They Came to Cut Down Our Tree, Then We Discovered They Had the Wrong Address

The first thing the man from the city did was put a red sticker on our tree.

The second thing he did was tell me not to touch it.

I was standing in the doorway of our apartment building on Calle Maldonado in Montevideo, still holding half a piece of toast, when he pointed at the jacaranda outside and said, The crew will be here tomorrow morning.

Tomorrow?

Yes.

I looked at the tree, then at him.

To do what?

Remove it.

That was how I found out that a tree could become a government problem overnight.

I had lived in that apartment with my sister Lucía for nearly four years. The building was old, the kind with narrow balconies, high ceilings and a front door that needed to be kicked gently near the bottom if it had rained. The jacaranda stood between the pavement and the street, leaning slightly toward our building.

In spring, its purple flowers made the whole block look better than it had any right to look. In summer, its branches gave us shade. In autumn, the pavement filled with leaves that stuck to everyone’s shoes.

Nobody loved cleaning them.

Everybody loved the shade.

That afternoon, I took a photo of the red sticker and sent it to Lucía.

She replied almost immediately.

Why is there a danger sticker on the tree?

I wrote back.

They are removing it tomorrow.

There was a long pause.

Then she sent a voice note.

Absolutely not.

That was the beginning.

By six o’clock, the entire building knew.

Doña Marta, who lived on the second floor and had complained about the tree for years, came downstairs wearing slippers and carrying her reading glasses in one hand.

Finally, she said.

Lucía stared at her.

Finally what?

Finally they are fixing it.

Fixing what?

Doña Marta pointed at the pavement.

The roots are breaking everything.

She was not wrong.

One section of the pavement had lifted enough to create a little ridge. People had tripped over it. The roots had also pushed against part of the building’s front wall, and after heavy rain, water sometimes appeared in the basement.

Still, I had never heard anyone say the tree itself was going to disappear.

Doña Marta shrugged.

I thought you knew.

That sentence stayed with me because nobody ever really knows anything when government departments are involved.

You know that someone sent an email.

You know someone submitted a form.

You know there is a number.

You know there is a person somewhere behind a screen.

What you do not know is which person.

The next morning, I called the Intendencia de Montevideo.

The first automated message lasted long enough for me to question every decision I had made since waking up.

When someone finally answered, I explained the situation.

The tree has a red sticker on it, I said. Someone says it will be removed today.

The woman on the phone asked for the address.

I gave it.

She asked for the number on the sticker.

I gave her that too.

Then she said something that made me sit up.

According to our system, there is no removal scheduled for that address.

Sorry?

There is no removal scheduled.

I looked out the window.

The red sticker was still there.

Are you sure?

Yes.

Then why did a man from the city come yesterday and tell me they were removing the tree?

She sighed softly.

Perhaps it is another department.

I had no idea whether that was a real answer or the polite version of I have no idea.

She gave me another number.

That number gave me another number.

The third number sent me to an online form.

The online form asked me to log in.

The login system rejected my password.

I reset the password.

The new password was rejected because I had apparently used it before.

I had never used it before.

At this point, Lucía walked into the kitchen and found me staring at my phone.

How is the tree?

More powerful than me.

She laughed.

I did not.

At nine-thirty, I went outside.

A small municipal truck was already parked across the street.

Three workers stood beside it.

One had a chainsaw.

I immediately felt my stomach drop.

I walked over.

Excuse me. Are you here for this tree?

The oldest worker looked at the sticker.

Yes.

You are removing it?

That is the order.

I showed him the message from the city website saying no removal was scheduled.

He looked at my phone.

Then at me.

Then at the tree.

That happens.

What happens?

Different systems.

He said it so casually that I almost laughed.

Almost.

The worker with the chainsaw introduced himself as Pablo.

He told me the order was to remove the tree because its roots were damaging the sidewalk and possibly affecting underground pipes.

Is there no way to save it? I asked.

