Lester's Guerilla Forest

Mr. and Mrs. Buce undertook an Easter afternoon stroll through Palookaville’s capacious public park. We ran into our friend Lester. “Have you ever seen my redwood grove?” he asked. No, we hadn’t. “Well, let me show you the redwood grove.”

A word of background. Everyone’s himself of course, and Lester is no other. He’s about our age. He’s been single for 40 years or more. He makes the most amazing Christmas tree ornaments you ever saw. And he is the world’s greatest handyman, who has saved our bacon more times than I like to count.

But the trees: there’s a small grove of mature redwoods near the creek edge in the Palookaville park—not natural; we figure someone must have planted them back the 1930s. Apparently about 15 years ago, Lester decided they needed attention, and (more important) augmentation. So he started planting redwoods. Some he brought back from over by the Pacific Coast, where he spends part of his life. Some he scrounged from customers. A few he dug up along the highway right-of-way just east of town. In all there are—I forget, I think more than 50.

He refers to them all by number “Here’s number 37…” etc. (it’s a mercy he doesn’t have names: that would be creepy). He remarks on how they are growing, which ones thrive and which ones appear to have problems. He talks about his biggest adversaries—vandals who rip them up for no good reason, and thieves who nip them off for Christmas trees (plus the occasional gopher). “But they make terrible Christmas trees,” he explains. “Once they are cut, they droop.”

Just about every day when he is in town, Lester drives his old VW van to a shady spot under the expressway and pulls out two three-gallon plastic buckets. With these, he carries water to his plantation. Hoses wouldn’t make any sense and drip-lines are a non-starter. So it is stoop labor. It’s back-breaking work—three hours at a stretch. The tradeoff is that Lester at 70-plus must be as lean as he was at 19, and must have just as much energy.

It scarcely bears mentioning that all this was done without authorization from anybody—guerilla forestry. In time, of course, the park maintenance crews began to surmise that something was up, and in more time they have come to accept him (tacitly?) as an approved variation to the General Plan—proving, once again, that an ounce of apology is worth a pound of permission. Just lately, they put in a new picnic bench at the edge of the road up by the highway. It is secured to a concrete slab. Set into the slab is a brass plaque bearing the inscription “Lester’s Children.” “One of my customers did that,” Lester explains, “so now I am more or less legal.”

Lester does not read George Orwell (but he is a great fan of Mark Twain). Pity: I think he would enjoy Orwell’s remarks in defense of his own record as a planter of bushes and trees.

Even an apple tree is liable to live for about a hundred years, so that the Cox I planted in 1936 may still be bearing fruit well into the twenty-first century. An oak or a beech may live for hundreds of years and be a pleasure to thousands or tens of thousands of people before it is finally sawn up into timber. I am not suggesting that one can discharge all one’s obligations towards society by means of a private re-afforestation scheme. Still, it might not be a bad idea, every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, put an acorn into the ground.

And, if even one in twenty of them came to maturity, you might do quite a lot of harm in your lifetime and still … end up a public benefactor after all.

—George Orwell, “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” in
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4:
In Front of Your Nose 1945-50, 181-4, 184 (Penguin Paperback 1970).
[See also “As I Please,” Volume 1, id., 104]