news story / By Heidi Walters

McKinleyville’s To Be Tree

An old outdoorsman fights to save the last of Central Avenue’s heritage cypress trees

(Oct. 29, 2009)  Aaron Libow has lived at the bottom of the dip in Central Avenue, north of the Highway 101 offramp, for most of the past 38 years. From his half-acre, he’s watched the town’s main bisector go from canopied-over country road to strip mall-lined thoroughfare. He’s watched the old Monterey cypress trees that formed the canopy be ripped out one by one for progress, from Murray Road to School Road and beyond. He fought to save most of those old trees, and lost, until there was just one of them remaining.

That one — close to a hundred years old, three-trunked, massive and graceful, and flanked by clunky giant yellow crash barrels — fronts Libow’s place on Central Avenue. And recently Libow — 68, woolly bearded, burly — was in a lather because he was certain the old tree was in danger of being pruned to the quick, and likely killed, by tree-trimmers hired by Pacific Gas & Electric.

The last of the Heritage Monterey Cypress trees on Central Avenue in McKinleyville. Photo by Heidi Walters

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Libow is no enviro-treesitter, mind you. Not like those kids who climbed into redwoods back in the day and sometimes got pulled from them by hired climbers such as the famous/infamous Eric Schatz.

Aaron Libow hunts and fishes. He and his four brothers have a welding shop down in Southern California where, among other things, they’ve made stuff for Disneyland’s light parade and special effects. He moved to Humboldt from Los Angeles in 1970 to study fisheries at Humboldt State University and ended up as a commercial fisherman.

In his giant barn-like shop, he welds and fixes anything you can think to bring in. He collects kitchen knives and makes his own lox and sausage and steaks. He grows his own vegetables — this year in a boat, to flummox the gophers — and he rarely steps across the street to the shopping center for grocery items at Ray’s.

And, in fact, Libow is good friends with Schatz, that gray-mustachioed professional arborist of treesitter-extraction notoriety. Last Thursday, the two sat in Libow’s kitchen talking about the fight to save the old cypress. Libow had taken a break from fixing an old wood stove and come inside to fry up some sausage patties he and a friend had made from a deer he shot recently in Eastern Oregon.

“A lot of activity goes on in here,” said Schatz, who’d doffed his broad-brimmed straw hat. “There’s a constant flow of people through here — Aaron’s personality’s like a people magnet, everybody loves him and he’s got 10,000 friends.”

The kitchen grew warm and spicy. Libow talked about the old tree fights and how he’d already saved the last cypress once before. Officials wanted to cut it down, saying it was a traffic hazard. He convinced them it wasn’t. That’s when the yellow crash barrels went up.

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