BEFORE I SIGNED UP for driver training at school, my father took me out in the car a few times so I could get used to being behind the wheel. He was patient with me, though he got bored fast. He’d drive to the city limits, then stop on the shoulder where we’d change places. I’d take the car for a five-minute run on the straight stretch of highway that led north, stop at the tree, turn around and head back. The tree marked the boundary of how far my father was willing to go. It was a big cottonwood with a height of about fifty feet and a span of thirty. In another place, there would have been nothing remarkable about it, but here it was the only tree for miles.
The cottonwood was more accurately the only wild tree for miles, or at least the only tree that no one admitted to planting. Swift Current was summer-lush with cultivated trees in its parks and neighbourhood lots. Every farm in the surrounding countryside flaunted a shelterbelt of seasonal greenery planted in a square around the yard. Double rows of Siberian elm and caragana cut green swaths through most of the fields—not tall, gracious trees like maples or birch, but dwarfed, gnarled survivors noted for their ability to thrive on little water and to endure the heat and cold. Provided by the government, these were humble, working trees planted to tame the wind, stopping it from blowing the topsoil away. In the years following the drought of the 1930s, each seedling was slipped into the ground by hand and watered with buckets carried from a well. If any of them on your land died from neglect, the tree inspector the next spring could make you pay. Each row of aged trees I saw when my family drove into the country, including the shelterbelt Grandpa Ford had planted in the early forties, added up to hours of hope and labour.
But not that tree. It wasn’t part of any windbreak. Nor was it near a farmhouse. Its seed, embedded in soft cotton, had been carried by a bird or the wind. Its early survival might have been accidental—perhaps as an elastic sapling it had slipped between the blades that plowed the soil on either side. It’s possible the farmer didn’t see it until it had grown a few more inches. After that, he must have made a deliberate decision to swerve the tractor around it, allowing a rare wildness to burgeon without care at the edge of the tended field.
Besides the dapple-grey under the branches of the windbreaks, the only other shade in the fields fell from man-made things like grain sheds or giant tractor wheels. During harvest at the farm, I’d sometimes see my aunt and uncle sitting in a wheel’s cool shadow eating the sandwiches she’d made, opening sealers of lemonade or iced tea beaded with water, their black-and-white collie-cross panting beside them. I had thumbed through art books in the school library, and I knew a painter could make something of that—three creatures at the centre of a dark circle, a huge machine looming over them, the sky’s burning globe shedding its unremitting light. In a country without trees, you sought relief in any shadow big enough to hold you.
The cottonwood cast its shade with wide generosity. After I had passed my driver’s test, Dad would sometimes give me the car for an hour or so. I’d take the road to the tree, stop on the shoulder and walk through the ditch to stand under its boughs. Its singularity and its size fascinated me. I measured out twenty-two giant strides from its trunk to the end of its shadow. So much life flourished in the area its roots and branches claimed. It was a breeding ground for robins and sparrows, its cottony seeds the perfect stuffing for a nest, the thinnest of its fallen branches scavenged by crows to build their houses of sticks. Wild grasses greened here. They were grazed by antelope and deer—I saw their rich brown droppings—the seeds a feast for birds and mice whose narrow paths tunnelled through clumps of prairie wool.
Once I stumbled upon a covey of partridges; they pulled my quickened heartbeat into the sky and out over the field until they disappeared. Grasshoppers bumped against my forehead and cheeks like fleshy pebbles some invisible bully was tossing from the long grass. On the ground over the hump where a root spread wide, I crouched to watch a darkling beetle, solitary and shiny, trundle his daily troubles away from his hole in the earth. When I looked up, the sky vanished in a green glistening of leaves that ate the light and changed it.
