Winter is on the wane here, no question, but knowing that its days are numbered for another season, this week it is lashing out with entirely seasonable fury. A bit of unscheduled snow last night — nothing more than a smattering of graupel, really, just enough to dot the earth’s surface after dark — has today left bone-chilling winds of ferocious speed and strength in its wake.
Official spring comes early this year, by any measure: March nineteenth, which, if the Farmer’s Almanac is to be believed, is the first time it has come so early in a hundred and twenty-four years. The vernal equinox will not turn out to be the only similarity this year shares with 1886, but it’s probably the least dangerous.
Here, though, spring is a dance that no longer begins with the March winds; it makes its first foray now in February, even January. Summer will begin its own early incursions by May. And through it all, winter will return periodically for yet another grand entry, a bluster and sudden foot-deep snows that have no staying power beyond midday.
Already, the hibernating creatures are abroad; I just yesterday caught two of the dogs on the other side of the fence, tails in the air and snouts down a prairie dog burrow. Those whose winter activity merely slows, rather than sleeps, are also on the move, and I have no doubt that there will soon be more aspersions cast upon poor Beaver for the failures of infrastructure that rightly should be laid at human doors.
By now, there will not be much ice left on the surface of the local watersheds. An awakened river is a fast-running one, and the habitat will now be coming newly alive with it. Down the Gorge, that will mean a departure, generally speaking, of the eagles, and a safe return of the spirits who divide their time between water and land. And Beaver will begin his work anew, clearing out the debris of winter from the waters, felling a tree here and there for the purpose of constructing new dams and seasonal lodge shelters, revealing a nascent green and uncovering the rings of life in the process.
The Gorge is — surprisingly, I think, to most outsiders — lined with trees along its banks and the steep rocky cliff faces rising alongside the great river. Some are invasive: Chinese elm and the dangerously greedy Russian olive, both introduced here from Eurasia a century and more ago, come immediately to mind. There are willows, too, although most are the indigenous red willows that qualify less as trees than as shrubs. Along the cliff faces and rocky slopes, squat piñon and mesquite share space with chamisa and sage. But the real warriors among the trees along that stretch of water are the cottonwoods.
I’ve written about these towering indigenous beings here before, and the vital role they, like Beaver, play in the habitat:
There are two species native to this place, Populus fremontii and Populus deltoides wislizeni. They are two of the three species of cottonwoods found in the poplar family, the former spreading toward the southern West Coast, while the latter is colloquially named for our own very local Big River, the Río Grande cottonwood. They are part of the landscape here in a way that most trees in most places are not, keeping watersheds alive and healthy by helping to control erosion. The Indigenous peoples of this land have always known of their gifts: medicine in the inner bark; drums made of the trunks, cut whole and in no need of piecework; katsinam carved of their roots.
Although by some standards they are considered long-lived trees, their lifespan runs anyway from roughly forty years to some one hundred and fifty years. By the standards of this colonial society, a century and a half seems ancient. By our Indigenous standards, it’s relatively young. Still, this is a land not particularly known for its deciduous tree population, and so even a hundred and fifty years is significant here. And along the Gorge, old warriors live and thrive; even those know regarded as “dead” by colonial definitions are alive with other wildlife, who use them for shelter in one form or another. Some live directly in their nooks and crannies, beneath the bent limbs and in the broken places. Others, like Beaver, whittle steadily away at bark and inner trunk, using the wood chips to their own ends.
And eventually, such trunks give way — like an elder whose own limbs have seized with time and overwork, no longer able to stand on their own. And still, there is nothing “useless” about them; even broken and tumbled to the ground, they have much to offer the rest of their own small world, from shelter to mulch to erosion prevention and more. It’s an object lesson in what — and who — we choose to see as valuable.
It’s a lesson, too, in learning from the past — from experience, from the starred inner trunks and rings that count the passage of the years, an abacus in the shape of a hoop. It’s a reminder that life, like the seasons, is cyclical, knowledge and wisdom, too, and that the answers we seek are often available to us, if only we remember to uncover the rings and learn how to read them anew.
~ Aji
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