Cutting a Tree

by ELIZABETH J. WENGER

The man who teaches you how to operate a chainsaw will look so much like a lumberjack, you will begin to doubt this is a real course and that he is a real teacher. He will wear a red flannel and have a blonde beard. His frame will be boxy, burly, brawny. He will lean on an axe and lecture you on the saw parts that turn inside the metal and plastic box that contains the motor.

He will bring out his saw, a heavy thing he will lift like a barbell to demonstrate its weight. He will joke and tell you about his years as a logger out east. He will describe the difference between felling trees on the coast and felling trees here, in the West. He will evoke the West so often across the four-day course, you will fall for the myth of it just as you will fall for the sawyer-imago he plants in your brain like a seed that will grow and grow until you fell it yourself.

But you will not cut a tree until the third day of your saw course. Not till after the mythical saw teacher jokes some more about wounds and regales you with tales from the forest, of men who’ve been cut, who were nearly killed, or who died horribly from widow-makers falling from the sky, from being whipped by spring poles they had somehow missed in their initial assessments, from falling on their saws, from being crushed by the trees they were felling, falling on them. 

His speech will be thick with logging lingo—language you will soon become so familiar with that you will spit it out as casually as you order a drink at a bar. You will tell your friends how to buck, how to access a lean, accruing your own collection of tree tales you will someday tell your kids.

He will joke so much that much of the course’s content will blend together. You will remember only the pictures he shows you of chainsaw wounds. These are not clean cuts like from a katana or butcher’s knife or the box cutter that left your right index-finger knuckle open so wide you could see to the bone when you were twelve. These cuts are different. They are gnarly things. Skin shattered to ribbons, split so you can see straight into that fragile vessel you so often forget you inhabit.

Aside from the gruesome images, you will also remember when the lumberjack-teacher has one moment of clarity. It is hidden among his dad jokes and tongue-in-cheek warnings. This sliver of wisdom will be veiled behind logger machismo; when he tells you why he stopped logging, he will look at the class and say: “When you start seeing trees as dollar signs, you know something is wrong.” Then he will carry on with the course and exhibit proper form while poking fun at former students who didn’t know shit from Shinola.

You will not be there to log, but to cut trees in some manner that they call conservation, fuel reduction, habitat restoration. There are so many trees and so many ways and reasons to cut them.

On the third day, before you begin to saw yourself, you will watch this man fell a tree. The whole class will fall silent so that all that can be heard is that violent roar of a chainsaw and, when he cuts the power, the slow creak of the tree falling. Like an old floorboard, like a rocking chair, like the sound of your grandmother getting up from bed.

Then it will be your turn. And you will pull the cord that will engage the drive cup on the fly wheel and rotate the crankshaft which connects to a piston that will begin its movement within the cylinder. There are magnets involved and mechanisms you don’t dare think about for worry your head might burst when all you really need to know is how not to cut yourself with the chain that is now flying rapidly around the bar of your chainsaw.

Then there is the vibration against your thighs, which will feel briefly erotic, seductive, sensual. You will not know if it is the vibration itself or the power of holding such a thing—this invention of the early 1900s that revolutionized the way we cut wood and, in turn, the way we harvest forests, turning them from immensity to possession.

You will not think of the invention itself or the history of logging. You will look at the machine and relish the feeling of wielding it. You will recognize its power as both an immediate and remote possibility. You are not cutting yet. You are holding it, getting a feel for the thing.

Finally, you will get to use the saw on wood. You will approach a tree and look it up and down like one might an opponent in a duel. This is an unfair fight. You will know this, but you will also know this is your job: To bring chain to wood and to carve and slice and chew at the life of the thing until it falls.

