Page 81 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

bearing tree, the beech, is creating a cyclic starvation scenario for the black bear who is dependent

upon its fall mast to survive. Ironically, The Nature Conservancy of Maine has only one small (a few

acres) stand of old-growth trees protected in the northern part of the state but it is impossible to access

because these trees are in the middle of a huge area that is logged all year round.

Early this spring one of my two closest neighbors began to cut away the glorious crowns and limbs of

all the dense white pines on his side of the road leaving bare trunks open to the sky. This man, a

security guard by profession at a local ski lodge and his wife, who works there as a waitress, both

dislike me (for reasons that remain totally obscure), and at first I suspected that this mutilation of the

trees by the road was his way of making a statement to me. He deliberately threw severed limbs onto

the road that I walked up each day. It was chilling to watch the way he beheaded each tree and then

stripped the trunk of its limbs leaving them in piles to rot. I knew that it took years for a tree to die in this

manner. Since most of the initial cutting occurred near the road, I witnessed and grieved for the

dismembered trees every time I walked my dogs.

In May when the mutilation began on my other neighbor’s property I asked Mary why she would allow

this to occur on her land. It wasn’t as if the chopping would open a view (for either neighbor). Mary’s

response dumbfounded me. She denied that any cutting was happening on her land. Every day with my

heart in my throat, I walked up the road cringing. Birds screeched as their nests were systematically

destroyed during nesting season, eggs smashed, chicks left for dead on the ground, keening

heartbroken parents left behind. And after the road destruction was complete Mike began to open a

huge area around Mary’s house. Piles of slash lay everywhere, and the nauseating smell of pitch

intensified as more trees lost their crowns and some limbs (most of their trunks were left standing with a

few sparse branches remaining). In late July, the next and final time I spoke to Mary, she finally

admitted she was opening the area up around her house because she felt so claustrophobic.

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