Gimme Shelter

Trigger warning: dead trees, dead cat.

On the morning of April 19, 2023, Solovino and I awoke to find our beloved cat, Shackleton, dead on the kitchen rug. Shackleton was a young, fully-vaccinated, indoor cat who had been perfectly fine the night before. Nothing had been eaten or was out of place. He looked peaceful, like he had died in his sleep.

Shackleton was no ordinary cat, he was as noble as an oak, loving, curious and he deserves his own post, but it would make this post twice as long and this is a tree post. So instead, I will drop this picture with its 1,000 words:

So, back to the scene: There we were, Solovino and I, keening over the lifeless body of our beloved cat, trying to process and navigate the first seismic stages of grief, when suddenly, in the middle of it, a chain saw sputtered to life outside.

At first, I tried to ignore its growling, but chainsaws are hard to ignore. Its wails were drowning out our own, making a mockery of our lamentations.

It was not to be borne.

I marched outside to investigate and beheld a man atop an oak tree that grew in our neighbor’s yard, the chainsaw idling in his hands. He had already hacked off the top of the tree.

This was no ordinary oak, this was a legacy oak, the tallest, oldest tree on our block. It was so tall it shaded our house two doors down. It was home a vibrant community of birds and critters. In fact, it was nesting season.

I ran inside to tell Solovino, who went out front talk to the guy running the grinder on the truck. He came back inside, looking wan.

“So…?”

“It’s bad.”

I was already in a world of bad, so how much more could there possibly be? “Tell me.”

“She’s having it taken out.”

“What? Wait…she can’t do that, not in April, it’s full of nesting birds!”

“It’s on her property, she can do what she wants.”

“But it’s a legacy oak! It’s illegal to cut those down!”

“She found someone willing to do it.”

I wanted to report it, to get someone with a lanyard and a clipboard out here stat to stop this murder, but it wasn’t even 8am yet, the tree would be mostly gone by start of business.

“But why?” I begged poor Solovino, “Why would she cut down that beautiful tree?”

“It was dropping leaves in her swimming pool.’

I am fairly certain that had that tree been allowed to stand, it would not only have survived the Eaton fire, but it might even have stood in its path and protected a house or two. Maybe ours.

After we fled the fire, Solovino and I wandered, shocked and smudged, through the next weeks. We found a temporary perch in Laurel Canyon where we could sit on the deck and watch the smoke from our neighborhood billow across the horizon.

Every night we dreamed of fire, and we knew we had to get out of the canyon before fire found us again. We scoured Zillow multiple times a day, but the rental market suddenly awash in new tenants. Everything we saw was too expensive or too depressing.

Then, by a stroke of luck, we found a lovely, Spanish Revival bungalow in Eagle Rock. The small house sat on the slope of a gentle hill, offering us a spectacular view of the San Gabriels—the very mountains that had just tried to kill us.

Nevertheless, we were grateful to have found this refuge, and what the house lacked in square footage and closet space it made up for in charm, and with an absolute barge of a bathtub.

But when I stepped out the back door I discovered the house’s best feature: an enormous oak tree that dominated the narrow back yard. It had a trunk so thick I could barely get my arms halfway around it.

The landlady told me the house was built by a woman who immigrated from Germany in the early 1930s. She may well have been part of the growing German diaspora in LA. escaping rising fascism in the fatherland.

The fraulein had brought with her from her homeland a tiny tree sapling—a German Black Oak, a national symbol of Teutonic strength and endurance.

How the Fraulein got her sapling across the Atlantic, and then all the way out west is a story I would truly love to know. All I know is she bought this narrow patch of land and built a house on it in 1932. When it was finished, she planted her sapling in the back yard.

The little tree took to the California soil like a native, rooting and reaching higher every year. She had grown twice as tall has the house and was nearing her centennial.

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Enter Schickel: a late-middle-aged, traumatized, tree-besotted woman, uprooted from her home and garden by climate disaster, searching for safety and a refuge for recovery.

When I saw that tree I felt as though I had been given a reprieve—if not from grief, then from heat. There were buds on the branches. n a few months the furnace of summer started back up, and I would be safe and cool beneath the outstretched arms of this beauty. I followed my landlady out to the yard, which was terraced into three parts. To my horror, the part where the tree was planted was carpeted in AstroTurf.

My landlady said she had the plastic grass installed at the request of her previous tenants. They wanted it for their children to play on and she liked the convenience of not having to maintain that part of the yard. I stood on the prickly plastic and wondered how anything could thrive—trees or children, surrounded by this toxic shit.

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Spring arrived with all its birds and blooms and daffodils at Trader Joe’s—but the oak remained dormant. Its buds stayed tight and dark. I began to fear for the worst.

“Your oak doesn’t seem to be is blooming, do you think it’s okay?” I gently queried my landlady in April, not wanting to be a bossy, know-it-all about another woman’s tree.

“Oh, it’s always been a late-bloomer, it’ll be fine.”

Summer arrived like a George Foreman grill, pressing into us, searing our flesh. The tree stayed bare. My anxiety surged and my brain somersaulted through doom loops. I had to save this tree.

“I really think the AstroTurf is hurting the tree.” I fretted once again to my landlady.

“Oh no,” she reassured me, “AstroTurf is permeable!

This was not my tree, any more than the one in Altadena had been. I had no power here and anyway, saving this tree wouldn’t bring the other tree back, or Shackleton, or Altadena itself. But it would be something.

All summer long I watered it and whispered encouragement into its bark.

In August, enormous, leathery mushrooms the size of potholders began sprouting up around the yard. That’s when I knew it was over. These were the pale handmaidens of death and decay, here to feast off the corpse of my Queen.

The landlady finally summoned an arborist who declared the tree most likely dead. He told her to tear up the AstroTurf immediately and begin a feeding and deep-watering regimen. Maybe it would rally.

When she pulled up the turf, my landlady discovered it had been installed with a layer of impermeable weed cloth underneath.

Oak trees send out tap roots when they are young. That German sapling had dug deep back in the 1930’s and 40’s. But as oaks age, their root systems grow wider and closer to the surface. For ten long years that tree had survived on little more than morning dew and birdshit. Talk about strength and endurance! She had truly lived up to her Germanic reputation, but alas, she was no match for Monsanto.1

Solovino and I made sure we weren’t home the day the tree was cut down. We couldn’t bear to hear the chainsaw. It would have ripped us up. Late in the afternoon we came home to this:

I did not anticipate how devastated I would be by the loss of this already-dead tree. I did not appreciate how much shade its broad branches provided, even without leaves. I didn’t know how bad I would feel on behalf of all the birds who used its limbs to survey the block, and for the woodpecker who had been faithfully knocking holes in the trunk all year.

I sat on the stump, frozen with fear in the heat of the late-afternoon sun. I felt like a small animal exposed on a treeless veldt, surrounded by predators. I wondered if I would ever again get to live in the shelter of an old tree.

Maybe that’s how the Fraulein felt, as the world grew scarier around her in her homeland. She saw disaster coming and she got the hell out of there. These past few weeks I have seriously considered leaving Los Angeles. It’s kicking my ass.

But there’s a lot of fascism brewing out there and I still own a third of an acre of contaminated dirt in Altadena, so maybe I’ll stay put.

I guess I’ll build a house and plant a tree.