A friend of our old home place was brought down yesterday. On Tuesday, November 17, professional sawyers cut down a dead-standing Mesquite tree estimated to be 75 years old. Our occasional high winds make dead trees a hazard, especially those growing along roadsides. It was time for Charlotte and me to lay in firewood for winter heating so it made sense for us to fell the old dead Mesquite and thus eliminate the road hazard its downed limbs represent and at the same time harvest the heat the old tree offers us as a gift.

At 8:00 AM the sawyers arrived. They’d already reconnoitered and devised their strategy for felling the tree without destroying my fence running along the roadside or endangering the road. Their calculations were dead on. The old tree dropped precisely into my open property as planned.

There is sadness in downing an old tree. While 75 years is brief compared to old growth Sequoias, it’s a long time in one place in today’s nano-second world where we change addresses and jobs and spouses like we change clothes. On the subject of downing old trees the Contrary Farmer writes:

“When a large tree hits the ground, the earth trembles. I can feel it in my bones and my soul trembles in response, like a tuning fork. And the sound that accompanies the fall causes me to quiver: as the trunk rends from the stump, a groan issues from the protesting wood and crescendos to a high wail as the tree gains momentum in its fall . . . I imagine invisible sparks, the soul of a tree disintegrating. The bird chatter, even the murmurs of wind high in the trees, hush in the electric air” (Gene Logsdon, The Contrary Farmer. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing Co, 1994, p. 148).

I thought of Logsdon’s words as I watched the old Mesquite crash to the ground. The old tree’s annual growth rings suggest it began life as a seedling in the hostile dust-bowl drouths of 1930, 1933, 1934, 1936. It survived predations of hungry jackrabbits during those lean years when bootleggers ended their smokey fires and breweries in Valencia Country New Mexico. It was a young sapling when the WPA and CCC boys were abroad in the Land of Enchantment, put to work by President Roosevelt. It was a young tree when the whole world went to war in the 1940s and when America opted for the fast lane during the post-war boom of the 1950s.

During the early 1950s Las Golondrinas lay derilect and fallow for a number of years, so the old Mesquite was here as weathered adobes crumbled in neglect. The tree was here when the Clinney family bought the place in the mid-1950s and brought it back and expanded it by cobbling together separate old buildings into the present rambling floor plan. It was here as witness when Mr. Clinney came home from his Defense Department employment in Albuquerque to announce the excavation of a bomb shelter under the northeast corner of the house, which he dug for his family’s safety against the dreaded nuclear attack that everyone feared in those days–a cavern we discovered during our own extensive remodeling. The old tree was here when the Clinney kids swam in the irrigation ditch … and when one of the girls came down with polio. It was here to mark the 30-some years the Clinneys called Las Golondrinas home.

The old Mesquite tree was here in 1984 when a Sandia Laboratory scientist bought Las Golondrinas from the Clinneys and lived here for eighteen years through work as well as retirement from laboratory research. The tree was here giving shade to resident horses when the scientist’s wife died and when he went through dark nights of the soul until in his sixties he brought back from Texas a high school friend as his second wife. The tree was witness when that wife had a severe stroke and when the retired scientist developed Parkinson’s Disease.

The Mesquite was likely already dead when we came to this place in 2002 bringing Scottish Terriers, a Scottie magazine, and green as a cucumber farmering skills. But as it gave shade from desert sun to men and livestock for all its 75 years at Las Golondrinas, so also to us, even as dead wood, it will now give heat recycled from its 75 years of processing light and water on this site.

We added a high-efficiency wood-burning stove in the rock fireplace of our old house the second winter we were at Las Golondrinas. It now heats the front half of our home where we gather at day’s end at the hearth side. This winter on frosty nights and colder mornings in our high desert, on those occasions when Charlotte and I and the Scotties cozy up to the cheery glow and welcome heat of our wood fire, I’ll remember the day the old Mesquite fell. I’ll remember it, too, when I scatter the ash bucket over our garden plot to enrich next summer’s vegetables.

As my maul splits the old Mesquite’s logs I’ll celebrate the old tree, the circle of life, and the old friend to Las Golondrinas who keeps on giving.

Joseph Harvill, publisher Great Scots Magazine