A tree from a boy’s dream

 

The cabin was on a good slope and the slope fell down to the wild mint growing this side of the rocks at the lake shore. Down at the lake, though, it rarely smelled of mint but smelled of huge dead and bloated carp that would wash up here and there throughout the summer, and as my childhood progressed there were more carp, and where there was once weeds and clear water for the sunfish to live happily, as I grew up the carp took over and the weeds disappeared and then it was a lake where the algae bloomed from all the nitrogen runoff from the cabingoers’ lawns and flowerbeds and gardens, so the smell became unclean lake water smelling very strongly, and when I was still young I stopped seeing sunfish entirely.

Down at the lake grew a giant cottonwood tree, a tree from a boy’s dream, with one very strong, very long limb running horizontally over the mint and rocks, and the crown massive like an oak in the mist. And although it was a granddaddy cottonwood even when I was a kid, it lived on another 30 years, and had it not been cut down then to improve the lake view I think it would be alive still.

One or two paper birch had come up at the shore and my grandfather had encouraged them, staking them as necessary and mowing carefully around them and telling me not to peel the bark when it started to grow white. And there was a maple; I remember it was a maple because it dropped helicopters. Do you remember peeling the wings of the helicopters to reveal the moist, hard, green seeds? I do not remember what kind of maple it was; I have such a tumble of maples in my head. Maybe a silver (there was an old, old silver maple along our driveway in the city where my father would park his truck in the evening). That was many years ago, and I have too many trees in general in my head.

Up the big slope were the old elms reaching into the sky with the roots holding the slope and soil and cabin up. There was my grandfather’s mountain ash where every morning he dumped his coffee grounds as fertilizer and the tree was very lush and green and orange, and on the trunk, he hung orange halves for the Baltimore orioles.

The cabin was heavily renovated one year and my grandfather and I had to stay in the camper topper that summer. And at the same time the big slope down and up top of the slope and the shore of the lake were heavily landscaped.

And then the year after the renovating all of the elms began to die of the Dutch Elm Disease. That deserves capitalization. Do you remember the thin years of Dutch Elm Disease?

So, my grandfather with his McCulloch chainsaw went to work bringing down the four, five, six elms, and at one time there were elms crisscrossing the new lawn in the new landscaping, long logs, big rounds and mats of sawdust with the big saw chips from his McCulloch. My job was to roll the rounds around and stop them from rolling down the slope to the lake, and to drag the dead branches up the slope into the woods to make brush piles for the rabbits to warren. And that was that summer with the mint and carp and less and less sunnies.

The next year we started in on the four or five or six elm tree stumps on the big slope, which were an eyesore apparently and whose roots were exposed and made mowing hell for the lawnmower and for me, the mower.

On, for example, a large tree stump of, say, two-foot diameter, we’d start digging with the spade shovels in a radius around the center of the stump of two to three feet. The soil was sod, and if we came to a smaller root, we’d cut it with a pickaxe. A larger root we’d cut with the felling axe. All the while digging down, and then you were into clay. Sometimes it was my Uncle Bill with us, and sometimes my Uncle Matt. Always it was me with my grandfather. Not talking, and that I learned from him. Occasionally I would talk, but mostly that was talking to myself, which I learned from myself by being with him.

Before we took breaks or finished for the day, we’d take the hose to the root ball and use the pressure from the nozzle to erode around the big roots and the rocks and boulders and most importantly try to erode around the tap root. The water would draw, mostly, slowly, and the whole job at this point was muddy. I wore my tennis shoes from two school years’ before and cutoff jeans and a white T-shirt, and all the work inside the muddy holes was done by me. At the end of the day my grandmother let me wade into the lake and bathe wearing my cutoffs and tee and tennis shoes, and she’d hang them to dry for the next day.

Eventually there’d be a big stump in a wide, deep, muddy hole with big roots cut away and maybe the stump would budge almost imperceptibly and then, first, we’d get an angle on the deepest root, and score it as best we could, and finally lean into it with as many men as on hand, usually one and a half or 2-1/2 or 3-1/2. And it would crack and be free.

Last summer’s beaver dam was blown out by the high-water event on the Flute Reed last fall. So now I’m able to walk out to the narrow island in the beaver floodplain. Gee, if there isn’t an elm – an adult elm, young still, still alive – out there starting to reach for the sky.

And growing just under it, along the creek, in tall grass in sandy, gravelly soil, a wild asparagus.

Do not know for whom the wild asparagus grows. It grows for thee.