The trees will be big and old and you will begin to feel as though you are disrespecting an elder, creeping up on a sleeping geezer with a pillow to suffocate them. Or they will be small and young and you will feel you are cutting potential. And if you are the type of person who believes everything has a soul, in an animism sense, you might wonder how the tree will feel when you go at it. And if you’re the type of person who believes even if it does have a soul, it is you who has a right to take it, in an anthropocentric sense, you will cut it and feel it is your birthright. And if you’re the type of person who loves horror movies you will realize, looking down at the sharp teeth, that you’ve always wanted to cut something down in the terror sense, in the violence sense, in the power sense.

When you are cutting down your first tree you will feel somewhere or something deep inside you, something planted there by the Lorax and the Giving Tree, Johnny Appleseed and even, somehow, ironically, Paul Bunyan, that you are doing something wrong. As the blade touches the bark of the fir, you will feel like you are betraying some moral precept. You will look down at the base of the trunk and see a wolf spider running away and wonder if this tree is its home. No, you won’t wonder, you’ll know. You will see birds fluttering about and little flying unidentifiable insects and you will see lichen and moss and fungus and vines and dirt, even the dirt, and the stones—all of this—you will feel you are killing with the tree.

Vaguely, you will realize, without even knowing it, you bought into the “feeling,” the “aura,” even the “vibe” of trees as environmental-ethical symbols. You cannot touch one without feeling a crowd of tree huggers gathering behind you with members of PETA and the Sierra Club and Greta Thunberg herself, all of them throwing blood and sawdust on you, shouting at you that you are a murderer and you are already accepting the charge. You’re nodding your head and crying as your blade sinks further into this thing, no, this creature, this living, breathing beast that stands still and willingly takes its fate, falls as if resigned to the idea of falling, as if all it ever wanted to do was lay down and sleep. It is not the individual tree you are cutting, but the whole forest, the whole world that is melting and heating and changing and shifting and burning and drowning and dying. “I didn’t mean to,” you’ll say, pleading to the jury, to God, to your disappointed parents, to anyone who will listen, “I didn’t mean to.”

Eventually though, you won’t think of any of this. After you cut your first, your second, your tenth, thirtieth, the feelings you once had will wear off. You’ll think back to your first tree and laugh—how young you were, how naive! Maybe, if you’re the sentimental type, you’ll feel tender toward that first tree. Think of her and wonder what she’s doing now, if the termites have taken her, or if she’s providing shade for new growth, or if a camper collected her dismembered body to throw into the fire ring.

Yes, eventually you will cut the trees because it is your job; it will be rote. At some point you won’t even get excited by the sound of the saw coming to life when you yank the cord. Some days, you will be mildly annoyed by the slight soreness in your forearm from pressing the trigger. You won’t notice a ladybug fleeing your incoming chain. You won’t think of metaphysics and ecosystems or of bark and sap. You won’t pause to count the rings on the trees and guess at years of drought, look for signs of fires survived or sunlight blocked. You won’t think back to the pecan tree you planted with your brother and father when you were small. You won’t think of how the pecan tree grew with you, and up to you, brushed against your second story window and scared you some nights but lulled you to sleep others. You won’t think of the magnolia tree in the front yard, of its flowers or of making rubbings of leaves in elementary school and marveling at the sizes, the shapes. Sometimes, you won’t think at all except about what’s for lunch, and if you’ll have time to nap during your fifteen-minute break, and if the chain needs sharpening for the fifth time that day.

This is the problem of cutting a tree: the tree itself, its physical form, is lost in a maelstrom of cultural semiotics and of memories of shade and parks and yards and forests all branching out and tangled in each other. It means so much that, how could it mean anything, but how could it mean nothing either? The conundrum quarrels in your brain against the simple and undeniable ease that is a chainsaw moving through the heart of a tree. The ease of repetitive action that makes one trunk bleed into another and the individual parts of the massive collection swell up till you cannot think beyond the roar of the two-cylinder motor, cannot decipher what each tree might mean in either a close-up sense (to itself) or a larger, divine sense (to the network of living things that you yourself are a part of, touching daily, touching even with your breath, touching with your tongue, your intestines, your excrement, touching and pushing and being pushed by, and feeding and destroying . . . touching, touching now with the chain).