Reality Reconstruction

Roots

Have you ever been looking forward to a nice, easy, Saturday afternoon, doing nothing but reading the paper and watching whatever happens to be on TV, only to have your most well thought out plans for laziness destroyed by a friend in need? Rides to the airport, helping somebody clean out their garage, and worse of all, moving, are things that define a friendship.

You wouldn’t ask that guy you see at the gym every couple days to pick you up at the airport, would you? Of course not. So, one the one hand, getting a call to do something horribly tedious and un-fun is a clear weekend killer, but it is also a remind that at least somebody counts you as a close friend (or a sucker).

I had just woken up, and was lying on my sofa, flipping through the channels when my cell phone went of. Since I recognized the number, (it wasn’t the IRS or an irate ex) I figured there wasn’t much risk in answering it. Oops.

My friend was having some problems in his backyard. He had gotten into a dispute, or a discussion, rather about some big tree. This big tree had some roots that were getting a little bit out of control, and they were starting to mess up their shared fence.

He and his neighbor had had the fence put in a few years ago, as the old one was nearly falling over. But the roots of this tree were stretching out under the fence into the neighbors hard. My friend’s backyard was all grass, but the neighbors was concrete, and he was worried (reasonably so) that the roots would damage not only their fence, but also his expensive concrete backyard.

So my friend request was to help dig out this root in his backyard, and stop it from spreading. The problem he was having was there were so many roots going all over the place, he didn’t know which was which. He didn’t want to kill the tree, as it was a really nice looking one, especially in spring.

I suppose the only good thing about this whole mess was that I didn’t have to take a shower or shave or anything before I went over to destroy his backyard.

We started digging, looking around, and sure enough, there were plenty of roots.

This was going to take some work. We were also going to need to get some more tools.

Roots can be an interesting topic, so long as you aren’t digging them up. Some trees have huge root networks that expand much further than the topside of the tree. Kind of like icebergs, some trees have most of their material below the ground, rather than above the ground.

From the perspective of a human, this doesn’t make sense. What good is a tree if most of it is underground? But from the perspective of the tree, it makes perfect sense. From a trees persepctive, it’s all about using whatever you have at your disposal to collect as many resources as possible to fulfill your objective.

And I suppose the objective of a tree is to live as long as it can, while making as many other trees as possible. So it stretches out its branches both above the ground, and below the ground to get as many resources as it can.

The fact that humans come along and put a tire swing on one of its branches is completely incidental.

Of course having roots is also quite limiting. You can very well get up and walk around with huge roots going several meters into the earth (unless you are one of trees from “Lord Of The Rings”)

Sometimes it’s best to cut your roots if they are giving you problems. Things that you used to depend on earlier may be a hindrance later on. Things that were originally built for safety can inhibit your freedom later on. The trick is to understand which roots are safe to cut, and which ones you should leave untouched.

This, of course, can take some digging, and an ability to take a step back and understand what it is that you are really after. And whether or not those roots are really giving you the benefits that you think, rather than just some imagination based on the past.

After a few hours, and a few trips to Home Depot (for digging tools I didn’t even know existed) we finally had all the roots identified, and had determined which one was threatening the fence, and the neighbor’s back yard. I turned out this particular root wasn’t nearly as deep as the rest, so cutting this wouldn’t cause any problems. There to be some big rock or something that had deflected the growth of this root several years ago. Otherwise it would have grown down, rather than out, like all the rest of the roots.

When we finally got the pizzas (yes, plural) after all that digging, it was just in time to watch some good movies on HBO.

And that’s how I spent my Saturday.

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