Early in our childhood, and thanks mostly to the iconic Fred Rogers, adults taught us that people make a neighborhood. Midway through the journey of a natural disaster, however, we learn the hard lesson that it is a neighborhood’s trees we commune with in a deeper sense.
The cast and angle of light on your yard, patio, or sidewalk. The familiar location of shadows. The sound of a breeze through green leaves is the windchime you never need buy, and the crisp crunch of brown leaves underfoot is the ambient sound of fall itself. You may know where to turn on a particular street thanks to a large American elm, and know where to park because you are beside an American sycamore or black walnut tree.
We had no idea how much we would miss them in the wake of St. Louis’s May 16 tornado. At least, I did not. The sight of street after street blasted clear of their trees, felled to the ground in silent defeat or shorn of every branch, like a hand without fingers—these are sights that dig at the soul because, much like seeing for the first time a friend or family member suffer horrible injuries in a car accident, you never thought you would have to gaze on such calamities.
Of course the human toll of a natural disaster brings home calamities more deserving of attention, assistance, and empathy. The documents of homes wrecked, lives upended and even lost, and buildings since demolished mark the human cost, the most imperative scars, of the city’s recent tornado. The scale of trees lost and upended, though, is the starkest reminder of a collective loss we all take in and respond to, even those of us lucky enough to live through that day unscathed. The endless trail of twigs, debris, and leaves, the sight of another majestic tree in the middle of dismemberment by a clean-up crew; all seem like remnants a big, bad bully leaves behind to taunt us with its awesome power of destruction.
Plant life can be laboriously fussy and prone to ruin without constant repetition of human attention. Maintaining a vegetable or flower garden is a lot like raising a child. Not so much with trees, which are “relational” thanks to their size and stature. Rather than reach down to prune them, we reach up to them, or even climb them in admiration.
When two vandals sawed through the trunk of Northumberland UK’s famous Sycamore Gap tree alongside Hadrian’s Wall in September 2023, the public response was almost as if the two men responsible should be charged with murder. What nature took 150 years to grow, they had spent mere minutes to fell with a chainsaw.
When the two vandals, both English men in their thirties, were charged by authorities, both denied having done the deed—until film footage of the act they themselves recorded was unveiled at trial. Neither had an explanation for why they sawed Northumberland’s Sycamore Gap to a stump, perhaps because there can be no explanation for something so vulgar and insensible. We call tornadoes “Acts of God” for a parallel reason. Namely, we could never know any reason or describe any sense behind the large-scale destruction that tornadoes bring. All we can do is mourn, clear the way, and plant again.
