A beleaguered Norway maple in the Star office driveway was brought down this week. How it had survived where it was, surrounded by bluestone pavement, was a testament to these trees’ toughness. In recent years it had begun to shed large branches, which hung up ominously above parked cars. But it also shaded the south side of the building in the summer, providing a screen of green leaves between my office window and the rest of the world.
The tree will live on briefly as firewood, I suppose. A friend was coming by yesterday to pick up logs to split to feed his studio woodstove. I thought about keeping some of the sections to split myself, but I haven’t quite caught up to my last haul of wood, and a stack greets me in the driveway each time I pull in.
Some folks consider Norway maples “junk” trees. When I was younger and maybe more of a tree-hugger, a neighbor’s vitriol directed toward the Norways shocked me. “No tree is junk,” I fussed to myself as his rant went on. Now I kind of get it.
My 1979 sloop spent the winter on stands in my sister’s backyard and dodged disaster when a huge Norway maple cast off a limb. The branch could have made a decent-size tree itself. Luckily, the wind was from the northeast, so it fell in the other direction, crashing through the back fence and coming close to plunging in a neighbor’s pool.
The last time a hurricane of any consequence swept through here was 30 years ago this summer, though it carried far less of a punch than earlier storms. The Hurricane of 1938 remains the most powerful within memory to reach Long Island. Many of the Main Street trees fell during its rampage, leaving holes in the canopy for the Norway maples to fill. Their time will come, too, I think.