You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Cutting down a Xmas Tree.
It’s like punching grandma in the face, like wiping your baby’s butt with copper wire, like getting a hair cut with napalm.
I am standing beside the White Pine. It is towering, 80 feet above me.
The sky is so blue, the clouds so fluffy, the needles so green and perky.
Who cuts down a Christmas Tree I wonder.
I look at the thick, healthy tree.
This tree is a wanted poster for good. It’s a Madison Avenue ad for life.
Instead of GOT MILK?
This tree screams Got Life?
The bottom branches are filled with Christmas lights, blinking red and green, a happy morse code of the season.
The only problem? It’s not the season. It’s July.
“Christmas Lights in July?” I ask my cameraman.
He smiles and focuses on the gigantic bulbs hanging from the thick branches.
The bucolic sub division has large lawns and deep lots.
The pine tree is on the corner. It is easily 20 feet wide, it’s branches thick and plush.
There is a sign at the base and it says:
Dear friends and neighbors. Despite our pleas, the Tennessee Valley Authority has decided our Christmas Tree must be cut down. We are heartbroken.
TVA, the electric power giant is going to cut the tree down at its base because it is under one of their electrical transmission lines. TVA says it is a matter of safety.
Job 1 is making sure nothing threatens the flow of electricity the TVA spokesman tells me.
Neighbors are furious. They look up at the beautiful tree that has been here for decades. It’s near the wires, but it’s debatable if it toppled that it would ever strike the wires.
For this reason, they are angry.
But they are also angry because it seems so senseless.
This tree represents all that is good in the world. The tree is bliss, it is love, it is nature inhaling carbon dioxide and returning life sustaining oxygen.
It does this for us for free.
What does TVA want to do in return? Barbarically murder the spirit of Christmas.
“We don’t trim trees in our right of way,” the spokesman says in a cold, rehearsed way.
This is a bad image. Something green and living is going to be destroyed by something corporate, cold and unfeeling.
I look up the bald hill decimated by TVA.
A silver transmission tower looms over the neighborhood. It looks like a Transformer in a Michael Bay blockbuster.
It is cold, metallic, almost evil.
It rises above the hill, devoid of vegetation, looming over the country homes.
It’s as if the transmission tower is an evil beast where the wicked witch lives and she has cast a spell over this neighborhood.
“our tree is beautiful,” neighbors will say. “they don’t have to do this!”
I feel bad for the neighbors. They are right. The tree is magnificent. It is a perfect Christmas tree.
Why the lights in July, I ask the woman who has invited me to this atrocity.
Because they are cutting it down next week and we want everyone in the community to enjoy it as long as they can they she says.
I look up the hill. I look at the wires that stretch down the mountain and over the tops of houses.
It looks like a buzz saw tore apart the hillside, eradicating any form of life.
“The transmission towers look like metallic monsters,” I say to the woman.
“Exactly,” she laments. “It’s just horrible.”
The air is still. I can hear the buzz from the electric lines that swoop over the houses. The power being moved down the line is unbelievable.
TVA officials will tell me they don’t trim trees. They cut trees down along their 16 thousand miles of line in 7 states. The company purpose is to protect electrical grids from crashing. Trees topple over in storms and bring down lines knocking out electricity to thousands of people.
“Nobody wants to be without power,” the woman says. “But it just feels like there needs to be an exception.”
I smile. I’ve talked to the spokesman. There is no quarter here. 16,000 miles of line. 7 States worth of power. One Christmas tree is a mosquitoe stinging a charging rhinoceros. TVA doesn’t feel it, doesn’t see it, doesn’t truly care about it.
I understand the corporate pledge. Protect the power. But on this wonderful July day, surrounded by blinking Christmas Lights, it just feels cold. It feels like big brother. It feels like mother nature is being run over by a dump truck.
The neighbors will share stories of Christmas’ gone by. They will talk about fellowship and community.
But when they stop talking. All I hear is the buzz of electricity, roaring down a transmission line, free of any growing life that could possibly jeopardize the use of Johnny’s Play Station in Iowa.
I hear a gasp from the Christmas Tree. It belches life sustaining oxygen into the neighborhood, perhaps for the last time.
Life’s Crazy™