On July 17, 2023, my morning coffee was interrupted with the sound of chainsaws twenty five feet from my bedroom window. Outside the window I saw a squad of five men on the side of the hill above our house, ripping into a grove of 50 or 60 year old oaks that sheltered both the ridge and the hillside below it. The noise, of course, was horrific, and while the sawyers whined away, I felt a certain amount of regret for those trees. I’m a fan of Robin Wall Kimmerer, though I wouldn’t go so far as to ascribe sentience to an oak. But it felt like a crime against those grand old trees as much as an annoyance to me.

The butchery was only the beginning. Once the trees were down, the now-dead logs cleared away, the weeping stumps pulled, the next four weeks were punctuated by warning whistles and ground shaking booms. The blasting company came to videotape our house’s foundation, inside and out, to insure against any later complaints we might make. What a great way to inspire confidence.

Then came the cranes and trucks and front-end loaders, moving the broken rock off the site. A foundation was dug and concrete poured. What was described in neighborhood gossip as a fifteen hundred square foot ranch house, we now refer to as “the hotel.” Skeletal walls of two by fours, paneled in ugly green wallboard, arose, and eventually, another crane came in and set the trusses in place for the roof over the main house.

The next morning, while drinking my coffee (again), and wondering if I could convince my new “neighbor” to ask her workmen to at least give us Sundays off from the noise and shitty rock music of her construction crew, I heard (and felt) a muffled crash. The wind had come up overnight, as the Weather Channel had forecast a couple days before, and was blowing a solid thirty MPH. I stepped out into the half-dark and realized the silhouette of the hotel on the hill had changed radically. The roof trusses, unbuttressed by plywood paneling or cross braces, had fallen in the wind, imploding into the open bay of the main house. I had a (short) moment of schadenfreude on behalf of the three yahoos building this house, though I knew the homeowner was likely to wind up paying for this, not them.

The collapse did make me wonder, though, if those 50 or 60 year old oaks weren’t exacting their own kind of revenge, punishment for being savaged out of their lives. It is a delicious feeling to wonder whether nature doesn’t have ways of rectifying our arrogance, and I can’t say I wouldn’t like to live in a world like that.