JOHN H. WALKER

Editor/Publisher

We're fighting the battle of falling tree limbs - and worse - at our house these days. The latest batch of wood to fall to the ground is from our Thursday morning storm a couple of months ago.

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One day last week I was home for lunch and heard this great "thud" out towards neighbor Ken's house. When I left to return to work, Ken and one of his sons were in the yard and checking out a great limb that had crashed to the ground.

Now, we're watching the top of what I call my "FEMA tree." It's a tree in the back yard that I had marked with a blue "C" back in the days post-Katrina when someone was saying to mark the trees you wanted cut with a blue "C" and FEMA would take them down.

They didn't.

They did cut and take down some pretty scary limbs, but they left the one alone I was hoping to see go away.

Now, there are two huge limbs in the top that are laying pretty precariously and other with a crack in it big enough to push a baseball bat through. So we're looking at our options, which include getting out the bad limbs or just taking down the tree.

After living in West Texas for more than 25 years, I can tell you the decision to cut a tree is not one that comes easy - or without much angst.

Yes, there are trees in West Texas - all varieties - but they are generally smaller because of the lack of rainfall, which ranges from 12-18 inches per year, depending on where you live.

In the Monahans area, which is near the point where New Mexico cradles in to Texas, is one of the largest oak forests in the nation, stretching over 40,000 acres of arid land. The "forest" is not apparent because the Harvard oaks are seldom over three feet high, yet they send down roots as far as 90 feet to find water and maintain miniature surface growth.

Down around Fort Davis, there are beautiful evergreen growths on the mountains, but nothing like our Southern pine forests ... and of course, we have nothing around here to compare to the mesquite or salt cedar.

While a tree, a salt cedar is truly a pest - much like kudzu - in that it was thought it would help control wind erosion but instead, because of its thirst for water, it helps keep everything dry. A single large salt cedar can use up to 200 gallons of water a day, which helps explain the large number of dry creek beds from the combination of an arid region and a aggressive invader that sucks up what water is available.

The bottom line on our "FEMA tree" will be the economics of it all ... will it be cheaper to take it down and haul it away or put a new roof (or more) on the northeast corner of our house.

I think we all know the answer to that, which means its days are numbered.

(John H. Walker is editor and publisher of The Daily News. He can be reached at 732-2565 or john.walker@wickcommunications.com.)