Who Can Make a Tree? – New Technology
I’m a tree nut. Not an almond, pecan, or that sort of nut. No, I’m a crazy lover of trees. When everyone else was a huge Star Trek fan, I didn’t identify as a Trekkie because the characters on the show spent so much time in treeless places like spaceships and outer space. I just couldn’t go there. Same with Iceland, which is a little short of trees.
The first poem I memorized, aside from Mother Goose rhymes, was Trees by Joyce Kilmer. The poem concludes with this stanza:
“Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.”
Trees were special to me even before I read the poem. Afterward, trees took on a mystical presence. In my hometown in Nebraska, American elms lined both sides of neighborhood streets. They reached their limbs across streets and created canopies. Their huge trunks provided wonderful hiding places for children playing hide ‘n’ seek. And it was easy to run from tree to tree–and never get caught–in games of tree tag. We nailed pieces of wood to make steps on our mulberry tree so we could climb up and feast on ripe berries. It puzzled me as to why anyone would ever choose to live on prairies, deserts, or planets where trees were few or non-existent.
Over my life, I’ve planted trees in every place I’ve lived. Not as many as Johnny Appleseed, of course. But friends and family, at my request, have ordered trees planted on my behalf for holidays and birthdays. They have generously donated to redwood forests, national park burned areas, global forest restoration, school yards, and open spaces. For friends and relatives who have passed on, I honor them by planting trees in their memory.
Besides my fondness for trees for no reason, I realize how valuable forests are in sequestering carbon. Trees absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and store it as carbon in leaves, branches, trunks, roots, and even soil. Shade created by trees is a welcome relief in our warming world.
I recently moved to a hilly, woodsy area southeast of Denver called The Timbers, which is part of The Pinery. And though I live on Majestic Oak Drive, our street name is deceptive. There is no grand or even average oak on our street. The only oaks nearby are clumps of little scrub oaks. Most trees are ponderosa pines. It’s a happy coincidence that I live in a neighborhood and on a street named after trees. I can ogle trees, walk in a forested area, and care for my 14-tree backyard forest. Luckily, the backyard trees have grown beyond the nibbling reach of neighborhood deer. In other parts of our lawn, a few new trees are vulnerable to deer, especially in winter when green grass and plants are in short supply. By Halloween, we wrap these trees in fuzzy green cloth strips to protect them from harsh winter cold as well as from Rudolph and friends.
Besides beautiful baby ponderosa pines, our rural area is sprouting strange beasts of trees: cell phone towers. They emerge fully grown but naked. Branches and pine needles arrive later. In their natural state, cell towers are ungainly, metallic creatures covered with large, funny-looking canisters. With a little tree artistry, though, they can be camouflaged in a landscape of stunning trees, rolling hills, and charming horse farms.
Cell phone companies, it turns out, are who can make trees. You would think that, as a certified tree nut, I would object to these impostor trees. And I would if I weren’t so appreciative of cell phones and how they connect people all over the world. Besides being handy, pocket-sized telephones, cell phones are navigators, cameras, flashlights, research tools, address books, and finders of lost children at amusement parks.
During family vacations when I was a child, my bored siblings and I played a game of who could spot a white horse among all the pintos, palominos, sorels, and buckskins we saw in farm fields as we drove across Nebraska to Colorado. Children today–even city children–can play a game on car trips of spotting cell phone towers, no matter how well disguised they are–a kind of electronic hide ‘n’ seek. The only problem might be children rarely look out windows when mesmerized by their cell phones.