Trees

I like trees, you can cut them down and make really useful stuff like boats, and books.

You can use them to hold up birds, so the cats don't get them.

You can plant them near your letterbox and let them grow wild, so the postie can't get close enough to deliver your bills.

You can buy an expensive house and poison them to improve your view, forgetting that the trees are actually part of the view.

They also have another use that people don't always think of.

While I was delivering mail on Friday, I looked at the time and realised I was really going well. It was a light load and I reckoned I'd finish well before three. A good way to finish off the week. I'd had a good week too, Monday to Wednesday had all been beautiful, weather-wise. I'd had light loads and no junk mail to deliver. Thursday was a bit crappy, because it rained, but Friday looked to be good. There was rain around, but the way I was going, I'd be finished before it hit.

Then, just over a third of the way through my run, I did a u-turn across a street and noticed the bike was feeling a bit wibbly-wobbly. I looked down at the rear tyre after delivering some mail to number 4 and thought, that tyre shouldn't look that wide.

I'd got my first puncture since I started the job.

I rang the depot and they told me a spare bike was on its way. In the mean time, a lady asked me if I was okay and offered me a cuppa, which I politely declined. Caffeine and 4 hours on a bike without access to a toilet don't really mix. Shortly after that, someone from across the road came over for a chat and he offered me the use of a pump and some sunscreen, since by now I'd taken off my helmet and the sun was out.

He mentioned the soggy footpath on his side of the street. I'd discovered it pretty soon after starting the job. It's really waterlogged and a bit scary to ride on. I assumed it was a leaky water-main, since I can see the water-meters there, but it seems the reason for it was something else.

This particular street is at the bottom of a hill. A little way up the hill, one of the neighbours used to have a lot of trees in his backyard. Apparently he cut down about forty of them. That's forty trees that are, or were, sucking all the excess moisture out of the ground. Once the trees were cut down, all that water ran to the bottom of the hill and turned the footpath into a swamp. Before the trees were cut down, the footpath was always dry.

It's a common problem in areas where trees have been cleared, especially on hills. Where the trees used to draw the water up to the surface on the hill, that water now comes closer to the surface on lower ground, bringing with it salts from the under-lying rocks. The resulting salinity makes the land unusable, since nothing will grow in it.

I don't know about salinity in this particular case, the grass there is certainly loving the extra water. However, it was a good example of one of the things I learned about at uni in one of my ecology units.

Trees might spoil your view, drop their leaves in your gutter, get in the way of that swimming pool that you want in your backyard, but they're not just a source of timber, or a habitat for wildlife. They're more important than that.