Almost 20 years ago, fed up with inside-the-Beltway living and the crappy schools and crime that came with it, my wife and I gassed up the Subaru and headed out on a country drive.
We’d been looking for houses in Northern Virginia, but the prices were too high for a reporter’s salary, so we drove farther out and immediately got lost on western Loudoun County’s gravel roads that ribbon through open fields.
Wonderfully lost.
Cresting one hill, we saw in the distance the six-acre lot we would eventually buy and build on. It was a wide-open cow pasture, hilly and still looking like the Civil War encampment it once was, the Blue Ridge Mountains just five miles away.
While it was bordered by a healthy forest, there were only three trees on the lot, a massive oak and two locusts that looked near death.
We couldn’t have just three trees, so our foresting of the field began.
First, it was with pretty ornamental pears and cherries, then Leylands and some blue spruces. Individually, they weren’t expensive at the local Walmart and Costco. But altogether it added up to big bucks.
One spring day, walking through a local farmer’s market, we paused at the county extension service booth. The sign said, “Free Trees.” We grabbed a handful of one-foot-tall river birch sprouts shoved into a plastic bag.
Not long after, the same agency was handing out spruces, too, and we took a box load. Any tree we could find was getting a home.
We planted dozens of twigs in a line in our garden. It looked like a baby tree nursery. They eventually grew big enough to plant on our field.
Now, many years later, our forest is getting old. Some trees are dying. Some are just plain ugly. And some grew too close to the house. Worse, those “free” trees have become wickedly expensive to cut down.
Oh, I’ve whacked a few with my trusty Stihl chainsaw, cutting them up for a bonfire. But looking around our place in January, it seemed like a lost cause.
Enter Charlie and “The Bandit.”
Just as I was trying to figure out how to cut down a bunch of diseased and hulking blue spruces, a black Ford pickup pulled up and a guy named Charlie jumped out. “Need some tree work?” he asked.
I hesitated. Tree work can get really expensive. Charlie offered to give me a price. Six trees, turned into mulch, and that mulch dumped where I wanted for $600. A seriously good deal.
I emailed my wife, the yard boss, and even she agreed it was worth it.
Two days later, Charlie and Chris, the owner of the company, and two helpers, showed up towing “The Bandit,” an industrial-sized wood chipper. We renegotiated for three additional, bigger trees to be cut down, and settled on $900.
Down went the trees in short order. Bandit ate most of them whole in a scary, loud, and dusty scene worthy of a 007 movie — or was it “Fargo”?
As they drove away, I walked around the bare spots where the trees stood just hours earlier and embraced the open space. Never again would I get poked by low-hanging branches as I cut the grass. No more endless hours of pulling sticks and leaves out of the gutters.
As I pulled a can of Bud Light out of the garage refrigerator to celebrate, the missus drove home from work and cheered the tree job. But not for the reasons I saw.
Now, she said, we can put trees that really belong in those bare spots.
Let the reforesting begin.
Paul Bedard is a senior columnist and author of Washington Secrets.
