A tree fell in the forest

A tree fell in the forest.
I know, because I was there. It happened today while I was walking on a trail in the woods. It was a very windy, gusty day, the perfect day for a bone-dry, sapless old tree to give up the long vigil and come down.
When the tree fell, did it make a sound? It did, but not the sound I might have expected. I heard a knocking, like someone rapping their knuckles against hollow wood, and then a thrashing as if something was bounding through the underbrush toward me, and when I turned to the source of the sound the first thing I saw was a white wound appearing about thirty feet up amid the leafless branches. It was the inner flesh of the tree appearing as the trunk split and the upper part of the tree toppled.
I was a few dozen yards away, so there was no danger to me but I jumped anyhow because of the noise (which at first, as I say, sounded like something – god knows what – charging at me through the bushes). And when I realized it was a tree falling, I immediately thought that this was human doing, that someone must be over there at the bottom of the fallen tree with a chainsaw, someone employed by the city or the parks service or whatever, whose job is to bring down old dead trees before they fall on someone's head and there's a lawsuit.
But there was nobody to be seen near the tree. And I hadn't heard a chainsaw. And it was a testament to how detached a city-dweller like me has gotten from the natural world that it took me a moment to realize the tree had actually fallen all on its own. Nature had done it without any help from her most interfering, restless creation, Homo sapiens. Do trees just up and fall in the forest? Well of course they do.
Okay, it wasn't exactly a forest, it was a few remaining acres of trees and boggy creek bottom on the south side of the city, criss-crossed by walking trails and surrounded by new subdivisions of big brand-new houses built right up to the rim of the creek valley. But it doesn't sound quite as resonant and momentous to say that a tree fell in the natural area. Yet funny to think that if I hadn't been there to hear it, the tree would have fallen like the proverbial tree in the forest, making or not making a sound, depending on one's philosophical leanings. And maybe that proverb itself is as dry and worn out as some of these old trees, metaphors left-over from an earlier time and just waiting to fall or be cleared away to make way for something that serves human desires better, newer metaphors based on technology and consumerism? Is that proverbial forest where the tree falls without anyone to hear it as endangered as the real forests of the world?