A Eulogy for a Tree

D’ougal, the king of the Big Trees. “Fare you well, fare you well, I love you more than words can tell…”

Early in the morning, on August 17, 2020, my husband left with the eldest to head to Portland. As I said goodbye while they drove away down the long driveway under the canopy of lush, verdant trees, I felt a deep sense of melancholy that I immediately brushed off as empty nesting syndrome. It’s hard to let your children go.

The day wore on and the smoke began to thicken. By the time sunset was rolling around, the sky was a sherbet haze. The melancholy had turned into a foreboding that I also brushed off, this time as worry for my younger son. He’d just left for town to confront some lifelong friends who had hurt him very badly, and I knew he was nervous about the conversation, thus so was I. Yet I wonder how, as the smoke grew thicker with every breath that day, I could have been so blind?

There was no power. No internet. All the men of the house were gone. It was ninety-eight degrees and the smoke had covered the land such that I had to close my windows. My heart was heavy and I needed to get outside, for it was cooler out there than in my sweatbox of a home. I grabbed a bottle of wine and my beautiful acoustic bass, not a standup but a guitar made by a local designer and went out to the porch off my master bedroom to sit beneath Doug, the greatest of the Big Trees. Normally, I’d have spent the evening in the hot tub, nestled under his great branches like stairways to heaven, but without power, my options were limited. As the evening grew dimmer, I stared up at his greatness—he was an Adonis of the tree world. I’d long had a relationship with him and as I gazed at his beauty, I felt compelled to cry.

I sang and played him every single song I knew. I toasted him and his fabulousness. I cried and sang and cried and sang for quite some time. I didn’t understand why I was inspired to do this, it was not something I’d done for him before. I played until the wine was gone and the darkness of the night surrounded us.

He would burn two days later, as the sun set.

Technically, his name was D’ougal, a Douglas Fir of more than two hundred feet tall and fifty inches in diameter at his base. I’ll admit, naming a Doug Fir “Big Doug” isn’t very clever of us, but he accepted it as his nickname for he was quite patient with us humans. He had two trunks, like long legs, topped with a lush green canopy. Often I would see a man diving into the earth when I looked at him—his face hidden while the rest of him towered above me. To be fair, he was a bit too close to the house, the previous owner had no qualms about letting trees touch the home, and more than once he dropped a huge branch on the hot tub cover, ripping a huge gash in it and rendering the thing useless once it rained. We’d look up at him from the hot tub on a starry night and beg him to refrain from dropping one of those widow makers on the home. Given D’ougal was crammed between the garage and the house, it’s no wonder that the flames climbed so high along his trunk that one of his legs eventually caught fire and broke at the knee, crashing down on the ash pile that was once our home. We have no idea how long he burned, when my husband arrived on 8/20/20 to find everything destroyed, Doug still had two trunks. When we returned mid-September, his leg covered the entire of our house, from one end to the other.

I can’t describe the emotions I felt when I saw him, crippled like a solider from WW1, blackened at least one hundred feet up. Though I wouldn’t admit it then, D’ougal was dying. The first contactor I brought up to the property was the arborist, a man named Paul, who walked the property with me to see who had lived. Many, many trees were dead, but at that time he thought Doug had a chance.

“If you believe in these trees, they will make it,” he’d said. Then he agreed to come back in the spring to see who was still alive after the winter storms.

We’ve visited D’ougal many times since then, at least two to three times a week, often singing and speaking with him. He’s always been easy to “talk with.” I’m convinced he was the one who told me to wake up on the night of my evacuation. When you hear Doug, it’s a boom in your mind—first an image, then as my brain processes it, a few words. On the night he burned, I’d connected with him in the hotel room. I’d just gotten off the phone with Walt, who was at the same time fleeing a fire Vacaville one hundred miles away, and I “saw” the flames in our neighborhood as they roared toward Vick Drive. I begged Doug to stop the fire, to save our street, as if that were in his power. He was a pillar of flame, covered from head to toe. All he would say to me was, “Fire is life. What will be, will be.” When I came to myself, I was covered in sweat. I’ve never been so hot in my life. I knew my house was gone but lacked the words to speak. When Walt arrived late that night at the hotel, I told him my vision. The next day, he drove up the mountain with our friend Sam to learn for himself that Doug had indeed burned, and so had everything else.

