Story Sketches I

My grandfather remembers the last green tree. He was seven when newscasters broadcast how brown the leaves were becoming, despite careful attention from every top botanist in the world, and nine when news came that it had fallen, so brittle, dry, and old, in one of the great storms. It was always my favorite story he told us—the time his family took a vacation to visit the Mesquite tree. I tried to imagine how it must have been, standing strong and tall, what it would have been like to touch the textured bark and lie in the shade under the green leaves. Of course, you couldn’t go close to it at the time–it was surrounded by fences and guarded by men with machine guns. My grandpa had never touched a tree. But he had been there, once, to see the last tree standing on this earth.

Nowadays you could go see pieces of bark and leaves in museums, but you obviously couldn’t touch any of them, those guarded relics of the past. My family had no money to spend on frivolous trips to faraway museums, so I’d only seen trees in pictures. How it must have been in times where trees were a dime a dozen. Grandpa told stories of his great-grandfather who owned an apple tree farm—rows and rows of apple trees as far as the eye could see.

For a while, when the trees really started to die off, about the time the Great Storms started, you could still buy imitation trees to keep inside your home, or even put them in holes in the ground so it looked like you were lucky and rich and owned real trees. But then laws were passed labeling synthetic trees a waste of precious resources, and they were taken away to be repurposed, mainly for energy. When the trees died, governments raced to find solutions, building large metal machines—essentially giant filters—that removed CO2 from the air. Once companies discovered how to replace trees with machines, no one wanted to pay researchers to develop new genetically modified tree seeds that might stand a chance growing in our environment. And so it came to be, in the year 3013, that our earth had no trees.