Tree Cutter’s Pie, and Things That Endure

The man with the dagger grip on the pie knife here, in the photo inset, is our friend Dave. I suppose it has more torque that way. Dave would know.

Back when we lived not far from Dave in Vermont, I made this pie for him, in commemoration of a daring and generous act of tree-felling he performed for us. We had four old spruce trees standing in a row close behind the house that needed taking down. Various people with opinions about trees had previously come by to look them over. They crossed their arms, made grave faces and told us that, although the trees looked perfectly sound on the outside, this variety typically developed internal rot after 40 years or so. These specimens looked to be double that age at the very least. The next big wind? Who knows. Plus, their great root systems had been pushing against the old fieldstone foundation of the house for some time. Their fate was at hand.

I hated to see those old souls meet the chain saw. They stood more than twice as high as the ridge of our large, sturdy, post-and-beam-framed farmhouse, built in the year that George Washington announced his retirement from public office. The trees of course were not as old as the house, but in my mind, they added something to the atmosphere of endurance that permeated the place. I preferred to think of them as long-standing benevolent guardians, rather than a future insurance claim.

They provided cooling shade in the summer and dulled the bite of many winter gusts from the north. Through the decades, they’d withstood pestilence, inland-wandering hurricanes, blizzards, and many a furious thunderstorm. They were a haven, too, for innumerable wild birds. In some ways, the trees seem to ward off ill-fortune itself.   

Once, a lightning strike sizzled through a maple tree in a nearby pasture. Tragically, it electrocuted a gathering of our neighbor’s dairy cows sheltering beneath it. The maple was not among the highest points in the landscape. Our spruce trees were the highest. You could almost believe they had deflected the lightning strike away from the house by means of some invisible force field. But just barely. We were of course very, very sorry for the cows and their owner.  

When the epic ice storm of 1998 cut a swath through northern New England, it laid down millions of trees overall. It was as though Godzilla had stomped his way up into Canada, also crumpling, for good measure, older barn roofs here and there and a few lofty transmission towers. Then, the temperature dropped, and the ice clung everywhere for days. More trees gradually succumbed to the insupportable weight. You’d hear splintering cracks now and then. It wasn’t a good sound.

As for the four spruce trees, for days their ice-encased limbs were bowed low, their bottom branches pinned to the ground. But then came a thaw. The glassy coating slowly loosened. Under the sun’s warming rays, shards of ice tinkled down in sparkling cascades, creating a delicate music like wind chimes. It was a good sound. A few branches were lost, but the spruce trees stood largely unscathed.

Now they were going to come down. But the trees weren’t about to make it easy for us.  

Their very height so close to the house was a problem. Their large branches were dangerously co-mingled. The fall zone was limited to a tight space bounded by a nearby powerline. also, any interior rot meant that a tree, once cut, might have its own ideas about where it wanted to give way. It was a job for which you’d want a crack commercial outfit who’d bring in a team with all sorts of specialized, heavy equipment, for a whopping price.

But cash was tight. We dithered quite a while. Until along came Dave. A one-man outfit with a few basic tools of the trade. And a lot of cables.  

Dave was a professional logger by choice and a scholar by formal degree. He had deep knowledge of a seemingly boundless number of fields. At the time, he lived alone in a plainly-built house set way back into the woods. He surrounded himself with things he cared about: Books. Magazines. Tools and gear everywhere you looked. A working Saab or two in the yard, plus a few organ donor rusting quietly in the weeds. He didn’t appear to spend much time in his kitchen, and did not mind reheating the same pot of coffee for days until it was gone. Dave offered to drop the trees in exchange for a home-cooked dinner at our place.  

Really? That was it?

We trusted Dave to do what he said he could do. The price was beyond reasonable. What was there left to dither about? Other than what sort of dinner could possibly repay the gesture.

On the day Dave did the job, I couldn’t watch. I left, and I returned to find the four spruce trees laid out on the ground like slain soldiers on the field of battle. There were no other casualties.

As part of the deal, Dave had left the lesser limbing work and all other clean-up to us. When only the huge shorn trunks remained, we hired a guy with a portable sawmill to see what useable lumber we might salvage. Expectations were low.

But when cut, the majority of wood from those trunks was rot free. Clean and solid. Carrying a wet, acrid tang of vitality.

We reaped a huge harvest of extra-wide boards that we stored to dry in an out-building on the property, having no idea what we’d do with them. Where the spruce had fallen, four deep depressions in the back yard remained, as if the trees meant to leave a last mark on the land they’d spent their lives on.

I put my all into the promised dinner for Dave, going for a blend of hearty and a tad fancy. What you see in the photo is a tortiѐre, a traditional savory French meat and potatoes dish that I’d changed up a little, adding to the filling a few more fragrant seasonings and a red wine reduction. The first part of the enjoyment of this dish is the aroma that hits a dinner guest as they come through the door.  

Now when I make a tortiѐre, I’ll usually add those trees as decoration along with their baked-in memories. I call it Tree Cutter’s Pie. It sounds suitably hearty and there’s the added aroma of a story there.