Those pictures remind me, there was an oak tree in our neighorhood that had died many years earlier, but was still standing. The upper part of the trunk and the main branches were literally hollowed out. The tree was right in the middle of an intersection, about two blocks from my house, on a low-traffic street. It didn't bother me, but I always thought the branches were a menace to anyone living or walking nearby. The close neighbors loved that tree, so they said. Cynical me thought it was because the tree slowed down traffic and prevented big trucks from taking that street.
The punch line is that someone driving a delivery truck didn't get the message, or didn't share the love. One day the truck hit the tree and split off about 1/3 of the trunk and the biggest branch. There followed weeks of begging, pleading and petitioning by the neighbors for the city to save the (long-dead) tree, somehow prop it up, or just leave the shattered trunk in place, waiting for the next delivery truck. People got quite emotional about it. When that fell on deaf ears, they asked for a traffic circle in the middle of the intersection to slow down traffic. The city put in monitoring equipment and determined (as I already knew) that there was very little traffic at that intersection, as the connecting streets are too narrow. The city does do traffic abatement circles, but there's a long waiting list and there has to be a good reason.
That was a couple of years ago. For a while some of the neighbors put up a little memorial where the tree had been, but that ended when the city dug up the roots and repaved the intersection. Now it's just a memory. To be clear, the tree was not a rarety. Our neighborhood is full of trees of all kinds and sizes, including oak, redwood and pine, as well as bushes and hedges, and a mother deer who gives birth every spring like clockwork. Also a very secretive family of coyotes that are spotted once or twice a year for a few seconds, and take the occasional family cat.