Pablo shrugged.

I only cut what is on the order.

There was something almost comforting about his honesty.

He was not pretending to know more than he did.

He was not trying to win an argument.

He had a list.

The tree was on the list.

That was enough.

I called Lucía.

Come downstairs.

Why?

Because they are actually here.

She arrived five minutes later wearing jeans, one shoe untied and the expression of someone who had been dragged into a problem before coffee.

Then Doña Marta came down too.

Then the man from apartment 3B.

Then a woman from the building next door.

Within fifteen minutes, six people were standing around the jacaranda giving opinions about municipal tree management.

Nobody had been invited.

Everybody had one.

The woman from next door said the tree’s roots had damaged her parked car.

Doña Marta said the tree was destroying the building.

The man from 3B said the tree was probably older than all of us and should be protected.

Lucía asked why the city would remove a healthy tree instead of fixing the pavement.

I asked the same question.

Nobody answered.

Then Pablo looked at the tree again.

It is not completely healthy.

We all went quiet.

He pointed toward the upper branches.

There were several dead sections.

I had never noticed them.

If there is a strong wind, some of this could come down, he said.

That changed the mood.

Suddenly, the argument was not tree versus people.

It was tree versus tree.

The beautiful parts we wanted to keep against the dangerous parts we had ignored.

Lucía folded her arms.

Can they prune it instead?

Pablo said, Maybe.

Maybe?

That decision is not mine.

I asked who made it.

He pointed toward the municipal truck.

The people who sent us.

There it was again.

The invisible people.

The people who existed somewhere beyond the street.

I called the city again.

This time, after explaining everything, I was told that the removal order could be reviewed if a resident believed the tree was salvageable.

There was a form.

Of course there was a form.

The problem was that the form had to be submitted before the removal began.

The removal was scheduled for that morning.

It was already that morning.

I explained this.

The woman on the phone said, You can still submit it, but I cannot guarantee that the crew will wait.

I looked at Pablo.

He was standing beside the chainsaw.

I asked him if he could wait.

He looked at the other workers.

Then he said, We can wait a little.

That little became twenty minutes.

Then forty.

Then nearly an hour.

The whole thing started to feel ridiculous.

I sat on the pavement outside the building with my laptop balanced on my knees, filling out a government form while three municipal workers stood beside a tree waiting for me to explain why the tree deserved another chance.

The form asked me to describe the problem.

I wrote that the roots were damaging the pavement.

Then it asked why I believed removal was unnecessary.

I wrote that the tree appeared mostly healthy.

Then it asked for photographs.

I took photographs.

Then it asked for the exact location.

I opened a map.

Then it asked for supporting documents.

I stared at the screen.

I had no supporting documents.

I had a tree.

That was all I had.

I submitted the form anyway.

A confirmation number appeared.

For some reason, seeing those digits made me feel like I had accomplished something.

Lucía sat beside me.

Do you think it worked?

No idea.

Very reassuring.

We waited.

Nothing happened.

Then a city inspector arrived on a motorcycle.

His name was Ramiro.

He walked around the tree slowly, looked at the roots, checked the pavement and examined the dead branches.

He asked who had requested the removal.

Nobody knew.

He asked who lived in the building.

We all pointed at one another.

Finally, Doña Marta stepped forward.

I complained about the roots.

Everyone turned toward her.

She looked embarrassed.

I did not ask them to kill it.

The inspector nodded.

That is an important difference.

He checked his tablet.

Then he frowned.

There is a problem.

Of course there was.

The original order was not actually for this tree.

The address was correct.

The tree number was not.

The order belonged to the jacaranda three doors away.

We all stared at him.

Pablo laughed first.

Then Lucía laughed.

Then I laughed too, because the alternative was screaming.

For almost three hours, we had been arguing about a tree that the city had never planned to remove.

The crew packed up.

The inspector apologized.

The red sticker, however, remained.

