Trees being what they are, I suppose it isn’t really dead yet. The leaves are still green. Sap still flows. But the tree won’t survive. No one’s going to sit it upright, no one’s going tend to it.
The killing wasn’t personal. I’m sure they didn’t have any special animus toward this particular tree, nor toward any other tree, or plant, or animal that was killed, nor even for discarded trash that got moved around when they came through. They had a job to do, clear a path to the construction site, and they did it. This tree just happened to be in the way and so it was uprooted.
Seeing the tree like that made me sad. Though I had no deep attachment to the tree, I was attached. I knew it as a specific tree, an individual. I thought of it as the “Y” tree because of the way it branches. This is my oldest photo of the tree, taken on 6 July 2007:
You can just barely see the “Y” tree on the right, just beyond the mouth of the tunnel, all but hidden among the foliage. You can see its form more distinctly in this photo, taken on 9 December 2007:
Here’s what it looked like on 7 October 2007:
There’s some graffiti on the rock wall just behind the tree:
If you look to the left, just below the center, you’ll see some white marking on the rocks. It says “Free Werds”:
I know nothing about Werds except that he’s a graffiti writer, and a good one, who’s respected among his peers. There’s a fair amount of his work in this area – in and around the Bergen Arches in Jersey city – and much of it has been left untouched in the three or four years I’ve been photographing local graffiti. That other writers do no go over Werds’ work is a sign of respect. As for why Werds was in prison, I heard it had something to do with drugs, which is plausible.