Tree Story

My cottonwood tree has transitioned from male to female. For twenty years it was happy to be a male, as were we with it being a male, as female cottonwoods drop that eponymous stuff every June all over everything, like snow falling in January.

We were OK with the cottonwoods down by the river doing their thing, far enough away to be kind of pretty rather than annoying. But our transgendered cottonwood sits in our front yard, where we planted it 22 years ago as a cotton-less cottonwood, or male, to shade what would become our beautiful courtyard full of flowers, bushes, and grass. It quickly grew to enormous size, as tall as our two-story, 30-foot tall house. And never once did it shed cotton, because, after all it is/was a male. 

When it began raining down its cotton this year I of course went to the Internet to try to figure this out. I found out that nurseries sometimes make mistakes in their gender classification, but the fact that our tree never released cotton for 20 years seems to negate that possibility. Sometimes, female trees take a few years to produce cotton, leading you to believe you have a male instead. A “few years” does not translate to 20 years.

Like so many other places across the world, New Mexico has had an unusual spring and early summer: it’s been raining. Ordinarily, after a few April showers things dry up, warm weather descends, and by the beginning of June it often reaches 100 degrees in Albuquerque. This year, in typically 10 degrees cooler El Valle, I was dressed in wool socks, long pants, and a jacket until about two weeks ago, when temperatures finally reached near normal and the rains abated, at least a little (this is not a complaint, but a celebration). So one could surmise that maybe all the rain and cool temperatures caused the cotton release. Except that MALE COTTONWOODS DO NOT PRODUCE COTTON.

What has my transgendered tree wrought? Well, the largest, most beautiful columbines I’ve ever grown—definitely the product of rain and cool temperatures—are coated with cotton that makes them droop and moan. My green grass is blotted white. Cobwebs of cotton fill every nook and cranny of window casings and doorways. Every time I open a door, cotton blows in to cling to anything soft, particularly the rugs. My dogs make sure it gets distributed upstairs where they join me at night. 

Yesterday a quick rainstorm, with lots of wind, blew through El Valle dropping what I fervently hope is the last of the cotton. I raked up as much as I could from the yard but the columbines took a beating. It kind of reminds me of what’s happening in the transgender world of people. Seems to me that all that fury and disdain dumped on the feminists who created beauty out of hard work and growth, much like my columbines, just clogs the relational paths that we all share

Pilgrim and Waldo on the Appalachian Trail

On the one hand, you have Bill Bryson, the out of shape middle-aged journalist (and his even more out of shape friend Stephen Katz) failing, over many months, to hike the entire 2,100 miles of the Appalachian Trail but giving us a marvelously funny book full of historical, naturalist, and intellectual ruminations in A Walk in the Woods. On the other hand, you have ultrarunner Scott Jurek’s Instagram postings of an ultra fit man running up and down the trail in his attempt to speed through the entire route in 42 days.

In the middle, you have the 2015 hikers who started out in Georgia in April and are in fine form at the beginning of June in Virginia. That’s where I saw almost 50 of them on the Appalachian Trail near Roanoke, day hiking my measly 9 miles. I wonder what form they’ll be in when they reach Maine in September.

They’re called “thru hikers,” but they also give themselves trail names. The first one we met (I was visiting my friends Elaine and Richard, former Taoseños, now Roanoke residents) was Pilgrim. A German, he looked like he’d just stepped out of an outdoor catalog: polypropylene matching shorts and shirt; Osprey mid-weight backpack; state of the art accordion pad for sitting and sleeping; telescoping hiking poles; mid-weight boots. He told us his basic pack weighted just 20 pounds and he carried 10 pounds of food. A slim, trim, hiking machine.

A thru hiker outfitted in the ubiquitous gear

A young woman—the vast majority of them are millennials—soon came up and bumped him with a “What up?” They weren’t exactly friends—both started out alone and only occasionally hiked together—but as thru hikers they were bonded. They all are, I guess. It helps that they have to share the shelters and campsites spread out over the course of the trail, but affinities are found or formed over the endless days of 10 to 20 miles hikes.

When we reached the overlook at lunch, there were about 10 of them resting on the rocks eating their high energy fare. Soon the sweet smell of pot wafted over us as they broke out the dope. I think I’d be tempted to bring along some stronger stimulants as well, but they seemed very happy with weed as they chatted away during their brief respite.

We met many more coming up the trail as we headed down after lunch. While the gear was identical—Osprey packs with rain covers, hiking poles, etc.—the bodies and apparel weren’t. There was the man with the full Paul Bunyan beard with his tank top/short shorts partner. There was the shirtless man with the wraparound headdress. There was the woman with the umbrella and her backpack-carrying dog (it started to rain but no one wore a raincoat as it was too hot). When we stopped to chat with Waldo, the young man who informed us that he usually hiked 19 or so miles a day but stopped when his body told him to, I asked him why everyone carried the same brand backpack, figuring there was an online promotion of said Osprey. But no, he said, everyone shops at REI where brand Osprey rules.

To someone from the west—me—it was all a bit claustrophobic. The ubiquitous deciduous forests (full of blooming rhododendron) were lush and thick, but without the diversity of terrain and ancient feel of the mixed conifer western forests I’m used to, and with the crowd of thru hikers (albeit they were congregated in Virginia because of the season), it felt a little redundant. Here’s Bryson’s description of the same forest I walked in Virginia:

“So the forest through which Katz and I now passed was nothing like the forest that was known even to people of my father’s generation, but at least it was a forest. It was splendid in any case to be enveloped once more in our familiar surroundings. It was in every detectable respect the same forest we had left in North Carolina—same violently slanted trees, same narrow brown path, same expansive silence, broken only by our tiny grunts and labored breaths as we struggled up hills that proved to be as steep, if not quite as lofty, as those we had left behind.”

The word that is often used to describe the Appalachian Trail environment is pastoral. There’s nothing wrong with pastoral: in other essays I’ve quoted Bryson in his eloquent defense of the mix of wild/domestic terrain that characterizes the trail, as one leaves and enters civilization along the route. I don’t buy into the lament that to have wilderness one must exclude people, the cry of the deep ecologist. 

Pilgrim, communing with nature

I guess it’s just what you’re used to. The operative words in Bryson’s quote are “at least it was a forest.” During our conversation with Pilgrim, he mentioned he’d hiked the Camino de Santiago from the French border through the Pyrenees Mountains of Spain (everyone is Pilgrim there). We questioned him about details: one only has to carry a daypack, with hostels, hotels, and cafes at every night stop along the way. He called it a “cultural hike.” So take your pick: a pastoral hike along the Appalachian Trail (but with plenty of hard work); a wild hike along the Continental Divide Trail; or a cultural hike along the Camino de Santiago. I’ll take them all—as long as I’m not trying to do any of them in 42 days.