by Richard Seifried
Signal Hill Musings
May, 2005
Living on Signal Hill has brought back facts learned during my youth. A healthy forest is not one which is thinned, burned, nor bulldozed. Rather, natural fires, insects, droughts, and cloudbursts all play an integral part in preserving what man has tried to manage but instead has destroyed.
A dead pine tree stands in the middle of the lot that is part of our estate and is east of the house. Once upon a time, the relic had been a lovely native pine. Death claimed it years before we arrived on the hill. Dead trees are a necessity if one desires a natural, healthy forest environment. Surprisingly, the tree on our lot will probably take as many years to deteriorate as it did to grow to its maturity.
Termites, beetles, carpenter ants, beetle larvae, centipedes, and millipedes all work away at the tree and provide gourmet meals for our avian visitors. The magnificent, top-notched pileated woodpeckers – red-headed, red-breasted, downy, hairy woodpeckers – yellow-shafted flickers – all dine at our dead tree restaurant.
Around the base of the now almost barkless, limbless trunk is an unmowed, circular area consisting of various wild plants, some flowers, and rotting debris that has dropped from above. Undisturbed, the vegetation, plus the widening cracks in the trunk, provide homes for blue-tailed skinks, geckos, and other reptilian species including banded garter snakes. On hot sunny days, they scurry away as I approach, attempting to secret themselves within the wooden cracks or behind the loose lower bark.
All limbs are gone now. What is left is a naked trunk, round, providing little wind resistance, tilting to the north until an easterly or northern breeze pushes it to another direction. New cracks form. Old ones widen. Someday, it will come crashing down, or, perhaps just disintegrate in small portions, shortening a foot or so at a time.
However our dead tree succumbs to gravity, I shall not move it, but will continue to mow around the decaying wood and living vegetation so that the area will still be home for new generations of snakes, lizards, and insects; perhaps a small rodent or two will reside there as well.
The dead, now fallen, pine tree
We have violent lightning storms up here on Signal Hill. Last summer a bolt struck two, root-connected oak trees, killing them both. So, now we have more homes developing, new sanctuaries for our small creature neighbors.
Is there an analogy somehow in what I am writing, a similarity between the pine, oak, and mankind?
I think there is.
Man is born, grows, is nourished, contributes, then weakens and dies. Sometimes, like the lightning-struck oaks, he falls early.
But, his or her contributions remain in human memory, nourishment of a sort, for a time, perhaps a generation or two. Some, like Gandhi, MLK, and FDR, provide intellectual moral nourishment for a few lifetimes. Others, Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, nourish mankind for many, many, many lifetimes. They are the sequoias, bristle cone pines, and red cedars of mankind’s existence.
Every one of us, every single human being, makes a contribution to society. Each of us, in a small way perhaps, influences our human society and the natural world itself. We are all important, just like every living thing is, including our dead tree here on Signal Hill.
