Ash Requiem
(originally published in Shift, a print journal that is sadly lax in posting things online...sigh
Early one damp fall morning a few years ago, while walking in the large nature preserve adjacent to my house, three phenomena drew my attention. First, the ubiquitous, exquisite (but pesky) red-headed woodpeckers seemed to be working much harder than usual. Second, some of the larger trees were surrounded by lush skirts of bark fragments. And third—and clearly visible from a modest distance—the trees with the skirts were bald. They had been stripped of their bark. It didn't take long to realize that all the affected trees were of the same species: ash.
Around the time President McKinley was assassinated, on another autumn’s day long ago, a wing-shaped seed helicoptered its way into the ground on a gently east-facing slope in the countryside about an hour north of New York City. The Harlem Line from Grand Central had already reached the vicinity over a half-century earlier, in 1847, so the expansion of the metropolis was well under way. It dwindled pretty close to where the seed fell, though, so to this day the area remains relatively bucolic, a region of rustic stone walls, hooting owls at night and the occasional visit by a black bear.
The seed, one of a dense cluster of sister seeds, was from an ash tree. They hang down like a bunch of keys—in fact, they're known as "ash keys". Our seed lodged itself in a small cleft in a rounded boulder that looms like a surfacing whale from the surrounding soil. It anchored itself and stretched skyward, impervious to and oblivious of the major currents of the century. A depression, two world wars, Vietnam, Fidel, the oil embargo, Reagan, disco... And when, in 1975, the hillside upon which it perched was flattened out a little, and a house built adjacent to the whale rock, this now-substantial ash tree dodged the ax and continued to flourish, providing shade to the front stoop of the house and offering a balm to a couple of generations of grateful residents returning home weary after their commute from the city on the Harlem line.
It comes as no surprise, of course, that this house is the one that I now inhabit, my wife and I having bought it twenty-two years ago when we moved from downtown Manhattan to these, the so-called "leafier precincts". And while the tree might have been impervious to many of the currents and vicissitudes of the past hundred years or so, there was one it couldn't resist, and which ultimately led to its demise.
The ash is one of the great American trees, compadre to the oak and the maple, the chestnut and the elm. The latter two species have not fared well: the chestnuts, which once comprised approximately thirty percent of the huge northern deciduous forests, were almost entirely wiped out by a blight that started in the first decade of the 20th century. The elms met a similar fate, when Dutch Elm Disease entered the country from Europe in the late 1920s, spread by beetles. The elms, tall and shady, were America's quintessential small-town tree. Their loss was devastating, although unlike the chestnut, which was almost entirely wiped out, some isolated individuals survive. One of them happens to stand proudly next to the barn that my wife uses as her painting studio.
Ash wood is hard and strong and has just the right amount of spring to render it perfect for baseball bats (many a Louisville Slugger is made of ash). It's in high demand for contemporary furniture—understated and assertive in equal measure. And it's considered one of the best firewoods, producing minimal smoke and a righteous bed of coals. I know this from experience.
About thirty years ago, a gorgeous but lethal beetle made its way to our shores from Asia, freight-hopping in wooden shipping crates. They're emerald colored (hence their name, the Emerald Ash Borer), and look enameled, like the brooches found among the looted treasures of mummified pharaohs. They bore into the bark of their favorite tree, the ash, and lay their eggs. Larvae hatch, and then tunnel along right where the bark and the wood of the tree meet, the cambium. The cambium is a major action zone. It's the growth region where new cells are added, and the fruits of its labor—at least in the trunk—are visible as the rings that it adds each year.
When the ash borer larvae go to work, they devour the cambium. The resulting separation of bark from wood disrupts the production of phloem and xylem cells, which are crucial to the transportation of water and nutrition back and forth in the tree. Meanwhile the larvae, fattening and nutritious, attract the attention of the local woodpeckers. Beautiful and distinctive with their black-and-white checkerboard bodies and flaming hammer-shaped heads, they whoop through the trees with their war-chant call, and their swooping, parabolic flight. The woodpeckers start hammering away to get at the larvae, the bark flies off in large chips, and within a few weeks a huge tree can be totally denuded, revealing the intricate latticework of embossed tunnels bored in the wood by the chubby little larvae. These filigreed mazes are mysterious and intriguing; it's hard to resist the urge to decipher them as runes left by an esoteric civilization.
So the ash borer was, like the scourges that demolished the chestnut and the elm, a beneficiary of global transportation. Is climate change part of the equation too? We could point to a direct relationship (and leave it at that): the most effective limitation on the spread of the borer is brutally cold weather—temperatures of minus 30 degrees Celsius and below. One might argue, then, that rising temperatures means that it never gets that cold anymore, explaining how the borers are moving north so rapidly. Great, except for one thing: it NEVER gets that cold in most of the places being devastated! Sure, in northern Canada their habitat is expanding, and up there it actually MIGHT be related to the rising average temperatures, but it's a pretty tenuous argument to make.
One of the few ways to control the beetles is by biological means (as opposed to pesticides), and the most effective biological agents are a couple of wasp species which spell armageddon to the borers. However, they too are susceptible to cold, and succumb at temperatures considerably warmer than minus thirty. It seems that whatever the actual mechanism, the climate crisis is not helping the ash trees.
Our own grand sentinel started to show the first signs of trouble just before the pandemic. It was inevitable, yet I still held out hope that...what? There really wasn't any hope, and sure enough the beautiful bark started to look mangy. The red-headed demolition crew moved in—sometimes four or five to a shift—and two summers ago we had to hire some local lumberjacks to take down the tree. The leader was a charming, grizzled man named Virgilio; he's been doing tree work in the vicinity for forty years. His star worker was a young man from Guatemala, in his early twenties, who shimmied up to the top of the tree, and then carefully, methodically, over the course of a sweltering day, roped branches and chain-sawed them off to be lowered gently to the ground by the rest of the crew. Finally, the remnants of the trunk were brought down in a single fifty-foot log which was then sawn into sections. We culled about four cords of the beautiful, hot-burning wood (but no baseball bats), and we still have enormous sections of unchopped trunk in our yard. I counted the rings—this tree was 125 years old.
I walk in the woods almost every day. I don't see that many skirts of bark anymore—mainly because the ash trees around here have now all succumbed. The storms seem to get worse every year—the number of trees that have been downed is accelerating, victims of increasingly violent winds and soil that, loosened by the intense rainstorms that now characterize our climate, relaxes enough to release the clawing roots with flippant ease. Some of the most exquisite trees in our woods are members of the beech family, muscular hardwoods with smooth elephantine bark punctuated by droopy crinkled markings that look like huge sad eyes. They have much to cry about these days: the American Beech is under attack by bark and leaf fungi that are anticipated to wipe out the entire species on the Eastern seaboard within the next ten years. The spread of these fungi is hugely exacerbated by rising temperatures.
There is no known remedy.
Beautiful