This is a town without trees.

It wasn't always a town without trees. There was a time when trees lined the lengths of the narrow, dirt roads. The trees were large and magnificient, taller then any building. Their branches arched across the roads, stretching to touch their brothers on the other side. They protected the town from the empty sky.

The trees gave the town its beauty in fall, when the leaves were yellow and red, and in spring, when the buds began to sprout. The trees were the town; it seemed more likely that the houses had been planted in the spaces between.


The man who took away the trees was not an evil man.

The man who took away the trees ran a business for many years. He was respectable to his customers, and successful in his work. He brought much prosperity to the town.

And so it turned out, being a respectable man of the town, and being that it was a small town, that he eventually became the mayor. And his first business as mayor was to decide that the trees must go.

It was not that the man did not appreciate the beauty of the trees. He did. Often he would walk among the trees on his way home from work, listening to the rustle of the fallen leaves beneath his feet, and then he would marvel at the beauty of the colors all around him.

But when the man became the mayor, he decided that he must look beyond such aesthetics. To be moved irrationally was fine for a layman, but with his new responsibility he felt he should not allow his judgement to be clouded.

‘I must do what is best for the town,’ he thought.

He determined that what was best for the town was to take away the trees.

He reasoned that the trees were a hazard. He argued to the council that they were an accident waiting to happen. He noted the evidence. During big storms you could hear the trees creaking and groaning; it was only a matter of time before they snapped, he argued. Already after a storm you would see small branches that had fallen to the ground. On a few occasions, after particularly fearsome storms, the street would be littered with the carcass of branches, having cracked beneath the momentum created by their sway. With great concern he pointed out that some of these branches were noteable in their size, and that they might do serious damage if they fell on an unsuspecting passerby.

‘We cannot tolerate such a danger!’ the man argued. ‘What if one of these branches were to fall on a house? What if one of our children were to be crushed by one?’

The council at first resisted, but the man refused to give in, and eventually he won out. His reasoning had no answer.

‘After all, he said, ‘These trees are a risk, and they are unnecessary. They have no reason to be here. We do not need these trees. And so they should be gotten rid of. For then we can live in peace, and not in fear of some fateful day.’

The next spring the trees were brought down in a cloud a sawdust and chainsaws. And now the town does not have to think anymore about falling branches, and no one worries when a big rain storm comes.

But now the town is treeless. The streets are no longer shrouded from the sky, and the bright sun beats down on the barren gravel and illuminates all its imperfections. The beauty that the trees held has disappeared. The houses are now misplaced, seperated by parched grass and stumps, naked to behold the chipped paint and crumbling foundation.

But worse is that the town itself was held together by the trees. The roots were the roots of families, their leaves the sign of life. Since the trees came down the children don’t come out as much anymore. The couples no longer walk through the streets holding hands and laughing. The old men no longer sit on their porches through the long summer days, rocking and watching the shadows pass.

The mayor has since moved on. He found work in another town, and no one has heard much from him since. But his legacy will only be forgotten when the stump of a town finally withers and dies.

- posted by Sigurd12/28/2004 07:01:00 PM