He died in a tree at the end of our street. I didn’t know his name, but I learned of his death on my evening walk, when the air still carried the scent of grass clip­pings and over­heat­ed lawn­mow­ers. One of my neigh­bors accus­tomed to seeing me on my usual loop ran out to catch me before I reached the inter­sec­tion, where a police car blocked traffic. 

“Hey, you might not have heard; a guy died next door. A tree trimmer, up on that tree.”

My gaze fol­lowed his finger up the trunk to the feath­ery leaves that seemed tall enough to catch the clouds. 

“Did he fall?” I asked. 

He shrugged. “I was around the corner when it happened—there was a loud crack, then the man started moaning.” 

Sky­dusters. That’s what people call the tall Mexican fan palms in Los Angeles. I look up at the six giants at the end of our street. I don’t under­stand why they grow so high. They’re not com­pet­ing for sun­light among the other trees. Maybe they enjoy tow­er­ing above our world. 

The lower fronds die, but instead of falling to the ground, most remain hanging from the tree. Grad­u­al­ly, the dead leaves accu­mu­late and form a skirt like a hula dancer might wear. But the fronds can unex­pect­ed­ly come down, landing on someone’s head or denting the hood of a car. Many of these trees grow too tall to be trimmed with a ladder. It’s the spe­cial­ized tree trimmer, who will scale the trunk, crawl under the skirt, and slowly cut away at the leaves until the cover is gone. 

They call trim­ming a palm “skin­ning.” They call the cut marks on the trunk “scars.” 

“Here.” My neigh­bor held out his cell phone. The photo was mostly a cutout of blue sky, but I made out the back of a man’s head and his torso in the bottom right corner. My hand flew to my heart. If I had to guess, my neigh­bor had not wanted to be seen doc­u­ment­ing the tragedy, so he must have taken the shot dis­creet­ly, result­ing in the odd angle. What was clear was the man was hanging upside down, and from the limp­ness of his limbs, he seemed lifeless.

I left my neigh­bor and con­tin­ued on my walk, passing the home with the homi­ci­dal tree. The home­own­ers were out in the street, scur­ry­ing to clear fronds from the road. They stacked them in a pile in their front yard. I came across a frond and attempt­ed to lift it. At first glance, it looked light—like a dried-out piece of wood—but my wrist bent awk­ward­ly. I put my back under it, like hefting a sleep­ing man’s leg. The man who owned the palm rushed forward to take it from me, his eyes avoid­ing mine. The woman, too, turned away, not wanting to engage in con­ver­sa­tion. I stepped over and around the remain­ing limbs, leaving the couple to their cleanup. 

In the Tor­rance neigh­bor­hood where my husband and I live, a part of Los Angeles County, many home­own­ers hire labor­ers to do their yard work. I often watch the trucks pull up in front of homes. Lawn mowers and leaf blowers are unloaded, and soon the noise begins. The blowers push leaves and dust into the street. I would not mind paying for land­scap­ing, but my husband insists on doing it himself, which means our yard has slowly devolved into a patch­work of crab grass and weeds. An entire economy is sus­tained from yard work, a whole stratum of people buoyed by the finances of home­own­ers, like us, who don’t know how to keep a lawn. 

I should help my husband in our yard. I’m Fil­ip­ina. My ances­tors came to the U.S. via the Hawai­ian Islands to work on the sugar and pineap­ple plan­ta­tions. I did my share of farming and gar­den­ing as I was growing up. My family never hired a guy—not to pull our weeds or fix things around our house. My father and brother always did the work themselves. 

My father might have been a good tree trimmer. I’d seen him quickly scale a moun­tain apple tree and toss down the del­i­cate fruit for us to eat. 

In the weeks that fol­lowed the tree trimmer’s death, my neigh­bors moved on. They left for work and returned home; they no longer spoke of the death on our street. They talked about the weather and traffic and spring break. 

But I couldn’t shake the image of the man hanging from the tree. His world, upside down: the dry hills and black pave­ment became the wide expanse above his head, and the blue sky, the floor of heaven upon which he might fall. 

Maybe in his last moments, he thought of his family—his wife, how he didn’t want to wake her that morning, so he did not say goodbye. He might have also recalled his children’s laugh­ter the night before, coming from other rooms in the house, or maybe he thought of the man below, the one who exclaimed as he started up the trunk, “I don’t know how you can do it.” Many other men had made similar remarks, awed at the height and how the top of the tree swayed in the slight­est wind.

