The art of (un)compartmentalizing
Cutting down ash trees is a risky business. Living in Iowa feels even riskier.
Welcome! I'm Sara Ramsey, a novelist and tech worker who recently moved back to my 430-person town in rural Iowa. I write about the wild and weird magic of my rural life, as well as anything else that strikes my fancy. If you haven’t subscribed yet, please join me!
Hi friend,
The ash trees are all dead. I can see a massive ash through my office window, far away on the other side of the railroad tracks. Its leafless silhouette is still beautiful, and its branches climb into the sky as though it still has life in it. Dead ash trees sit in yards throughout town, threatening the houses they used to shade. Dead ash trees dominate the fence rows and creek beds, standing silently next to parched fields that have suffered in this year’s drought. Dead ash trees surround one of the public lakes, which is itself choked by an impossibly bright green algae bloom (Iowa: come for the lack of regulation, stay for the farm runoff and polluted lakes!).
In the winter, when all the trees look dead, the ash trees blend into the background. In September, as the leaves turn and the cornfields become endless swaths of gold, the ash trees are more noticeable.
Last week, my neighbor cut down the corpse of his ash tree. No one has the money to hire anyone to cut down their trees, which is why many of them are still standing. But my neighbor wanted to clean his up before our annual town celebration this weekend, so he did it himself.
I watched through my window occasionally, half convinced I would see him die. He propped an extension ladder up against the tree, climbed as high as he could go, and cut off as many branches as he could reach with a chainsaw. He sometimes tied his ladder to the dead tree trunk, but otherwise there was no sign of safety equipment. At least once, he propped his ladder against the branch he was cutting, which seemed particularly ill-advised.
Every morning, he cut off a few branches. Every afternoon, he cleaned up what he had cut down, chopping it into smaller pieces that would fit in a wheelbarrow. The next day he did it all again, moving lower down the tree, just careful enough that he lived through the experience.
One day I walked by and stopped to say hi. He was sitting in the yard with his wife and surveying the stump where the tree had been. Around the stump, the last big chunks of trunk waited to be chopped and disposed of.
The first thing he said to me was that earlier in the week, he’d seen a woman driving a minivan and could have sworn it was my grandma. I said that I was pretty sure she hadn’t run off with a secret second family, which made him laugh.
Gram died in 2019, but she had dementia; it feels like she’s been gone for over a decade. It still startles me when someone mentions her. I spent all of Gram’s decline living in places where no one knew her. It’s nice to be someplace where people remember who she had been.
It’s also odd to trip over her memory, and all my other memories, when I’m not prepared to.
My neighbor and I talked about the mural festival, which he really enjoyed — he was a big fan of the art and liked talking to the artists. We talked about his apple trees, which start producing earlier than any apples around here, and so are already done. We talked about his peach trees, and he told me I can pick some whenever I like. We talked about the other trees he’d planted in his yard over the years. He didn’t say it, but I know from stalking property records that his parents owned the place before he did. He’s retired and his first wife died too young; his kids are gone. He said that if he plants a tree now, he won’t live to see it get big enough to replace the one he cut down.
Then he showed me the ash tree’s trunk. The ash was killed, like all the rest here, by the emerald ash borer, and its signature was written in the wood. The bark had peeled away, revealing wood that should have been smooth — but the insects had eaten curving, twisting paths all across the face of it. Their tunnels had cut through the tree’s outer layers, preventing the tree from sending water and nutrients up to the canopy and slowly killing it.
I wanted to take a photo of it, to better hold it in my memory. But in my neighbor’s yard, it felt as inappropriate as taking a photo at a funeral.
That hasn’t stopped me before. I have a few photos of the dead in my phone — snapshots taken surreptitiously over open caskets, as though I needed to prove to myself later that the person was really gone. Google Photos gives me an occasional “Remember this day…” that pops up the body of an uncle, or a friend. I don’t need the reminder, but I don’t delete them.
When I was younger, though, it did feel like I needed the reminder. Living away from here, I could pretend that my uncles were still alive; I could pretend that my grandmother knew who I was. I’ve usually felt well-served by the compartments I’ve constructed. My writing life, my corporate life, my California life, my Iowa life; as you know from previous posts, I prefer to keep things tidily separate. The compartments enable me to be productive (by some definitions of productive) and safe (by some definitions of safe).
I think I have to physically be in Iowa to write my current book, and this newsletter, because I slam this compartment shut when I’m not here. I can’t hold this place clearly in my mind when I’m elsewhere, moving anonymously in crowds, eating with friends in restaurants that could be anywhere in the world, letting myself feel untethered and rootless.
Still, there’s a cost to living in this compartment and keeping it open — as I bring my adult self, and my adult experience and power, into a space that my child self perceived in such a fundamentally different way.
Sometimes the cost is small, and bittersweet — like a mention of my grandmother when I’m not expecting it.
Sometimes the cost is larger — a grief, or a memory, that has stayed locked away for so long that I never thought I’d confront it again. Or an unfinished debate in my mind about my neighbor, who is kind and generous to me and also has a yard full of MAGA signs next to his dead ash tree.
And sometimes it feels like the cost is too high, and also maybe too obviously a bad tradeoff. Why should I stay and try to make a difference, when the town and trees and even my own family are dying off? Why not get a fancy job and a fancy life? Why not give up the writing that makes my heart ache, and swap it for a job that is merely a mind-numbing aggravation?
Why not admit that capitalism and corruption have eaten pathways through everything that used to make this place function…and that the death is inevitable even if we can’t see the full extent of the damage?
But then I feel my body, as I sit on my balcony listening to the endless chainsaw-like hum of the cicadas. There’s an endless cost to reopening this Iowa compartment, but my body is reaping the rewards. My heart rate is lower than it’s ever been. My sleep is better. Returning to the scene of the crime, as it were, is offering my earliest wounds an opportunity to heal — an opportunity that avoidance seemed to promise, but never fulfilled.
I’m in Iowa for now, at least. As long as I’m here, I might as well write about it, even if the writing sometimes feels like its own kind of compartmentalized torture.
[side note: it’s a Friday, so I’ll save you the guesswork on this post’s subtext — but it’s embarrassingly obvious to me, in an amateur, freshman-English kind of way, that if I’m writing about dead trees, it’s because my book’s plot is not working. I can’t blame the emerald ash borers, but I’m wandering in a forest of dead plot points and decayed metaphors, hoping I find my way through it. Yes, my writing compartment is crazy and full of internal drama, which is why that compartment stays mostly secret.]
None of the trees in my yard are dead, but I think I’ll plant some fruit trees in the spring. In one life, I’ll be gone from here long before they bear fruit. In another life, I’ll stay and watch these new trees grow, making cherry tarts for the neighbors the way Gram made cherry tarts for me.
Regardless of what’s happening with my book, or my community, or my heart…I know there is good to be gained from planting a tree, even if I don’t get to see it.
Cheers,
Sara
I am in NYC, at a Starbucks Roaster close to my hotel. Starbucks always makes me think of you. I grabbed my bevie and sat down to check my email then started reading this. Thank you for making me tear up in public. This was beautiful.