, that the cutting went on and on. That night, and all week, the camphor tree released its oil—powerful, astringent, far sharper-smelling than the scented balls a camphor tree later sometimes becomes. The oil wafted over the neighborhood. The tree perfumed our nights with its huge death. It clung to our hair, our clothes. It stung our eyes. And each day, we greeted its new absence.
Yet even then, the tree continued to surprise me. It kept drawing community. The cutting had been posted on a website. People came all day, each day, to take bark or burls or bits for turning. They’d tiptoe in and harvest some, then drive off. Some people took a lot, some a tiny piece. It somehow recalled the harvest of an ancient woolly mammoth—some act of great communal sharing. Our family also saved two logs. I called a local kiln to haul it off and dry it. I’ll have a round or lengthwise split from the tree milled next year, and then maybe—what?—a table, or a bench, or some shelves, made out of a living thing I loved.
It’s nearly summer now. Our town is in a rabid fight about building a library. The signs are up, the neighbors pitted against each other—yes! and no!—and some days it seems we do not know much about community at all. I also miss the tree some days when I see the open sky above my neighbor’s house, although I also like the sun in my front garden. Mostly what I think about is how during its life and even to the end, the tree offered us all great beauty. I felt so happy, in the end, that it reminded me that a big life, lived well, spreading wide, can mean so much to folks around it. I was glad that in the end, such a life can sometimes be broken into many parts, reaped and treasured. Even in its death, it was a gift that we could share. In the end, it gathered us.
