Beautiful Destroyer

Most of the country is beset by very hot weather, but it seems much more oppressive than usual this July.  My mile walk to the public library has become arduous since there is no longer relief from the relentless summer sunshine along the route.  The reason?  In the course of a few months the shade canopy that has been cooling our streets for nearly fifty years has been destroyed, beautiful trees cut to the ground. The ambiance of our neighborhood forever altered.

The beautiful, but destructive, Emerald Ash Borer began its assault in the state of Illinois seven years ago. Our community became infested about three or four years ago.  We never really thought much about the abundance of a single type of tree planted along the parkways.  There were a few other types and some other specie replacements had been preference and paid for by home owners over the last ten years, but, as the current vast blankness reveals, not many, and those not yet large.

The tree trimmers struck with ruthless abandon, each block's canopies falling before their saw.  At first many trees were stripped of all the top branches, leaving barren trunks as sentinels in a bazaar parody of the Easter Island standing figures. Eventually even those were cut to the ground, the necessary but ugly slaughter representing a Pyrrhic victory over the insects.  Today all is devastation.

Our town had the foresight to purchase a nursery of new saplings a few years ago, knowing that the ash trees would fall victim to the green menace.Slowly the town is replacing our ash trees with new trees, varying the species as they should have in the beginning.  We have been given a puny Victory Elm, a mockery of the once great American Elms which were destroyed by Dutch Elm disease a decade or so ago. As I walk along the street on my way to the library I read the labels on the tiny trees that will require years before they give shade and grace to our community streets once more.  The sun beats down seemingly as a punishment for our ingratitude and negligence.  We mourn our trees and wonder about this, and yet undiscovered, vulnerabilities waiting for tomorrow.