Tree Cutter’s Pie, and Things That Endure

The man with the dagger grip on the pie knife in the photo is our friend Dave Bulow of Adamant, Vermont. One year I made this pie for him, a spin on a savory French dish called a tortiѐre, in appreciation of a skilled and generous act of tree-felling he performed for us when my family and I lived in rural East Montpelier, a few miles from Dave. He took down four enormous old spruce for us. I fight sentimentality when it comes to such things, but I hated to see those old souls meet the chain saw. No surprise that things in the living landscape come with expiration dates. But in death, in one way, these trees surprised us all. But first, looking back…     

Standing behind and more than twice as high as the ridge of our two-hundred-year-old farmhouse, those trees had seemed to me like watchful guardians rather than a looming peril. I could imagine them, too, marking the human follies and atmospheric events around them for God knows how many years, because in their own cellular ways, trees do that.

While living, the trees had provided cooling shade in the summer and dulled the bite of many winter winds. They were a safe haven, too, for innumerable wild birds. And in some ways, the trees seem to ward off ill-fortune itself.   

Through the decades in that place, we weathered drought, pestilence and inland-wandering hurricanes, and yet these four trees stood. Despite their height and many a furious thunderstorm, lightning never bothered them. Once, a lightning strike sizzled down a nearby tree – not the higher spruce – coursed through the granite-spined ground and horrifically electrocuted a gathering of dairy cows in our neighbor’s pasture, as if some force field had barely deflected a hit intended for our place. (And yes of course we were very, very sorry for the cows and their owner.)  

Through countless snowy blizzards, no important limbs on these spruce trees bit the dust. The epic ice storm of January 1998 cut a swath through northern New England, hitting our region hard, and reportedly laying down millions of trees overall. It was as though Godzilla had stomped his way up into Canada, crushing not just trees but old barns and some number of power transmission towers. Thickly icebound, trees along our road buckled in slow motion over days. We weren’t sure at first, if our bent-boughed spruce would make it. But the glassy ice slowly loosened, and for a day or so it fell downward in long tinkling cascades, making a pretty sound like high-pitched wind chimes. In the end the spruce shed only a few minor branches.

But people who knew trees made grave faces and told us that spruce such as ours, even though they looked perfectly sound on the outside, typically went to rot on the inside after 40 years or so. We calculated the trees to be a whole lot older than that after consulting photos the previous owner of the house had left us. It seemed riskier by the day not to do something.       

Many in the neighborhood, including my husband, had chain saws and had taken down a tree or two. But this was different. Such people gazed at our tree removal situation and muttered words like geesh and whuh-oh.  

Whoever did this work had to drop the trees safely away from the house, of course, but in addition, miss a nearby power line. And as close together as they were, they needed to fall without getting dangerously hung up on one another, in widow-maker fashion.

If that wasn’t enough, the likelihood of interior rot meant that a tree might have its own ideas about where and how it wanted to fall, once cut. Precautions had to be taken. It seemed like a job for a big commercial outfit, the kind who’d bring in a team with all sorts of specialized, large equipment for a whopping price. But as it turned out, it took only one skilled man with some fairly standard tools of the logging trade. Plus nerves of steel.

That was Dave.     

At the time of this tree-downing, Dave was a logger by choice and a scholar by formal degree with a seemingly boundless knowledge of many things, but a man who preferred to work in the woods. He lived in a modern, sparely-designed house set way back from the road surrounded by the things he cared about. Books. Magazines. A computer. Important-looking tools everywhere you looked. A few dogs of random lineage for company. A working Saab or two, plus a few dead ones for spare parts. He didn’t appear to spend much time in his kitchen.  

Dave offered to drop the trees in exchange for a home-cooked dinner. Not only did we trust his skills, but the price was right. It was generous far beyond what was right. He got his dinner.  

On the day Dave did the job, I left for the duration. I couldn’t watch. I returned to find the four spruce laid out on the ground side by side, like slain soldiers on the field of battle. But there were no other casualties.

The back side of the house was now more exposed to the elements. A few days later the wind cut through the opening in the raised chimney cap and it made a new keening sound, as it did thereafter whenever a good gust came from a certain direction.

Rightfully, Dave had left the limbing of the trunks and the hauling and burning of debris to us. It took us weeks and weeks of weekends. The sheer volume of strewn tree-matter was a testimony, in a way, to the amount of life the trees had lived. After we cleaned up, we hired a guy with a portable sawmill to come see what wood there was, if any, to salvage from the rotted trunks. That’s when the trees unveiled their surprise. And it was this: The wood within was clean and solid, nearly through and through. The only thing these trees had to fear in life, to that point, was a chain saw. Well.

We reaped a huge harvest of extra-wide boards that we stored to dry in an out-building on the property. With the trunks gone, four deep depressions in the back yard remained where the giants had crashed to the ground as if they sought to leave a last mark on the land they’d spent their long lives on.       

I put my all into the promised dinner for Dave. A tortiѐre, the central dish, was by tradition meant to use up leftover pork bits, adding potato, onion and seasonings. The French Canadians of my acquaintance would use every part of the pig but the oink, and made it taste fine. But I switched out the pork for some very good ground lamb I’d picked up at the local farmer’s market and added a selection of minced vegetables. To me a tortiѐre is always a little dry by itself so I concocted a drizzle-on gravy with a little red wine reduction for piquancy. A recipe that turned out to be a keeper. At the last minute I had the idea to add an approximation of the four spruce trees to the top crust of the tortiѐre.

Dave might have pointed out that my spruce tree depictions weren’t anatomically correct, but he had the grace not to do so. In some ways they looked like weird mushrooms. But the intended tribute was achieved. Now when I make this kind of tortiѐre I still 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 faint aroma of a story there. □