The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I do my fair share of tree cutting, I’ll admit to it. The trees I fall seem hopelessly defenseless maybe to the uninitiated newcomer to the woods and forests here on the not quite civilized South End, rooted as they are when the chainsaw revs up and the first cut for the back notch is made. But those fresh immigrants from the cities and suburbs they fled would be wrong, amigo. Trees have been here longer than us, longer than the indigenous Southendomish tribe who feared the spirits behond the safety of their open beaches and shorelines, longer than the fauna that evolved from earlier flora. Their DNA is more complex, their lifespans are far greater and their size makes midgets of the largest of us.

Long after we’ve gone extinct or left or a greener pasture on another planet in another star system, trees will reclaim what we took. They’re here for the long haul and they know how to play the long game. Even though I replant 10 times what I cut down for firewood, they know I’m not their friend. You might think only the alders would count me as a mortal enemy since I only cut them, but the firs and the cedars, the maples and hemlocks, they’ll always side their arboreal kin. I get it.

Last year a maple sheared off and smashed our wellhouse. This was after an old hemlock did the same and crushed my boathouse. An accident? you’re probably thinking. Not me. They could have fallen 330 degrees away from these buildings, but no, they hit them dead on. Bad luck, you’re figuring? Yesterday I came down the trail and toward the wellhouse I’d rebuilt. The same maple dropped another limb the size of a tree aimed right at the new building. At first I thought it had missed by 8 mere inches but after bucking up limbs and trunk, I noticed part of the wellhouse had been whacked hard enough to move it out of plumb, snap the corner post and send siding flying.

If I thought my trees had exacted enough revenge, I was badly mistaken. Evidently there’s no truce and no peace plan. I may have to stop using firewood for heat … but I suspect it’s too late for that.

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Maybe you saw where a gang of killer whales over in Europe launched coordinated attacks on sailboats, the speculation being that a dominant female orca had been injured by some encounter with a ship and was severely traumatized. Traumatized is a nice way of saying she was mightily pissed off. Out there in Mother Nature the birds are dropping rapidly in numbers, the insects are being reduced too and of course the amphibians are thinking about skipping metamorphosis and staying in the water. We humans haven’t been too kind to the creatures who share the planet. A little busy developing combustion engines, clearcutting the Amazon and working to develop artificial intelligence.

Course we homo sapiens aren’t too concerned, not yet anyway. Global warming? Climate change? What, me worry? We got our jet skis and our air conditioners, who cares about a few less mosquitoes, right? If we have to put up dams to keep the Atlantic from flooding Florida, well okay, we’ll put up sea walls and tide gates, not gonna stop burning coal just because a few environmentalists are whining, sure not gonna litter up Arizona with fields of solar arrays. The future will take care of itself, always has, always will. The birds, well, they’re on their own.

But … I just wonder if this gang of killer whales might be a harbinger of nature taking revenge. I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds as a kid, the world under siege by billions of feathered attackers, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. What if all the insects banded together in massive swarms? Or the frogs formed militias? And the snakes joined them? I know, it sounds paranoid, but dammit, what are those orcas up to? We even gave a few of them nice homes in the swimming pools of SeaWorld and fed them their favorite fish and all we asked was they do a few acrobatics for the paying customers. Geez, talk about ingrates.

I don’t know about you but I plan to keep an eye out down by the garden for any … well, unusual activities by the squirrels or the robins. Yesterday I watched two robins attacking a red squirrel, something I thought was probably normal. Today I’m not so sure.

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