To the four-legged animals that populated the countryside, the tree and its pool of shade must have been a station stop, a cool watering hole without water, a pause in their journeys through the lean light of dusk and early morning. The tree was too close to the highway to be a permanent dwelling for them, but was it a landmark for foxes, coyotes, badgers? Did it say to them, you’re halfway to your sleeping den? Did a fox rub its cheeks on the scaly bark to let others know it had been here? When I touched it, the tree touched back. I inhaled its scent and let out my breath, so small compared to the massive lungwork of its leaves.
The cottonwood was the most important landmark outside the city limits. If you heard a kid say “Let’s meet at the tree” to his buddies on the first spring day they hauled their bikes out of the basement, that was the one he meant, and everyone knew it. More than one graduating class cut out paper place cards in the cottonwood’s mushroom shape to set on banquet tables in the school gym. Brides and grooms had their pictures taken there. You’d see the photographs a week after the wedding in the display window of Ogilvy’s Photography on Central Avenue, the tree a living backdrop to the white dresses and dark suits; the bride’s veil, thin as a leaf, teased by the wind.
Long before I was old enough to drive, I’d picnicked under the tree’s branches with my friends. We’d make our own sandwiches out of my mom’s homemade bread and Ona’s mom’s chokecherry jelly. Lynda would bring three Cokes from the machine at her dad’s garage. We needed those Cokes—to get to the tree we had to climb the biggest hill outside town. At least once in the summer and the early fall, we pedalled from the valley our city nested in up into the sky before the highway slightly dipped, then levelled out and rose again. Three times we would get off our bikes and push, sweat drawing the dust to our skin. Black flies BB’d our faces until we coasted in the wind down the less steep incline on the other side, hoping to go fast enough to ascend the slight rise before the tree without needing to pedal any more.
Finally there, beach towels spread and our lunch unpacked, the cottonwood’s huge presence curtained us from the cars and trucks whizzing past. We were invisible, as if we were hidden in a dense forest, as if we’d opened a door and stepped into another world like kids in a story. Above our heads the leaves chattered. On a blustery day, we lay under a green river’s rush and roar. Even if the wind fell still, the leaves fluttered as if sensitive to the rising and falling of our voices.
We ate the sandwiches we’d packed, drank our Cokes and touched our cheeks and foreheads to the cool, shapely bottles. If it was fall, the leaves would be as gold as the foil on chocolate coins, and we’d hear wild geese passing overhead. For reasons we didn’t know then, their flight filled us with longing. Did the geese look down at us? When they saw the tree in its splendid isolation, did they measure the distance they had yet to go before the southern marshes? Beneath their wings and melancholy calls, beneath the golden branches, we knew exactly where we were. Then, we didn’t know how rare that was or what it meant. We didn’t know how easily you can get lost once you move away from childhood.
Sometimes we watched a storm bluster in, lightning striding from the black horizon towards our small city. If we stood tall around the trunk, our backs pressed into the rough bark, we knew we’d stay dry, at least for the few minutes before rain found its way through the loose shingles of the leaves. Sometimes a half-ton would stop, the driver loading our bikes into the back as he gave us a lecture. A tree calls the lightning down, he’d scold. His warning made the tree more magical. In our minds its branches exploded into brilliance; zigzags of silver shot down the trunk and through the roots, then burst back into the sky, the tree fusing heaven and earth with a deadly brilliant seam.
One year I drove to the tree a few days after Christmas. It had been a bad holiday—Dad out of work again, Mom weary with worry. Its branches bare, in the falling snow the tree looked lonely. I wondered if, like me, it longed for companionship, for the moon to rest on its bare shoulders, for the red-tailed hawk to preen in its highest branch. When the wind tumbled through its boughs, was the tree less alone? Did it feel a presence, warm-blooded and comforting, when an animal curled against its trunk in the night? I wondered what it made of me as I stood beneath it.
Ordinary yet remarkable, the two of us were the only upright things for miles. Beyond us on all sides, fields unrolled their bolts of white, nubbed cloth to the darkening horizon. Now that the cold had come and the leaves had fallen, the tree had stopped talking. Its branches bore the blue star-silence of the snow.