The Oak-a-Dope Report
by Robert Hill Cox
part 1
When Bruce calls saying he might have a new client for me, he admits he’s already told the man about the Constantino job. That’s when I moved six sixty-ton poplars for no other reason than the missus wanted to expand the pool patio to make room for the new Primo Weber grill, the one with the smoker, sear station, and dual tuck-away rotisseries. It was a tricky job, because the mister said he wanted the trees positioned so that when he manned the grill, he could discretely take a leak behind one of them, since the main joy of grilling, in addition to using the huge tongs, was drinking a lot of beer while you did it.
Bruce and I are the main “tree guys” in Fairlawn County. We are cousins. We are competitors, but we refer clients to each other, too. Bruce is seedlings and saplings; I’m cherry-pickers and cranes. Bruce does landscape design; I do landscape reinvention. Bruce is the master of the clippers; I flash the mean chainsaw. We both love shaping shady things. I love shaping shady things and heavy machinery.
Bruce knows the new client Mr. Stewart from grammar school. He says Kent — Mr. Stewart’s first name — once grabbed his lunch box and threatened to throw it on the ground so the thermos of milk would break unless Bruce let him take the cookies inside. As a grown-up, Kent hasn’t become any nicer, Bruce tells me on the phone. The man knows no bounds.
That’s why he’s rich, I say. You know what they say about millionaires and billionaires, I say. A millionaire can pick his nose and no one will call him on it. A billionaire can pick his nose and eat it. Mr. Stewart, I gather, is somewhere between the two. He picks, then wipes on the seat of his pants.
Mr. Stewart is the soap king. He studied chemistry and came up with a synthetic heather smell that he then incorporated into a line of premium skincare products: Highland Heather Brands. He has just sold out to Unilever.
The drizzle of the cold autumn day sits on the edge of sleet. I meet Mr. Stewart at the Trowbridge place, the last undivided forty acres in the county. I drive past the trees by the road where the old house had been, then up the naked hill to the building site of what will be his crenelated mansion, Stewart’s Folly, the locals are already calling it. The foundation alone I estimate at twelve thousand square feet.
I find Mr. Stewart slouched in a metal chair under one of those small, roof-only white vinyl tents with scalloped edges you usually see either at a jousting tournament or over an open grave. His hands are in big, fleece-lined gloves that sit quietly on his lap. I have noticed this about the rich: they look smaller than you or I when they have nothing to do. And more idle if they have their gloves on, because then they can’t pick their noses.
Bruce introduces us. He retreats to his truck, claiming paperwork.
“I hear you’ve climbed Everest,” Mr. Stewart says. He pronounces it “Ev’rit.”
I nod. In a previous life as a mountain guide, I got hired to do the Everest gig: it’s where I developed a knack for massaging rich men’s egos. That was all about endgame and nothing about process. The climb was joyless: I was pushing onto the 1 Train at 96th Street, but at twenty-nine thousand feet. Being on the subway and discovering those homeless guys hunched in the end seats that look dead are dead... I counted eleven bodies on the way up. We gave them nicknames: Green Boots. The Laughing Man. I prefer Alpine-style quickies, but I know how to do siege when it is required.
“So what seems to be the problem, Mr. Stewart?” I ask.
He sighs. “It’s going to look fake,” he says.
“What’s going to look fake, sir?”
“Bul’m’r.”
I had just learned that’s how you are to pronounce “Balamore,” which is what I know he is planning to call this, his dreamhouse, his San Simeon, his Biltmore, his iteration of the Neverland Ranch. I have been warned Mr. Stewart has Scottish predilections, supposedly picked up from spending so much time with the caddies at St. Andrew’s. Mr. Stewart is Scotch-Irish, second-generation American. His father owned the local limousine service.
“Whatever I do, it’s never going to look old. F-oo-k spindly little maples. I won’t have Bul’m’r looking like a f-oo-kin’ Walmart parkin’ let or some lame ‘Medieval Manor.’ ”
“Um, Mr. Stewart. I’m right in thinking you were born nearby?”
“Right here in FARlin.” That’s how be pronounced “Fairlawn.”