I don’t know much about tree trim­ming, although I come from a long line of land­scape artists in Hawai’i. My father trimmed the mock-orange hedges in our blue-collar sub­di­vi­sion. Those hedges helped to block people’s view of our rundown house. 

All his life my father worked at the nearby country club, so he was good at sculpt­ing nature into a con­trolled and man­i­cured beauty that tourists enjoyed. On the week­ends, he did odd jobs for extra money. Once, he helped a wealthy man design a short fairway and putting green in his back­yard. As a family, we worked on the coffee and macadamia nut farms togeth­er. But when I bellied up to the border of the neatly lined trees, I could peer over a stone wall to a trop­i­cal forest that found its own order; ‘Ohi’a lehua and Acacia koa dom­i­nat­ed the canopy, shrubs huddled in the middle layer, and hapu’u fern scat­tered across the floor. 

My own brother learned to farm and land­scape from our father. When he was in his twen­ties, he began working on a san­dal­wood farm where they dis­tilled fra­grant oil from wood­chips culled from the heart between their barks. Within ten years, my brother had worked his way up to foreman and was invited to Wash­ing­ton to teach stu­dents about sus­tain­able san­dal­wood farming. But he never made it to that class­room. He hurt his back and got hooked on painkillers, then meth. Now, he’s living as a home­less man in the bushes of the Big Island. 

On my next walk, I stopped at the palm. A small memo­r­i­al had formed at its base with flowers, candles, and notes. I looked up at the tree and imag­ined the tree trimmer cutting a frond that caused a domino effect, the entire skirt col­laps­ing and sliding down, pinning him beneath.

Maybe he coughed from the dust raining down from the dried leaves. The backs of his gloved hands might have touched the rough, scarred bark, but at that awkward angle, he couldn’t grab hold and pull himself up, espe­cial­ly with the weight of the skirt on his torso.

As he wheezed beneath the burden on his chest, maybe images of his tree-trim­ming brethren flashed before him. Over the years, he might have heard how others in his pro­fes­sion had gone. Not far from here in Palos Verdes, a trimmer inad­ver­tent­ly touched a live wire. The result­ing power outage cut elec­tric­i­ty to thou­sands of homes. Another fell into a wood­chip­per, pro­nounced dead by the time the author­i­ties arrived. 

Stand­ing at the foot of the palm, I can’t imagine the tree trimmer antic­i­pat­ed such a fate. The notes around the trunk, mixed with flowers, expressed love for their “Tio Beto.” Maybe this man, like my own father and brother, pushed away any thought of danger, knowing his family relied on his earnings.

In the weeks that fol­lowed, I spent time search­ing the Inter­net for a news report on the tree trimmer’s death. I wanted assur­ance that this man’s life mat­tered, that someone cared to doc­u­ment his passing and rec­og­nize the dignity of his work. 

I found a video. A cam­era­man must have been present and posted footage online—not of the tree trimmer’s body but of the scene on our street. In it, the tree trimmer’s wife arrives. She’s off-screen, but I could hear her— the emotion in her scream is some­thing every­one on the street rec­og­nizes. They stop what they’re doing and instinc­tive­ly turn in her direc­tion, then their eyes drop to the ground. Only some­thing as big and old as the earth could hold that grief. 

I imagine the tree trimmer’s spirit still lin­ger­ing nearby. Perhaps upon hearing his wife’s cries, he yearned to comfort her. I played the video over and over.

It was the firemen who fin­ished the tree trimmer’s job. The man might have wished he’d had their tools and method in the first place. They had two long ladders. Two men worked in unison to lift and cut the fronds away from his body. The leaves came down like huge beige snowflakes.

My father has been dead almost a year to the day. He died from lung cancer. The oncol­o­gist said the dust, debris, and fiber­glass par­ti­cles that spun up in the main­te­nance shop where he worked con­tributed to his con­di­tion. Two men I loved endured dan­ger­ous occu­pa­tions that laid waste to their bodies, but they kept our family fed. I think about the well-man­i­cured land­scapes that remain from their labors, so lovely they could take your breath away.