Black Cottonwood
I moved into Track in February of 2017. It was a cold February, snow on the ground after a surprise late winter snowfall. I remember coming into the house to see Micah there in the kitchen, bulkily dressed in outdoor winter attire, chopping vegetables in the frigid cold looking like someone prepared for a day on a ski slope.
Winter turned to spring and spring into summer. The house had a wood stove I was determined to make use of, no more cold winters on my watch. So I set to gathering and preparing as much free wood as I could, accumulating a pile in the driveway to saw, chop, and stack along the fence-line. I have a distinct memory of one particular sunny evening chopping wood beside the house. There was a man walking down the street who stopped on the sidewalk behind me, rambling in my direction, "I think that's a cottonwood tree.. that's a cottonwood tree right?". I turned half way around, feeling interrupted from my work. "I'm not sure." I said. Staring up at the tree he continued on, "I think it is a cottonwood tree, ya know they only grow where a river once ran, right? They only grow in places where a river goes from and comes back to over the years". I turned around fully, "I didn't know that, like where a river diverts and comes back to eventually?". "Yup" he said, "Ya know that means the river will come back here some day right?"
The cottonwood tree is wildly massive, standing well above the two story house beside it. The specific species of this tree is black cottonwood, next to our black house. Unhingedly huge in the middle of a downtown block, it felt like nature's living obelisk in memoriam to the world it came from, but simultaneously standing in total opposition to the industrial constructions around it. It would rain sap and pollen down on the cars parked near it in the spring and in the fall dump its hundreds of pounds of foliage into our driveway and onto the auto body supply shop's parking lot beside it. The landscaper the auto-body shop hired hated that tree, hacking back at its limbs which continually reached over the fence and blowing its leaves into an angry pile in front of our driveway. The cottonwood tree arises just north of a swampier area of the yard. In the southern portion of the property boundaried by parking lot and railroad tracks is a murky muddy marsh with cattails and seasonal puddles of polluted murk. I have read that when the house was originally constructed, it was near the shore of the estuary, built on stilts over marshland before back-fill turned downtown into a paved gravestone for the environment that once was. I always understood that this little chunk of marsh, confined into a triangular corner of the property, was likely the last living vestige of the original landscape of downtown. I believe that those cattails and that cottonwood tree were descended of cottonwood and cattail which had lived in that very same area before this modern era destroyed nearly everything which had stood there before.
Cottonwood trees send runners underground, especially when there are external or internal stressors. These root-like runners emerge from the surface where they find water. A sapling known as a sucker forms a new tree nursed to life by its parent. Over the years the runners from our tree began to snake around and encircle the house, the leaky and clogged gutters pouring water over their sides showing the tree a path to follow. These little suckers rose up like many fingers around the house, as if the tree was reaching up out of the swamp to pull the house back down into it. And it was working diligently to this end, one giant root in particular in the southeast corner of the house, probably more than 12 inches in diameter, had begun to creep under the foundation forming a crack as it began its slow work of lifting the house up entirely. I thought about addressing it, but part of me felt it was destined to do its work. Time for a tree is much slower than the timeline we exist on as humans. Despite their seemingly static nature they are always moving and working with intent. Outside of my bedroom window, on that same southeast corner during my first spring in residence, I watched over the course of a few days as one such sucker blossomed with new leaves. At most an inch wide at its base and perhaps 6 feet tall with other smaller suckers around it, it was a joyful sign of spring to see the barren twiggy forms outside my window explode with bright green growth. That particular little sucker thrived. Over the course of my nearly 5 years there I watched it grow from barely over my head to reaching above the roof-line. One spring, it experienced a growth spurt some young cottonwoods go through where over the course of the season it seemed to double in height, shooting up with jubilant enthusiasm. Its leaves swelled to triple the size of your average cottonwood leaf so it could lap up every drop of sun available to it.
The day of the fire, Damien Aerin and I stopped by at night after everyone had left. That block and intersection of 7th and Jefferson has always felt like a lawless zone, especially after dusk when the chaotic energy of the area seemed to increase into a frenzy. Lawless in the sense of the laws of the state but also in the sense of the laws of reality itself. Reality feels warped in that place, an energy sinkhole where the roads, the tracks, ordered society and an older form of existence converge. In ways the freeness of the ‘scape could be freeing to the individual, and being back there that night I felt that none of that energy was lost. It is a purely chaotic energy, and its freeing of form brought at times joy filled beauty, and in other times darkness, pain and destruction. The house stood still, smoldering. I looked up through the same upstairs window I remember looking out of the first night I slept there. In that cold February of 2017, The streets were still patchy with snow, and Loon had spray-painted a message in cursive on the warehouse across the street. "I think yr gr8! <3". Now I looked from the street up into what had become an empty window frame, seeing the night sky behind it as the roof and interior walls were entirely gone. I looked to the left searching for that little sucker I remember by my downstairs bedroom window, curious if it had been left standing as it grew so vigorously only a few feet from the house. I was taken aback to realize it had grown into an entire mature tree, rivaling even its parent tree in height, standing well above the house with a trunk nearly two feet wide at its base. It was working diligently to reconstruct the forest it remembers was there and knows will be there again some day. As we observed the house, a man approached. "Aye yo glad everybody is alright!" said the man in a rough voice. "Rizzy is that you?" Damien replied, they proceeded to greet warmly and talk. Aerin and I ventured around the side of the house. The yard was flooded, deep puddles everywhere. It was partially runoff from the fire hoses, but they had also neglected to shut off the water meter to the house. I could hear water spurting out uncontrolled in the bathroom at the south side of the house, the marsh in the back shimmering in the street lights completely flooded with this water. Standing there for a moment hearing the water drip sizzle and gush out into the yard, It seemed like for tonight at least the river had returned.