I say there really isn’t much you can do. Mature landscaping: you either have it or you don’t. But I suggest we survey the property to see how I might assist. We walk to the bottom of the new driveway, where the farmhouse stood but a year ago. Brown stubble now grows on the filled-in cellar hole. Enid Trowbridge was occupying a smaller and smaller portion of the house over the years, as windows broke, dormers caved, and squirrels and raccoons took up residence in the upper floors. I knew Miss Trowbridge because I looked after her trees. The trees had endowments. Miss Trowbridge and the house did not.
I tell Mr. Stewart that somewhere along the line I am a Trowbridge, too; and so is Bruce, so is half the population of Fairlawn County. Colonial governor and owner of enslaved people, Uriah Trowbridge, had been some great-great-great-great grandfather, but I was hard pressed to explain how exactly I was tied to Enid Trowbridge. I assure Mr. Stewart that our connections just make us wish the best for the property, which of course is what he wants, too, now that he owns it.
“Ideally the drive up to the house would be shaded with big trees, mature lindens or pin-oaks, say,” he says. “I’d have an alle. Failing that, one big tree in front I suppose might do.”
We have stopped walking to admire the Trowbridge Oak, which is along the road just before the turn to the house. At least four hundred years old, the Trowbridge Oak may well be the most ancient living creature in Connecticut. Certainly it looks the part. The Oak is a many-sided, multi-armed Hindu god. White and pink lanterns have dangled from its limbs during Trowbridge garden parties. Other times: strung-up witches, uppity Native Americans, rebellious enslaved people, patriots, pickpockets: it used to be the village hanging tree. The Trowbridge Oak giveth, and the Trowbridge Oak taketh away.
As my wife has said, the Trowbridge Oak slings so many knobby, twisting limbs at you, it looks like a life-size Claymation model of some monstrous sea creature from a horror movie. The Trowbridge Oak is gnarly, as if at any moment it might spit an acorn in your eye. Legend has it that, during the Revolution, Ethan Allen fattened his hogs under the Trowbridge Oak before he set off for Fort Ticonderoga. That it once saved a platoon of patriots when the British soldiers pursuing them passed under the oak and the acorns were in such profusion that, ball bearing-like, their feet spun out and they fell on their asses. That it inspired the fighting apple trees in The Wizard of Oz.
I believe all that. The Trowbridge Oak likes mischief. When they installed plumbing in the house, its tap root sensed some easy water nearby and immediately hung a left. It penetrated the cellar wall, where a tendril reached in to squeeze the feeder pipe until it burst. How a tree can sense a waterpipe a hundred feet away and shoot a root right to it boggles the mind.
Drunk drivers have launched their cars into the Trowbridge Oak, assaults the tree absorbed with nary a broken twig.
Enid Trowbridge taught me a ditty about the tree:
“As long as the great oak grows
Trowbridges in Fairlawn you shall know
When the oak is tall
The Trowbridges will master all.”
“Does a tree realize how glorious it is?” Mr. Stewart is asking me a question.
I don’t know what to say. I guess you could ask the same question about the universe.
“Are there any rules about moving a tree?” he follows up with.
Moving a tree is an abomination. Trees stay put for a reason. That said, you can get away with it — trees are the ultimate in indifference. But you somehow need to apologize to them, which I’m good at. The way every time I’ve been above eight thousand meters I’ve known I was getting away with murder. But, somehow, if I admit that, then I’m okay.
“I’d say there’re two rules: First, you cannot completely eliminate the risk that the move will kill the tree. Second, any tree can be moved for a price.” I know that sounds self-serving.
“That’s the spir’t!” he says.
We walk along the stream, then up the field back to the site of the new house. All the raw earth and bulldozers suggest some sort of mass burial is going on. He motions me to sit in a metal chair under the tent. He paces in front as he makes a few phone calls.
I gather he is talking to the head of some college fundraising office because I hear him say, “You know your refusal is forcing me to reconsider my entire gift!” Then he grunts goodbye. He sighs as he sits, the gloves on his knees looking huge again.
“My alma matter has a charming English elm right in front of its old hall. I said I’d make a substantial contribution if they let me have it, but they turned me down.”
You’d need five Chinook helicopters flying in V formation to move something like that.
“So I guess it’s plan B,” he says.
“And that is?”
“I want to move the Trowbridge Oak. Up here to in front of the house. It’s on my property. I own it now. I can do with it as I please.”
* * *
Copyright © 2024 by Robert Hill Cox
