Last week I brought my chain saw out of hibernation and walked around downhill of the house, snipping off sundry little dead trees to tidy up the property. I worked my way down the trail to the garden, and then I found myself looking up at this tree.

It’s a lodgepole pine, 70 feet tall and 95% dead. I thought, It might as well come down now. Another year and it would be completely dead, and then a high wind might bring it down. We might wake up one morning with a dead tree in the poultry yard, in the berry patch, or even right down in the middle of the shoop. There was no wind that afternoon as I stood there, chain saw in hand; my saw was sharp, I had the time, and I wouldn’t have to contend with wind pushing the tree this way and that while I was trying to control its fall. So I started cutting.

I hacked out a wedge-shaped cut halfway through the trunk in the direction I wanted the tree to fall. Then I cut from the back toward my first cut. But like many lodgepoles, the trunk was oblong, and its long axis faced the direction I wanted the tree to fall. It would much rather fall on the shoop. But I quickly retrieved some wedges and pounded them into the slice on the back of the tree, the way our neighbor John had done last summer.

It worked. Pretty soon, the tree leaned away from me and fell according to directions, crashing heavily down as trees do, right across the old skid trail and well away from anything breakable.

The wood from this tree could provide several weeks’ worth of heat to our home next winter. Jess wanted to take my picture with it. I wouldn’t have chosen that, since I’m the least likely person on our road to drop a tree successfully. But she insisted.

It’s surprising to think of the effectiveness of that little steel wedge. It probably doesn’t generate more than an inch of lift. But when it’s is pounded into a deep cut on the back of the tree, that one inch is enough to bring the two-ton, 70-foot behemoth crashing to the earth.*

It’s analogous, isn’t it? Great trees grow from little seeds, and little wedges can bring down great trees.

*It occurs to me that some of you may be upset about my cutting down a tree. Here is a little secret: every tree falls. It may fall in a high wind or by lightning strike; it may die by insects or by fire, but like every human, every tree dies; and when it does, there is only one place for it to go and that is down. I would far rather control the time and direction of its fall, and use its wood thankfully, than otherwise. It is part of a wise stewardship.