Modesto Ash

a tree poem

This is me in Carmichael, CA, a suburb of Sacramento. I’m standing on the back on my work truck and my left hand resting on the wood chipper that I would always haul while doing tree work. The tree closest to me in the background, a Modesto Ash where a squirl lived who trusted me to eat peanuts and cashews and almonds from my hand. I spent much of my adult life caring for hundreds of Modesto Ash trees throughout Sacramento.

 

It postures tall and strong next to its 
contortions, twisting in all the right 
places. Season after season, it moves 
to an interpretive dance, following the 
lead of Earth's brutal grace. Its fingers 
and hands and arms, all wave goodbye 
to the leaves, allowing them to congregate
at the chain link borders and say their fare-
wells to the shadow it once cast upon the
land. A break long overdue.

For, give or take 30 years, the Modesto 
Ash has been so welcoming. Home to 
the Yellow-billed magpie and the gray 
squirrel, host to even the parasitic mistle-
toe, all making the Ash their dwelling in the 
most subtle of ways. Their beds concealed
in the summer’s heat, only to be exposed as 
fall drops.

Nearing the end of its use, the Ash, weary 
and weak, begins to make way. With a 
lifetime of  built up earth settled deep within 
its wrinkles, the rotting decay accelerates its 
death. Soon to be succumbed to the valley’s 
harshness. 

Some are unearthed, pushed at their under-
bellies. The others, with limbs supersaturated 
and waterlogged, submit to the pressure and 
split from their forked trunk.

Echos’ heard for miles while the sharp perfume of 
bar oil hangs low and a two-stroke cocktail, pours 
into the pores of those undertaking, making confetti 
of the Ash’s flesh. Its final celebration of life.

© PD Hurt, October 2025