Doug always loved a good party. I’m so grateful that on the Friday before the fire, the Hoovers, our covid bubble family, came over for a “cool tub.” He got one last raucous fête, and he deserved it. One day in late September, I heard a voice say, “check the Slice of Heaven,” the name of our neighborhood Facebook group, and I saw a call from young mycologist researchers looking for sites to use oyster mushrooms to help with fire remediation. I immediately called them. In their group was a woman who was willing to take the dead trees PG&E had left behind and her crew still visits on a regular basis to work that job. I know this was Doug’s way of getting some young folks to come hang out with him, I’m not kidding.

Yet even with this love, he continued to wither. His branches grew brown while the neighboring giant firs still have a very vibrant green canopy. He was thirsty, but the rains didn’t come. Each day there was less of him. Less of his voice, less of his body. Last week, more than five months after the fire, I received the topographical survey of our land. There he was, a 50” diameter tree with the label DEAD next to him. My heart clutched. I tapped into him.

                “Are you dead?”

                “What will be, will be.”

D’ougal isn’t the first tree I’ve loved. My Uncle Tom had a willow on the Mississippi River and I would spend hours nestled in her branches, imagining I was in a castle, or in the fairy realm, far from the world. It was in that weeping willow that my imagination first came to life. I loved her so much. She died some years back. There have been way too many floods and eventually her roots gave out. There’s a gaping hole where she once stood and a hole in my heart each time I visit. I still miss her. Funny, many people ask me how I could have the courage to return to a plot of land that has been burned like this. What if it happens again? My Uncle Tom and Aunt Susan have lived on the banks of the Mississippi for as long as I’ve been alive. They’ve piled up sandbags against the rising river more times than anyone can really keep count. Yet they still live there. It appears that falling in love with a river and a piece of land runs in my blood.

If I’m honest, I’m grieving the loss of this friend. Hope can take you only so far. The word DEAD on that survey says it all and the time has come to let him go. Big Doug was the king of the Big Trees, the one Walt and I knew best, but now that the houses, as well as 40+ other trees have been removed from the land, there are new Big Trees to meet. Trees we’ve never seen because they were hidden by larger ones that have passed on, or the house which no longer exists either. Across from Doug stands another Doug Fir, this one 60 inches in diameter at its base that I’ve been getting to know. He goes by, Burl. His canopy is green and lush even though he too is burned at least one hundred feet up. The firestorm that caused this damage is unfathomable, I can imagine it whipping it’s way between my houses and trees, like golden waves, spinning around the structures and up the canyon crevasses. I’m sure it was terrifying for the forest folk to endure.

While his body is dead, I’m not sure D’ougal is gone. There’s something about the consciousness of trees; they live on in the roots, connected for miles, sharing information, like their own social media network. When I tap into him now, I still feel him. It’s different, but somehow he’s still there, becoming something else. What that is, I may never know in my lifetime, but the being D’ougal still exists in the Book of Life. He taught both my husband and I that nature is filled with consciousness. These beings may not use vocal chords or movement like we do to share ideas and interact with us, but it’s been one of the greatest mistakes of the Industrial and now Information Age to think that only humanity is capable of consciousness on this planet.

Can a person love a tree? I think many of you know this to be true. Can a tree love you back? This is the great question. Many native cultures know and love the mountains, rivers, trees, fish, birds, grasses, and rocks of their lands. They have long understood that we and the Earth are one and use terms like Brother Wind or Grandmother Raven to bond themselves to the nature they have been blessed to tend. While the western mind will deny such love can exist, our hearts know it’s possible. Perhaps one of the reasons we feel such melancholy in our age is because we know that many beings are destroyed by our endless cycles of profit and greed. If we knew she could feel, would we continue in our ways? But if we don’t continue to use nature, then what about us? If we granted consciousness to the world around us, could we remain on this path of ultimate destruction? To see the world as alive forever changes you.

All it takes is falling in love with one tree, one river, one rose, and the whole heart of the world can be known. For that lesson, dearest D’ougal, I will always be grateful to you.