MAY 14, 2023 – (Cont.) Many princely pines in the Trädgård are in worse shape than how we found our back-garden princess, but the latter is more accessible and not surrounded by tick-land. With all the necessary operating equipment relatively close at hand, I decided to administer emergency care to the stricken princess. I summoned a nylon rope, a tall aluminum ladder, a five-foot metal stake and mallet, and a small piece of Styrofoam to insert between the rope loop and the tender neck of the princess to prevent “choking” her living cambium. The main part of the operation went reasonably well. After tying the rope around the stake that I’d pounded into the soil, the princess was no longer hunched over, at least, but her beautiful face was still turned down in despair.
I decided to operate further, this time deploying pieces of packaging string and a three-foot splint cut from a hazel bush. The delicate procedure required long, steady small motor skill administered with both hands while I stood far up the ladder on slightly sloping ground. In ladder operations, caution is paramount, and accordingly, I positioned the ladder so I’d be leaning into it, not away from it. Tying the splint to the upper neck of the princess took time and patience, as I held the princess’s delicate head in one hand and tied square knots with the other (aided by my teeth). Eventually, I released the patient to nature’s open-air recovery room.
As I operated on this beauty, I thought about real surgeons who operate on human patients. I reflected on how rescue workers after an earthquake in a remote region of the world cheer when a child is found badly injured but alive under tons of rubble. The child is pulled to safety, transported by helicopter to a makeshift medical facility where volunteer doctors work their magic. A year later the child, once immobile and masked in casts and bandages, is now a bright, beautiful and very much celebrated girl, skipping freely with all the hope and resilience of a survivor. In an interview she brightens the heart of every listener by saying, “My dream is to get an education and become a medical doctor who saves peoples lives.” Yet, sadly, thousands of victims have been forever silenced and soon forgotten by the world.
Today, I imagined myself as a volunteer doctor trying desperately to save one child’s life, while hundreds—thousands—more in the surrounding woods, I know all too well, were also tormented by last winter’s storms and because of their numbers and remoteness, lost their chance at greatness or just plain living. But better to save one life, one tree, than none. If our civilization prods and incentivizes us at times to be adverse to nature—and to life itself—at other times, the better side of our culture holds each life dear and thus, worth extraordinary effort to save and sustain.
If Mother Nature laughs—or cries?—at my schizophrenic relationship with her, I trust that in the cosmic scheme of things, my own kind will find a mix of amusement and inspiration by my action to save one tree. One tree, a precious child of the earth.
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© 2023 by Eric Nilsson
