Forty years ago this fall, moviegoers sat in a mix of terror and shock as they watched the final 20 minutes of John Carpenter’s original “Halloween” — during which the seemingly dead Michael Myers came back to life.
Not just once, but twice. And then again. Neither knitting needles nor his own butcher knife nor six bullets nor a fall from a second-floor balcony could stop Michael Myers from the swift completion of his appointed rounds.
If you were 12 years old and had slipped into a theater to see that R-rated masterpiece — as some of us might or might not have done — you had never seen anything like this reanimation of a villain.
Of course, resurrections like these would be repeated ad nausem over the ensuing generation of film, including in the eventual overstock of “Halloween” sequels and reboots, not to mention the “Friday the 13th” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” franchises.
By the time the garroted Alexander Godunov emerged from Nakatomi Plaza for the final kill of “Die Hard” ten years later, we had come to expect life after death for screen villains. At least Alan Rickman didn’t survive the 30-story fall, though we would not have put that past the filmmakers.
But even those of us who grew up watching Glenn Close spring out of the bathtub in “Fatal Attraction” have been surprised to see a miraculous resurrection playing out in real life and in the neighborhoods where we live: The rebirth of ash trees wiped out over the past 10 to 15 years by the emerald ash borer.
Surely you remember the EAB infestation. First reported in Michigan in 2002, the non-native species killed ash trees from the inside out, laying eggs that choke the flow of water and nutrients.
By the spring of 2006, the EAB invasion had killed an estimated 15 million trees across Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Ontario, Canada. A News-Sun story from May of that year reported that “Lake County Forest Preserve officials are warning that the county’s ash trees may be in peril if the destructive emerald ash borer beetle finds its way here.”
It found its way here, and the county’s ash trees started coming down by the thousands.
In Lake Forest — where the EAB was first detected in 2009 — 5,000 ash trees went on the chopping block. Waukegan officials estimated in 2014 that 4,000 ashes would eventually be cut down in the city limits. By 2016, Round Lake reported 1,500 ashes had to be removed from parkways alone. Public costs were in the six figures at communities all around the county.
Somewhere in the middle of all this slaughter, I noticed that our towering backyard ash tree, one of the tallest trees in a young subdivision, had tell-tale yellow leaves on its crown in the middle of summer. The EAB had taken hold, and two summers later, a handy neighbor came over with a chainsaw and cut it down, piece by sad piece.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral. I put the final task of stump removal on the list of future projects, which means it never took place. Then during our rainy spring of 2018, the ash tree came back from the dead — shoots of healthy green leaves began sprouting around the stump, eventually forming a bush about three to four feet tall.
It must be said that this bush looks acceptable from most angles. I wondered if it should be left in peace, perhaps to help repopulate the species after the EAB melts away.
The only problem, according to experts I contacted at the College of Lake County, is that leaving this stunted ash in peace will allow the EAB to continue thriving on our landscape.
“You do see a lot of sick ash trees re-sprouting after they have been felled,” CLC sustainability manager David Husemoller wrote via email. “The problem of nurturing along those nice green sprouts is that they will not keep that nice green bushy appearance. Those stems will want to form a multi-stemmed tree and once that tree is big enough the Emerald Ash Borer will strike again to kill it.
“It is sad to see those nice trees go, but at this point we don’t have any way to maintain them sustainably.”
In agreement was Rory Klick, associate professor and department chair of the CLC Horticulture Department.
According to Klick, CLC itself lost “at least 40-plus trees” around the main Grayslake campus, and “not all have been removed, so still more culling and replanting work to do.”
“While those ash trees that were cut down do re-sprout, as David noted, eventually the EAB will return to re-infest,” Klick added. “In time we will work to grind out those stumps and replace the previous ash trees with more diversified tree species.”
Klick stressed the importance of diversification of species, which will not only avoid losing so much of a landscape at one time but also to ensure survival of trees in general.
“Here at CLC we adopted the tree list from Morton Arboretum (and) have built that into our overall tree replacement strategy on campus,” Klick wrote. “In addition, we have over 300 species and cultivars of trees and shrubs in our campus teaching collection, so a great place to check out species that perform well (or don’t!) in our area.”
And so while some of us make plans to once again kill a tree that will not be killed easily, we close with a final observation from Klick about the ash tree, which appears to be even more like Michael Myers than we thought.
“I have noted that the blue ash, Fraxinus quadrangulata, while infested like the other Fraxinus species on campus, seems to be slow to succumb and is still fairly healthy,” Klick wrote. “It will be interesting to watch the specimen we have over the next few years to see what happens.”