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A Poem of Great Meaning to Me
By Gilbert Griffiths
I grew up on Vancouver Island in the Province of British Columbia. My home was surrounded by trees and my father logged them. One of the first poems I ever learned as a school student is the following one by Joyce Kilmer. “I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.” It brings tears to my eyes every time I read it, because it reminds me of the seedling I was given to plant in my yard. I was about 11 years old at the time and all the students at my school were loaded onto school buses and taken into the mountains behind the school. MacMillan Bloedel Limited, affectionately called “MacBlo,” was proudly showing a huge logged off area that they had just replanted with with Douglas Fir trees. As part of the presentation, each student was given a seedling to take home and plant in their yard. Upon arriving home from school that day, I grabbed a shovel and dug a hole between our garage (used as a storage shed because we didn't own a car) and the front fence. I carefully planted my tree and faithfully watered it when needed (which wasn't very often as our average rainfall was over 200 inches a year).
By the time I left home to join the Royal Canadian Mounted Police some 8 years later, my tree was about 20 feet tall and 5 inches in diameter at the butt. However, when I was in British Columbia in 1979 in connection with my police career, I took a weekend off and travelled to Vancouver Island to visit my parents. When I arrived home, I looked at my tree and was amazed to see that it was over two feet in diameter at the butt and more than 40 feet tall. Its branches were sticking through the phone lines. Upon talking to my parents, I was told that they had just received a letter from BC Tel (British Columbia Telephone Company) that my tree, plus four more of my parent's trees, had to be cut down because they were interfering with the telephone lines. The telephone company was afraid that during a big windstorm that one or more of the trees could be blown over taking out the whole set of phone lines. If this happened, my folks would have to pay the cost of replacing the lines and any poles that were damaged. So, the following week, my logger father using “belt and spurs” climbed each tree and carefully cut them, from the top down, so that the phone lines were not damaged during the tree removal process. (top down cutting involves climbing to near the top of the tree and cutting off short sections of the tree so that these short sections fall away from what you are trying to protect. As each section falls, the cutter climbs down several feet and repeats the process until the last cut is made just above the ground.) The wood from the five fir trees was used in my folk's wood burning stove, so it wasn't wasted, but it was still a shame to see the trees removed. I was upset by the loss of my tree, but glad that I had been given the opportunity to grow one of my very own. Interestingly enough, I spent most of my police career in the Province of Saskatchewan, which in the southern part, when I first arrived, was so devoid of trees “that you could stand on a sardine can, face the east and see three days into the future.”
However, since that time the residents of Saskatchewan have planted thousands and thousands of trees. The city of Regina alone has over 10,000 trees in it. Farmers have planted shelter belts around their home quarter sections (160 acres) and some have even planted trees around their grain fields. Most Provincial parks have numerous trees in them as well. The only place that trees are not being planted is in the boreal forests which, until the downturn in the economy slowed the forest industry, were being clear cut at an alarming rate. There are many great poems, but for me, the one quoted above is the best. What do you think about it? |
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