Entry 2: Noise

16 January 2017
Mid-afternoon, overcast, approx. 35ºF

As I round up the curved pathway in Mellon Park, a grinding bellow pours over the hillside. One of those great rumbling machines swallows tree limbs and spits out wood chips and sawdust across Beechwood Boulevard, and for any south-facing slope of the park the grind of metal teeth against hardwood clogs the air. I can almost feel the give of bark and branch in my own mouth, or humming against my palms. The vibrations of the splitting wood reminds me of clearing trails this summer, not so much the soft ring of a crosscut saw, but more so the incessant drone of a chainsaw. I remember felling a dead pine snag, calculating the depth of the undercut, then the tense coax of the blade into the holding wood, inch by inch into notches of fiber holding the tree upright. My gaze swooped from whining chain to the tree's trunk until I saw that shift in sky, the tree's lean turning to tumble. I yanked out the blade from the holding wood and ran as fast as I could in thick chaps. Fifty feet away, I turned, heart hammering, to see a gap in sparse canopy where moments before the gnarled, mistletoe-bared branches had been. A standing tree, a whoosh of wood unheard over the chainsaw's gargling motor, then a brighter pane of sky.

But that was months ago, and in pinewood. Today, the low-pitched chipper growls through hardwood, which I have never worked with. I don't spend enough time in this area to know the tapestry of its urban canopy, but I can't help but wonder how people who live on that street must feel, peering out their windows, to see a tree there one day and ground to splinters the next. Of course there's a reason for removing the tree—heart-rot, or branches strumming power lines, or simple old age. I'm beyond the mentality of resenting every felled tree, but still I hate the noise.

So I curve back around to a north-facing slope of the park, settling down beside another old oak or maple. Last week I brought a tree guide, hoping to identify the hardwoods standing so patiently across Mellon Park's lawns, but without leaves I stare hopelessly at ridges of bark and decide to wait until spring. Evading the sound grinding wood chips had put me overlooking Fifth Avenue again, which brings its own rumble of rubber and asphalt. It's proving a challenge to focus on the space between the two voices of machinery. Papery maple leaves stick to my shoes and mittens as I settle onto the damp grass. A soft-leafed weed pokes up between blades of grass and leaves, looking something like buttonweed. Beyond Market Square, blue haze smears rises of trees together, and above them thin lines of clouds stack on top of each other against the horizon, as if someone has stretched them out and is pressing down with force from higher in the sky.

I watch a mother push a stroller along the sidewalk across Fifth. Maybe my perspective's all wrong, I think, this urge to observe from above. To the kid in the stroller, the world brushes past in forms of taller adults, high doorframes, arterial spread of branches. I let my spine and head fall back against the grass. The moment I look up, a squirrel scurries across the tree's trunk, and her clawed paws send bits of bark down around me. The sky, despite its overcast grayness, is painfully bright. I have to squint one eye, then the other, searching for the squirrel. How long has she been there, silent as I try to ignore the roar of cars? She's disappeared again, as if her appearance was only to deliver some sort of message I needed sprinkled over me.

Wood chips, bold white sky. The hum of engines endures, but no longer presses against the back of my skull. It's simply there. So is the squirrel, curled into a tree limb's notch out of sight, silver-tinted fur against silver-tinted bark. So is the streaked sky, and green-cupped weeds, and tattered maple leaves. So is the memory of a chainsaw's grind into pine, spitting out shreds of wood into every fold of my clothing. The tree crashed down, but for weeks afterward I shook out fine golden dust from its heart. Tomorrow the wood chipper across Beachwood Boulevard will heave away with its churned meal, but I don't doubt it will leave behind strips of bark and a similar gritty powder peppered upon the sidewalk and lawns. A silent imprint, borne from a thunderstorm of sound.