Joe Bennett: When you know you'll never be king of the castle, there's less point in pretending

As a boy you climb a tree to be a king. Photo / 123rf

They're gone. After four days. The tree surgeons. And the trees.

Where last week there was a stand of pines, tall and fat enough to reach and crush my house and everything within it, there is now only sky and a litter of logs and slash. The 15 trees fell to two men.

As a boy you climb a tree to be a king. 'Hey,' you call from the highest branch that your courage will take you to, 'look at me'. And the scuttling little people look up to see you waving from the sky and you know they admire and envy you. From down there they can see only to the end of the street. From up here you can see to the curve of the world and beyond, to the horizon.

Climbing's a young man's game. How old was Hillary on Everest? Twenty-something, I'd imagine. It gets harder to haul yourself up. And self-knowledge plays a part. When you know you'll never be king of the castle, there's less point in pretending. When you know you won't walk to the far horizon, why bother to climb up to stare at it?

But arborists keep climbing. They must be among the most watched workers in the world. Up they go in defiance of forces to be silhouetted against the sky in the world of birds. How could we not look at them?

Janet Frame wrote of watching a lineman at work and being reluctant to look away even for a moment. 'You see,' she wrote, 'I was waiting to see him fall.' It is thus too with arborists. Their peril is attractive, to us and to them.

I spent hours watching them over the last four days, sometimes sitting in the open with coffee and just plain staring, but also spying from windows, peeping round curtains. They were a spectacle.

I watched how they hitched themselves up on ropes, or bound themselves to a trunk with hoops and spiked boots. A small chainsaw dangled from the waist by a length of rope, to be hauled up and started in the sky and put to work until there was a crack and another branch fell 30, 40, 50 feet and hit the earth below with the sort of bang and snap and bounce that would thrill the heart of any boy.

They pruned each pine from bottom to top till it was a Cleopatran needle, narrowing from 6 foot across to less than 1 and crowned with a final tuft or two of branches. They referred to this not as a trunk but as a stem, as if the trees were grass and they the mowers.

Felled trees are our species' signature. We have hewn and burned and built with wood for millennia. We have cleared land for us to grow stuff. Were it not for us most of the planet would be forest. Arborism is among the first professions.

Once they'd stripped the stem, they left a rope on its tip and ran that rope up the hill and round the base of another tree the better to guide the angle of the felling. And they cut out a wedge from one side of the stem, then went at the back with the saw, and then into the saw cut they drove metal wedges and you could sense the weakening of the wood and it was quite impossible to look away and suddenly there was a crack as the spine snapped and then the tree was done for, toppling, gathering speed then thundering into the land with a great bass percussion that shuddered the house and the world. They did that 15 times.

I'd lived in the shadow of those trees for close to 20 years, had watched them double in height, had seen them tossed and bent by southerlies, had noted how their mat of roots crept ever further down the hill towards the house, gripping the underlying rock like a great splayed hand, and wondered how out of this thin soil they'd found the sustenance to grow gigantic.

And now they lie as torn, dismembered corpses. Some I'll burn. The rest I'll leave to rot, to leech into the soil to feed whatever grows in their stead. Meanwhile, the arborists have left me sky I did not have before, and light, and room to spread myself, and they've packed up their simple gear, the saws and ropes and axes, and have gone elsewhere to climb and fell and to be watched. They seemed contented men.