By CHUCK RAASCH, Gannett National Writer
November 23. 2009 5:18PM
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — I always bristle at the "tree-hugger" tag.
Quiz time
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Environmentalist or clear-cutter, you can't disagree that every good tree deserves TLC.
I came to this conclusion with certainty sitting in our sunny backyard on one of those clear autumn days that simply forces you to stop and sigh. I watched our 80-foot, senior citizen, black locust shed leaves by the bushel. Gorgeous showers of orange cascaded to cooling earth.
The season's detritus is now transforming into next spring's fertilizer. The old friend stands black and gray and naked against gathering cold. Squirrels prepare their winter condos in its branches.
I have watched this tree in wind and rain and in the heat and stifling humidity of a Virginia summer. It has a personality. It literally opens up in thunderstorms in a broad-limbed welcome to the rain.
A few years ago, when we had the locust cabled to keep it from splitting in such storms, I swear it punished us for weeks by dropping dead-branch missiles. It got to be where I'd look up before walking beneath it.
"Never, ever, do that to me again," it seemed to be saying.
If you do not believe that a tree is an individual living thing, then you have not seen a giant redwood. They grow so wide and tall they create their own ecosystems in their canopies.
Their very enormity and interdependence on their neighbors forces any humans in their presence to re-examine their own size and relationships to all other living things.
I spent my first visit at Muir Woods in Northern California in perpetual gape.
L. Frank Baum, who edited a newspaper for awhile in Aberdeen, S.D., made his trees talk in "The Wizard of Oz." Always made perfect sense to me.
(By the way, "baum" is "tree" in German. Once when we visited Germany, my wife used her college German to try to explain to a waiter that my ancestors had been farmers nearby. But she confused "bauer" — German for sodbuster — with "baum." The waiter got this very confused look. They're probably still talking about the Americans whose ancestors lived in trees).
Locusts are considered weeds in this part of the world. They are prolific growers and they tend to spread their roots at ground level, which can wreck lawn mowers and wreak havoc on bare feet. So they are often eradicated as nuisances.
People can take that get-rid-of-it approach in forest regions like Virginia, but not where I grew up.
In South Dakota, my home state, every stick of wood is precious.
I cannot imagine riding in a wooden wagon for the first time into a landscape so devoid of wood. That is what my ancestors and maybe yours did 140 years ago.
Despite all the planting of the ensuing generations, trees are still landmarks all over the state. One of the surest ways of finding water or wildlife is locating patches of cottonwood, box elder or Bur oak.
In the big sky, trees are the most vivid connection between heaven and earth.
In the past four decades, my parents have planted 6,000 trees on family farms near Castlewood, S.D. The evergreens and their hardwood companions stand in sentinel-like rows a half mile long, bending to the prevailing winds but not moving from their spot.
I'll let you draw your own metaphorical meaning there, but in my life the more things move — and boy, do they move on some days — the more you appreciate the things that don't.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Shelterbelt Project.
At the beginning of the New Deal, Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order underwriting the planting of tree belts from Canada to the Texas Panhandle. They were supposed to break the hot winds that were literally blowing tons of Great Plains topsoil as far away as the Atlantic Ocean.
By the mid-1940s, roughly 200 million trees were planted in about 19,000 miles of belts on 33,000 farms across the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.
Those tree belts were expected to last no more than 60 years, meaning this decade could mark the end for many of our friends planted back then. In my home Hamlin County, you can see the evidence as folks clean out tree belts and stack the wood to be taken, for free, for winter stoves.
Thanksgiving is a time when families gather, generations new and old.
They call it the family tree.
Contact Chuck Raasch at craasch@gannett.com, follow him on Twitter or join in the Facebook conversation.
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About RaaschChuck Raasch is national political writer for Gannett. His column, New Politics, appears here and on USA TODAY.com. A native of South Dakota and a graduate of South Dakota State University, Raasch has covered political campaigns since 1978, including Tom Daschle's first race for Congress and George McGovern's last race for the Senate. He has covered presidential campaigns since 1988.
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