A Single Tree

There’s four within a five-mile radius of where I live—two in Woburn, one in Burlington, another in Stoneham—and now one at the end of my street. Storage facilities. Big, box-shaped buildings that have sprung up all over the Boston suburbs. Places to store your extra stuff. Perfect for a consumer-driven society that thrives on buying more stuff. Or for a transient society. Public Storage. Extra Space Storage. Simply Self Storage. The one at the end of my street doesn’t even have a name yet. But it’s big. Three stories high. A few hundred feet long. A hundred feet wide. It replaced a field and a forest and a rock ledge and whatever creatures lived there.

For years, I drove by and saw white pines, birches, sumac, golden rod, milkweed, asters. Then one morning, just dirt. Construction equipment. A vacant lot. Everything gone. Except for one lone quaking aspen tree. A dump truck, a backhoe, a porta potty, a forty-foot-long, ten-foot-high pile of gravel, a chain-link fence—and a single tree. As I watched the storage facility grow week after week, I wondered why they left the tree. How strange that they’d preserve a single piece of the forest they destroyed.

When I drove by last week, the aspen was gone, replaced by a row of landscaped shrubs. Now, the storage facility seems complete. 

Art information

• “Storage Facility Construction, 2014” (detail) © Don Lyman; used by permission.