James Lileks: The curse of the boulevard trees

Someone showed up the other day and inserted a tree in the boulevard dirt. I assume it was the city, and not some arboreal philanthropist. We may be known for our civic-mindedness, but random acts of poplar aren't common.

Right now it looks naked and self-conscious. No leaves. It's possible they gave me one that was pre-dead for my convenience, since the last tree planted in that spot a few summers back didn't make it through the winter.

Spring came, everything budded, and the rest of the trees said "Hey, someone, go nudge the new guy. He's still asleep — Oh, crap, he's dead! Everyone, get your story straight!"

I called the city to report a dead tree. The phrase "We'll send someone right over" was not uttered in the course of the conversation. Let's just say the sound of approaching sirens did not shatter the calm of a spring morn.

Then one day it was gone. Sometimes the tree removal team comes with big whirring grinding machines; I think they took this one out with a scissors.

Its predecessor had still been leafy when they took it out, and I think it cursed us as the chain saws revved: "Fell me before my time, do you? Very well. On my spot shall mushrooms grow, dark hordes that mark my grave! Rotten stump fruit shall — hey, oww! Oww! OWWW!"

Of course, I ascribe too much to trees, which are really very stupid. They do not talk, let alone curse. But you get attached to them. They're like members of the neighborhood, and the only neighbors you don't mind standing on your lawn looking in the windows.

The real problem, of course, is that trees are lousy at reproduction. Dandelions will find a way to poke through six inches of asphalt, but trees are utterly unconcerned with making other trees happen. You have your oaks, which drop acorns for squirrels to bury — brilliant strategy.

You have those trees that drop the helicopter seeds that twirl down by the thousands like a spam e-mail blast. Hey, tree: This twirly ballet stuff doesn't work.

So we depend on people to nurse trees to spindly adolescence and jam them in the boulevards and leave them to the vagaries of nature, bugs, disease and their greatest threat, the homeowner who forgets to water them because the hose doesn't reach down to the boulevard.

At least I know this isn't an ash. No one's planting ashes anymore because they're being killed by zebra mussels on orders from the Asian carp, or something.

But I know this: Whatever they planted in my boulevard has one predator, and it's a weevil that lives in the tip of South America and will start marching north any day now. The tree will fall to some godless Peruvian Maple Sucker in 2037. By then the Dutch elm beetles will be dead because the Canadian bat invasion of 2021, lured south by ash borers, ate them all.