The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [117]
My mother can remember when most of the trees on our street, and in the town itself, were mere saplings. My husband and I had to take down a lovely cottonwood a few years ago—it was crowding a basement wall—and a neighbor came by to mourn with us. He was five years old when that tree was planted; he’s now in his seventies. It was strange to think that we were erasing a part of his childhood. My husband says that destroying that tree still makes him sad, that he imagined it to be like killing an elephant, something larger, wiser, and more mysterious than himself. I miss the tree for the marvelous play of light and shade it made on our kitchen windows in the late afternoon.
But it’s folly to miss trees here, where as one friend says, out of a hundred things that can happen to a tree, ninety-nine of them are bad. A lengthy drought in the 1980s killed off many of the aging shelter belts around farm houses, as well as windbreaks in cropland that were first planted, with government assistance, in the 1930s. Though it’s been a good conservation practice, I doubt that there will be money available to replant them. Like so many human institutions of the western plains, these rows of trees will simply fade away.
Even the monks at a nearby monastery, who have planted and tended trees here for nearly a hundred years, tend to be fatalistic about it. They work hard—one monk I know says that in his nineteen years at the monastery he’s planted nearly a hundred trees—and on hot summer days it’s a common sight to see a monk on a small tractor hauling a home-rigged tank that holds 1300 gallons to water trees in the cemetery, the orchard, the western ridge. But the monks also know that to care for a tree in western Dakota is to transcend work; it becomes a form of prayer, or as St. Paul said, a “hope in things unseen.” Maybe that’s why they’re so good at it, so persistent in their efforts.
I marvel at the fecundity of a crabapple tree that my grandmother planted at the north edge of our backyard that has drawn four generations of children to its branches and tart, rosy fruit. I worry about the two elms just south of the garden plot, weakened by drought and then disease. Will we have the energy, the hope, to replace them? Maybe with cottonwoods, the Siouxland variety developed for this harsh climate. But most of all, when I dream of trees here, when I visit them, they are the trees out in the open, trees I can take no responsibility for but consider to be my friends.
One of my favorites stands at the edge of a large pasture on the outskirts of Mandan, North Dakota. A young, small tree—what kind I don’t even know, but from the highway it looks like a burr oak—nudges a fence, its branches straddling the barbed wire. There it has persisted for God knows how long with one half of it in vigorous leaf, the other rubbed bare by cattle. There are no other trees in that pasture. This tree, like a tough little juniper that emerges from the lodgepole pines of the Slim Buttes, far to the south, to stand alone on a limestone outcropping, reminds me of an elegantly carved figurehead on a sailing ship’s prow, riding magnificently the dry prairie winds that will one day help to tear it down.
Many such glimpses abide: a tall, leafy locust split down the middle by a lightning strike, a lone Russian olive standing like a sentry near a pasture gate, its black branches vivid beneath the shimmery leaves. I picture the large burr oak in a ranch family’s yard; it’s been pruned and shaped to a striking perfection. It’s the one tree I know of here that would not look out of place on a New England village common. And I mourn what I think of as the political trees, an eerie landscape of waterlogged dead and dying trees just west of Mobridge and the Missouri River, casualties of the Oahe Dam. They