I once ran with a posse of boys who scoured scrawny woods at the end of a suburban street with cowboy hats and hatchets. We were determined to carve out a tiny settlement of our own. The crew of six-year-olds chopped small trees until fatigue set in minutes later. Building a makeshift eight-foot bridge across a tiny creek is hard work. The job took days to complete. A tree fort followed.
We were too young to realize the coincidence of earlier trail blazing, but it may have been etched into my DNA. Daniel Boone’s white pioneers, including my forebearer Billy Bush, built a fort in 1775 after cutting through the Cumberland Gap in what is now Kentucky. Our bridge washed away in a gulley washer before summer’s end in 1957. Fort Boonesborough was abandoned long before, around 1810.
Daniel Boone “Escorting settlers through the Cumberland Gap” westwards to Kentucky. George Caleb Bingham painting. Maybe the tree snag on the right protected the nests of woodpeckers and owls?
The Boone painting is rich in imagery and myth making. I heard a lot of the latter from my father. He portrayed pioneer Billy Bush as a hero for getting shot while safeguarding the “west” from Indians. (The British were sometimes backing the Indians.) . My aunt told me when I was in my late 20s that this was nonsense. Billy Bush got shot in the heel running toward the fort as fast as he could.
Attempts to tame nature are repeatedly hopeless
My childhood neighborhood was hit by a devastating tornado in 1974 when I was 23. The precious woods of my imagination were luckily spared when the storm bounced around Louisville on its way northeast toward Ohio. Homes along its path were blown away. Trees were toppled or shattered. The tornado destroyed 80% of the mature tree canopy, a few miles away, in Louisville’s Olmsted-designed Cherokee Park.
My parents suffered minor property damage in the tornado, but their power was lost for a month. Thousands of chain saws were deployed surrounding Louisville.
We lost power for a week in a 2009 winter ice storm. And there are continuing intermittent outages in Louisville, as my former neighbor Lenny Lyles once said, “whenever a squirrel farts on the power line.”
Ice storm damage in Louisville in 2009
A squirrel wasn’t the culprit this week. A snow and ice storm struck with a new twist: “Thunder Snow.” A metrologist warned the listening public to avoid shoveling snow in a lightning storm. We were exempted lightning bolts and power outage. 64,000 Kentucky customers lost power.
Rufus protects a hayrake hanging in a snow and ice-covered black walnut in Salvisa
Periodic tree line work is not always pretty and is often lopsided
Trees with any potential of falling and damaging the power grid no longer need to be pruned by skilled arborists in high-lift buckets with chainsaws.
Transmission power lines can be efficiently cut with telescopic booms that can extend up and outwards 120 feet with a massive sawmill blade.
The most brutal means of “Vegetation Management” is deployed by the state and counties along Kentucky’s road right of ways. A Bush Hog-type brute with flailing, flex-wing rotary mowers mounted on a hydraulic boom can be maneuvered parallel to the sentenced tree line, violently ripping apart and mutilating tree limbs.
Mutilated in Salvisa
The open wounds and subsequent growth are more exposed to diseases and insects than they would have been if properly pruned by a licensed arborist.
Veteran Louisville arborist Robert Rollins told me that we have lowered our cultural aesthetic appreciation and care of trees. The cheaper the better.
Lopsided in Harrodsburg
Wholesale deformity could be avoided and trees protected by burying electric lines in urban and rural areas, but this would require a large, infrastructure investment. Some new residential and commercial development require underground utilities.
According to ChatGPT, higher density neighborhoods might expect an $4.00-10.00 monthly increase in their electric bill. For rural areas, with fewer customers per mile, the estimated cost might range from $15.00-50.00 per month.
Over a quarter of U.S. household have problems paying their energy bills.
No one wants to lose power or pay this extra cost.
What’s left is a power grid with the burden and sorrow of unnecessary trees.