About Docks, High Water and Tree Doctoring

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

May 11, 1969

   THERE WAS enough to do at home to sober a horse, but after working until late Saturday afternoon with no end in sight, we decided to abandon the city and its multiple woes for the rest of the weekend and give no more thought to storm-windows.  We'd have to work at the lake, too, but might have a couple of chipmunks for company or, if lucky, a pileated woodpecker.

   The ravages of winter at our home away from home had been extensive.  The front and one side of the cabin cried for paint, as did what passes for the bathroom.  More than half the Norway pines that flank the road leading into the place looked like they'd been sat on, and there was evidence of a roof leak on the fireplace stones.

   BUT WE arrived in high spirits.  The countryside, we noted as we drove north, was clad in the blooming garb of spring -- to borrow a poetic morsel -- and the lake was the highest we'd ever seen it.  Gone was the marshy mass of cattails along the point.  Gone also was the point.  And the pines which had flourished there and were among neighbor Lyle McMurchie's many contributions to arboreal beauty, stood forlorn in deep water, awaiting a rescue that wouldn't come.

   High water had nearly washed away our dock in late September.  Save for the good offices of Bill Weber, another neighbor, it would have been gone.  Bill moored it to the shore and when my wife and I arrived the next weekend we piled the half-dozen sections on cement blocks 15 feet from the water.  We didn't try to salvage the supports.  These, fashioned from poles and two-by-fours, were still submerged in the lake.  They are under water now, too, and may always be.  Even the piled-up dock sections are partially in water, so high has the lake become.

   BUT OF FAR more concern than the dock were the damaged roadway trees.  They had grown amazingly from the time of planting six years before and seemed immune to misfortune.  Now immunity had ended and as I surveyed the damaged branches and toiled at repair, I mourned for each tree individually.

   A few summers earlier I had taped and trussed a Scotch pine that had been mangled when I kept the car too long in reverse.  Surprisingly, the tree survived, in somewhat contorted form, so I gave the Norways similar tape-and-twine treatment.

   WHEN we first noticed the damage we blamed the snowmobile set.  We had seen the boys gunning through the premises the winter before, to our mild dismay, but we thought protests would seem petty.

   The snowmobiler gets more blame than he deserves anyway, I guess.  He is charged with everything from running down game to disturbing the mating cycle of the groundhog, and I have pangs of conscience when I think that we associated this symbol of progress and winter mobility with our tree damage.  Close inspection satisfied us that the unusually heavy snow was to blame.  It had been too much for the branches.

   Maury Heyer, whose mother owns the cabin next to ours, wasn't sure that my repair work would be effective.  Maury works for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources so qualifies as an authority.

   "Limbs that are pulled away so badly that the central core is well exposed might as well be cut off," he told me.  "The tree won't die but the limb will, and trying to save it makes no more sense than bandaging a wooden leg."

   His advice came late, after I'd already cared for the wooden legs.  Now all that sustains me is the flagging hope that time will prove Maury wrong and that I have wrought a coniferous miracle.

   But miracles are not my thing and I am prepared, by July or before, to amputate.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.