I asked him why.

He said it belonged to the other tree and had been placed on ours by mistake.

He promised someone would come back and correct it.

Nobody came that day.

Nobody came the next day either.

Three days later, Doña Marta taped a handwritten note to the sticker saying, This tree is innocent.

Someone added a smiley face underneath.

By the end of the week, the whole building had stopped talking about the mistake.

Except Lucía.

She kept checking the tree.

She even started watering it when the weather became dry.

I teased her about it.

You hated this tree last month.

She shook her head.

I hated the roots.

That was different.

The city eventually repaired part of the pavement. The tree stayed. The dead branches were trimmed, the damaged section was cleaned up, and the red sticker disappeared sometime in the middle of the night.

Nobody announced it.

Nobody sent an email.

One morning, it was simply gone.

A few weeks later, I was walking home along Calle Maldonado when I saw Doña Marta standing beneath the jacaranda with a shopping bag in one hand.

She looked up at the branches.

You know, she said, I am glad we kept it.

I looked at the pavement.

The roots were still pushing upward.

Even with the pavement?

She smiled.

The pavement can be fixed.

Then she walked away.

I stood there for a moment, looking at the tree, the cracked sidewalk and the apartment windows above us.

The funny thing about government is that sometimes you spend a whole day fighting the system only to discover the system was fighting itself.

The tree was never the problem.

The problem was that nobody had stopped long enough to check which tree they were cutting down.

Three weeks later, the jacaranda was gone.

It happened early on a Thursday morning, before most people in the building had finished their coffee. I woke to the sound of a chainsaw and ran downstairs, still in my house clothes, only to see the same municipal truck parked outside.

Lucía was already there.

They came back, she said.

The order had finally been corrected. The tree was no longer listed under the wrong address, and the inspection had found that the damaged roots were worse than we had first thought. The pavement needed to be dug up, part of the drainage line needed work, and the city said the cost of trying to preserve the tree would be far higher than removing it and replacing it with a younger one.

This time, nobody had a form to fill out.

Nobody had a wrong number to call.

The chainsaw started.

Doña Marta stood across the street with her arms folded. She watched the first large branch fall and said nothing.

The workers took most of the morning. Purple flowers scattered across the pavement as the branches came down, and for a while the street smelled of fresh wood.

I kept thinking about the day we had all fought to save it.

The arguments.

The paperwork.

The photographs.

The inspector’s tablet.

The ridiculous amount of time we had spent trying to prove that one tree deserved another chance.

When the final section of the trunk came down, Lucía looked at me.

Was it worth it?

I did not know what to say.

The pavement around the old tree was repaired two weeks later. The drainage problem was fixed. The building stopped getting water in the basement after heavy rain, and the city planted a much smaller tree nearby.

Doña Marta was pleased.

Look at the pavement now, she said one afternoon. No more roots lifting everything.

Lucía disagreed.

They could have tried to save it.

Doña Marta looked at the empty patch where the jacaranda had stood.

With whose money?

That stopped the conversation.

Nobody in the building was wealthy enough to answer that question comfortably.

The people who wanted the tree saved had imagined shade, flowers and another twenty years of life. The people who wanted it removed had imagined repair bills, damaged pipes and someone getting hurt when a branch finally broke.

Both sides had something real to point at.

A month later, the new tree looked almost lost beside the old buildings.

It was thin enough to need a support frame.

Lucía watered it anyway.

Doña Marta walked past without looking at it.

I still sometimes catch myself searching for the old jacaranda when I turn onto Calle Maldonado. For half a second, I expect to see the branches hanging over the pavement and purple flowers scattered under people’s shoes.

Then I remember.

The tree was gone.

The sidewalk was fixed.

The neighbors still disagree about whether saving it would have been worth the money.

Nobody has managed to settle that argument, and maybe nobody ever will.

Some things can be repaired after they are cut down, but they never grow back in quite the same place.