
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, April 1, 1994                   TAG: 9404050010
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By LIZA FIELD
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long

LET'S CELEBRATE: FROM DEATH AND DECAY COMES LIFE

THIS WINTER'S tree damage got me thinking early about Easter. In many areas, the storms' work was mild compared to our retaliation with the chain saws. In the effort to keep death and brokenness out of our yards, we did not simply remove limbs the ice storms broke; many damaged trees got hewn entirely. Others still stand, not as trees but totem poles, entirely shorn of limbs.

My mother calls these casualties ``quadriplegics.'' Tree specialists call them ``hatracks.'' I grow uncomfortable when I see them, and think of the cross.

In an old Anglo-Saxon poem, ``The Dream of the Rood,'' the cross (or ``rood'') tells the story of Jesus' - and the tree's own - apparent defeat: cut down, abused, left to die.

But this tree knows something the onlookers don't: that out of death springs life. The poem ends with a victory over death, and this tree finds itself spangled hectically with emeralds and rubies - a cross you might find in a Niagara Falls gift shop. It's truly a gaudy and glorious scene - one that conveyed the idea of Easter for a primitive people: life emerging gladly from death.

The idea falls sort of flat in our day and place. Dead trees, dead limbs - dead anything - have gotten a bad rap in our society. You can find evidence of it not only in the hatracked trees, but all along the curbside of this spring - mountains of brush, fallen boughs, hewn stumps, waiting to be carted off to the landfill. The cleared-out yards that remain are bare, clean, devoid of songbirds and creatures. Said a poet friend of mine, ``I know the dead stuff is good for wildlife, but I find this urge to clean it out. I almost want a vacuum cleaner to run out there.''

She has let things lie, however, knowing that nature indeed hates a vacuum. It also has a hard time with the lawn mower, leaf-blower, weed killer and pesticide. In fact, scientists are saying that our obsession with the neat, smooth chem-lawn we have bought all this equipment to caretake is causing severe problems for the songbirds, thrushes, woodpeckers, toads, owls and other creatures who once shared our neighborhoods.

What's missing? Death, actually. To animals - to all of nature - death is oddly vital. Woodpeckers and sapsuckers need dead wood; songbirds love holes in trees and dead bracken for nesting sites. Robins relish the grubs and worms found in compost piles and old stumps, and owls and hawks need the varmints that live in brush piles and under logs.

Plants too, from moss and lichens to trees, need quite a bit of death to keep them alive. Leafmeal, compost, hickory nuts, dead sticks - these rude, rotting necessities are what restore nutrients to the soil - and hence, to the living earth.

That life comes out of death is not an idea strange to nature. Nor was it strange to the Anglo-Saxons. But it appears strange, certainly ill-mannered, to our civilized world today - perhaps because we have distanced ourselves from this side of nature. In fact, the more civilized and affluent we become, the more we spend on nature-removal - sewage, garbage, briars, heat, ice, darkness, mud, weather, snakes, buzzards, silage, bruised fruit, bugs - we get rid of it.

Where'd we get such distaste for these elements? The common factor between them seems to be an association with death. After all, we like nature in its healthy, lively stages - flowers and apples, clipped green grass and children. It's that other that frightens, and therefore offends, us: the broken rottenness that feeds this life.

And so we pile up our dead leaves, grass clippings, pine-straw and brush - and send them off to the landfill. Nothing that rots is allowed in view; nothing that hints of mortality (laundry, compost, chickens, weeds) ought be seen in a civilized neighborhood. Out of sight is OK. Hence, while landfills overflow, we carefully pluck cups off the parkway. While rivers gag from toxins and silt, we strain a fly out of a swimming pool.

To hide our own decay, we support billion-dollar industries. We contain the old in homes, the sick in hospitals, the crazy in asylums. A Greek tourist was heard to say with amazement, ``Everyone in America is so young, so healthy!'' Nobody hinting of age or sickness, after all, had come into her view.

Dead people themselves are perhaps the greatest mystery - vanishing behind curtains in funeral parlors. Our main sensory experience with death is that Aunt Emily has suddenly acquired a hairdo, is wearing lipstick for the first time in 30 years and will abide forever - full of preservatives - in a rot-proof steel bed.

This is not the Easter story. As our churches and nature still remind us, death precedes the resurrection. Without deadness, spring itself would not stir us so; nor could it be possible. Life and death are part of one circle, and if we cannot allow both into our minds - and our environment - we end up with neither: a kind of nonlife, TV noplace. Such an existence may be nice-looking and polite, but our feet can't walk there, nothing rots or grows, and there are no birds singing in the bracken.

Perhaps this Easter, we can celebrate the oddness of the whole thing, the passage from death to life, by allowing one dead tree in the yard, a stump, a pile of bracken, to play a role in the resurrection.

Liza Field of Wytheville teaches and helps operate a land trust.

by CNB