Valley oaks

The other morning on my way out I noticed the tree service was back at the two-acre lot down the road that just sold for a little less than one million buckeroonies.

A few weeks ago the new owners had had a large, healthy, beautiful eucalyptus tree removed. Eucalyptus are not most people's favorite trees around here – they're not native, they burn easily and explosively, and when they get big and old and heavy, they tend to fall over or break off enormous limbs that can take out cars, roofs or anything else that might happen to be lying around underneath. Some faithful readers may remember that a couple of years ago one of our eucalyptus trees cracked nearly in half during a winter storm and dropped a branch big enough to chop into a nice-sized stack of firewood. Though it's not the greatest wood for burning – or building things, either – it's not good for much at all, in fact.

Anyway, be all that as it may – I've always loved eucalyptus trees and have at times gone to more than a little effort to keep them alive, healthy and safe from the tree-cutter's saw. They're beautiful trees, silvery, smooth and fragrant, and so graceful in the wind. At my last house there were five or six very large ones (four stories tall and maybe 6–8 feet across at the base of the trunk) standing with their feet in the creek, and in the evenings I would often go outside to dance with them as they/we swayed like slow-motion seaweed at the bottom of the ocean. It was one of my favorite meditations before going to sleep. I could watch them from my bed, as well, if the moon was shining. I love those trees.

But our neighbor apparently doesn't love them. And yesterday morning I found out he has a thing about oak trees, too. The evidence came in the form of a large white truck and a crew of four guys with chain saws, charged with the unsavory task (so they explained to me) of removing two mature valley oaks that the new owner feels might mar his view of the vineyards, bay and distant mountains.

I rode up on my bike, all prepared to make a stink – beg them to hold off cutting until I could call someone from the county, etc. – only to find they were just as disgusted as I was. As tree guys, they don't like to have to kill beautiful, healthy trees, especially oaks, which are considered more or less holy around here and which in fact are illegal to cut if they've been awarded the status of a "heritage tree," though I'm not sure what a tree has to do to earn that distinction. The trees that were anhilated yesterday – not just dismembered and chopped down but utterly disemboweled from the earth until not even a particle of root remained – were probably between 40 and 50 years old, according to the foreman. But that was not enough to protect them. Down they went.

I would have loved to have those trees growing on our land. And I don't know if I ever want to meet this new neighbor; I dread finding out what kind of house he's planning to build.

I feel like I've been kind of complaining a lot about where I live, lately. I don't mean to. Mostly, I love it here – that's why I live here! This valley has been my home for more than twelve years now and I feel like I'm still in the honeymoon stage when it comes to discovering new things I love about it. For as long as I've lived here I've been shocked anew at some point each and every day by how really freaking beautiful it is – "I actually get to live here!" is what flashes across my mind – and the trees are a huge part of what I find most beautiful. The oaks, especially.

A little-known fact about me is that my name is an oak-related anagram for one of my most favorite personal rules to live by. I was not at all surprised to find this out a few years ago while playing with an online anagram generator. I relate to oaks, is what I'm saying. They're special to me.

Another thing about oak trees that I like very much: they are innately wild. Unlike certain kinds of pines or firs, for example, which may be pleased as punch to spend their entire short and unsuspecting lives on a Christmas tree farm, or other types of trees like Japanese maples and a million different kinds of fruit trees that seem to genuinely appreciate people's efforts to cultivate and care for them – unlike these other, more domesticated trees, oaks will never be truly happy living in the strictly regimented rows of the orchard or native plant nursery, no matter how deeply loved they may be by the people who try to grow them that way.

A baby oak tree – otherwise known as an acorn – as soon as it sprouts, puts out a long, deep tap-root that sustains it for the rest of its life. That's why if you ever order oak seedlings by mail, they come in those long yellow plastic tube-like containers, instead of in a regular nursery pot. And that's why, if you try to keep an oak tree in a pot, or transplant it after it's started to grow in the ground – if you disturb that long, life-sustaining root, in other words, or try to force the tree to grow where it knows it cannot – you may end up with a tree that lives but you will not have a tree that's as healthy, free and glorious as one that's been allowed to choose its own location, sink its feet in as deep as they can go, stretch out its tight and cautious young shoots toward the sky, and begin a long and leisurely lifetime of growing at its own pace for as many as seven centuries or more, if left undisturbed.

I personally know an oak in this valley that is estimated to be over 400 years old. Grandmother oak, we call her. She's a real beauty.