MARCH 31, 2024 – Last night I experienced a beautiful dream in which I was looking up into the royal crowns of a grove of aspens. Their bright yellow and light orange leaves stood out against a deep blue sky. A gust of air suddenly blew through the trees, producing a loud, pleasing sound like heavily starched ballroom gowns rustling in concert across nature’s stage. My mother was present, and she shared my wonderment.
I was surprised by Mother’s appearance, since Dad, not she, was the one everyone associated with . . . trees.
From the era of my earliest memories, Dad owned a tree farm a dozen miles north of town. For me, trips to the tree farm with Dad were as routine as being carted off to church by Mother. She had her religion, and he had his. Not surprisingly, I much preferred Dad’s.
First was the drive. I always liked going for car rides and looking out the window at the scenery. I especially enjoyed country drives. The woodlands and farmlands along the way gave the impression of long-distance travel and allowed my mind to wander in seemingly boundless directions, which always gave me the sense that I was part of a much larger world; one filled with far greater possibilities than existed in our familiar neighborhood in Anoka.
The tree farm was a 40-acre strip of land that ran straight back from the county road that led north from Anoka all the way to Lake George if you drove another 20 minutes. Lake George is where our neighbors the Ridges had a summer cabin. It was a small rustic place, and I couldn’t help but contrast it to our cabin, which seemed a lot sturdier and more like a real cabin, since it took three hours, not a mere 30 minutes, to get there, and once you did, there weren’t any neighbors to be seen or heard. Moreover, whereas Ridge’s cabin was surrounded by grass, our cabin was surrounded by trees.
But I digress. Except when we whizzed by the tree farm on our way to visit the Ridges on the south shore of Lake George, Dad would slow down upon reaching the row of mature red oaks that guarded our property along the road. We’d then turn onto the double-tire lane that extended all the way from the road to the back boundary.
The passageway took us past the small dull home of “Ray Chase,” as called Dad called the guy who owned the 40-acre strip adjacent to the tree farm. Whereas Dad’s acreage had been cleared, Ray Chase’s land was still wooded, mainly with red oaks. Eventually Dad purchased it all except for the acre or two that was Ray Chase’s homestead.
It wasn’t clear to me why Dad bought the adjoining wooded land. I think it was mostly because he liked trees, and the drive to our cabin and woods that surrounded it were six times as far away. I knew why he owned the cleared acreage, however: to plant and grow Christmas trees. “Norways,” Dad called them. He’d hired a local farmer with a tractor to pull a planter that Dad rented from somewhere. Over several weekends, Dad sat aboard the tractor-towed planter and dropped bare-root seedlings into the furrow created by the contraption. By this method he planted thousands of trees in multiple rows down the whole stretch of the 40 acres.
Typical of Dad, he’d started out with a plan to grow, harvest, and sell the trees. Why not? He loved trees, especially pine, and could earn a little extra money on the side. Except . . . his plan contained an inherent contradiction. Loving trees as much as he did, how could he go and chop them all down for Christmas?
He learned this soon enough, given the ideal growing conditions of the open, sandy soil. By the time I was in eighth grade, the trees were becoming a veritable forest. Furthermore, Dad had done such fierce battle protecting his young trees from the voracious gophers, first trapping, then poisoning the vermin, he wasn’t about to put the saw blade to his precious “Norways” once they’d matured. (Cont.)
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© 2024 by Eric Nilsson
