It’s one of those unremarkable roadside natural growths: a gnarly oak with a mangled crown 30’ high and not destined for any sawmill. For years dozens of road crews – judging by the moss overgrowing limb lops – have directed its growth away from power & phone pole #120557727 installed 3 miles up Black Bart Trail East.
Some years ago, mid-May or early June, Nick and I were walking up the road an hour after sunrise. Just where shadow yielded to sunlight there was a hefty fallen limb still attached to a tree’s trunk and very much alive. Behind the break was the darkness of the tree’s hollow trunk. In front of the break was a vulture, facing the full light, drying its akimbo wings. Nick went happily berserk, barking & leaping for the bird he knew he couldn’t reach. I was once told that vultures have a defecatory response to such threats. Then a smaller vulture clambered from out the tree hollow’s nursery and clumsily onto the branch and perched next to (I assume) its mother. Not much else happened.
The next year, same scene. “I wondered,” I said to Nick, “whether we’d see that show again. Frank told me it’s really rare for vultures to nest so low.” The following year toward the end of May I found myself expecting the show. Disappointed, I gave up expectation. Then, according to some natural course not mine, came again the apparition of mother and child and Nick’s jump-around. That was it and all. We now had ourselves a springtime ritual. I’d watch for its natural recurrence each May, at some point saying, “Well, ‘twas fun while it lasted,” which cued Madonna Vulture & child to re-appear next day as earth continued its diurnal course, and did for several more years (Nick is 10).
Until this year. – P&E and AT&T subcontractors have been up & down East BBT for a week or more in anticipation of this year’s wildfire season which started in L.A. on 7 January. Probably our season starts on Valentine’s Day. The scouting crews have spray-painted graffiti on power poles. Mostly the graffiti proclaim USA. Before 2016 many of us knew that the initials meant “underground service access.” Chanted by a crowd, the initials meant support for Team USA in an international competition. Since 2016 USA has been occupied by Magatites. The slogan now is a punning alternation between sports fans’ joyous shouts for American Madison Keyes’ victory in the Australian Open and Project 2025’s Fifth Column subversion of our Constitution.
Last week when Nicky and I walked up to sunlight we looked at absence. No tree. Chainsaw had felled it, chipper had masticated brush and spewed the chips into a truck for haulaway. Nicky was sniffing (I thought somewhat mournfully) the remains of his unreachable prey’s manger. The sawyer had thoughtfully bucked it into woodstove lengths. Nick’s and my pleasant May ritual… gone.
A crewman was coiling some rope. I was angry, about to shout “Why’d you butcher that tree? It didn’t threaten your goddam wires!” I didn’t shout. Crewman silently looked at an old guy with dog. I looked at the operative end of a chain of causation reaching up through increasingly well-paid salary levels, all the way way up to CEO Patricia Poppe’s $51,200,000 2022 paycheck (Environmental Working Group figure) and probably beyond into court where PG&E’s defense against the charge reckless disregard for fire safety will sound like this: “Your Honor, just this year PG&E has spent untold millions to serve the people of Northern California and protect our power lines. We’re sparing no expense! For example…[blah, blah, blah].”
Truly I hope my young sawyer earns PG&E’s annual median employee salary of $132,433. That sum (it’s less than his CEO boss lady takes in a day) would earn him a decent living & possibly the chance to send his children to college & even to pass on to them some generational wealth.
It also lightly burdens him with Henry Thoreau’s observation “the rich man…is always sold to the institution [our U.S. socio-economic system] which makes him rich.” And randomly cuts down trees.
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