Here at Red Willow, the color of the day is not red, but a dirty grayish-brown. The peaks to the south are barely visible through the haze; to the north and east, they appear through a thick veil that looks like smoke. By day’s end, they, too, will be wrapped in a shroud of blowing dust.
This is spring in our small world.
The wind was up before the dawn, sending airborne everything not fastened firmly down. Speed and force have increased slowly but steadily since, and the forecast calls for gusts in excess of seventy miles per hour before the day is out. For now, lesser gusts rule the atmosphere, pulling a giant wall of dust from the southwest and driving it northeastward. Sundry scents of smoke seem to hold the dust aloft, traces from western wildfires that have drifted our direction.
The trees are bent, the smaller branches flung forward like the vibrating end of a cracked whip, and the pollen falls like rain.
At the moment, only the willows have greened anew; the aspens remain stubbornly skeletal and gray. But the colors are deceptive: All have pollinated, their branches heavy with seed pods and fuzzy inducements to sneezing fits. The wild winds confer the singular advantage of broad pollination upon their numbers, sending their offspring far past any point they could hope to gain under their own effort. But in so doing, occasionally a host limb finds itself an involuntary sacrifice in the service of propagation.
For these are no ordinary winds.
Oh, they’re not that far removed from what has traditionally been the norm in this place, but much of the continent has never experienced anything like them. On the coasts, such gales accompany the kinds of storms that wear perilous labels: hurricane, typhoon, occasionally blizzard. In some parts of the country, only tornadoes come close for sheer power and force, but those are rare occurrences, with their own spiraling pattern. But the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains are home to another kind of pattern, that which manifests in a broad solid wall of wind, one that bends bodies double and sends branches and dust fully horizontal. It’s the kind of wind that can fell a tree by pulling it up by the roots, breaking that which refuses to bend and lifting off the ground, whole and entire, anything tall and arrogant enough to challenge its primacy.
On days such as this, the willows are instructive.
These are not the red willows for which this place is named, of course: Those are less tree than shrub, fronds that grow from stalks in stands; they do not stand alone. Their many individual spines, sprung from a collective base, cannot properly be called trunks; a trunk implies something bulky that occupies individual space. They are, like the people and place to whom they lent their name, decidedly collective, communal, their strength in their shared origin and emergence.
Weeping willows are different.
Sources split on their indigeneity or lack thereof. Some assert they they are indigenous only to China, and that all other appearances around the world are introduced or cultivated. Others describe them as native to what is now called North America, as well as to several other regions of the world. Locally, they are widely regarded as indigenous to the area, and treated accordingly, a dynamic underscored by their seemingly organic omnipresence.
Here on our own small bit of earth, we have, in additional to numerous red willow stands, one globe willow and seven weeping willows, the latter split into two stands on opposite sides of the land: four to the northeast; three to the southwest, adjacent to the pond. [The images above come from the latter trio, while one of the former grouping appears in the background below.] They rise from heavy trunks that tend to split close to the earth, branching upward and outward, their skins rough and heavily textured. They are hard enough, solid enough, strong enough to withstand even winds as fierce as these, for the most part.
But as the weeping willow’s branches rise, they narrow and soften, becoming thin and flexible. It is, in fact, their signature trait: These slender, supple branches are what permit the weight of the leaves to succumb to gravity, giving them their “weeping” name, fronds that reverse course and fall to earth like tears.
Enough that this tree’s branches reverse themselves one hundred eighty degrees — rising upward only to turn around and bend back toward their base. But on a day such as this, they must bend again: blown forcibly outward, forward, suddenly at right angles to their trunks, and to both of their natural directions. Branches intended to fall perpendicular float suddenly parallel to it — except that “floating” implies both voluntariness and gentleness and this is anything but. In spring, the willows are subject to the violent whims of the trickster winds, and their choices are stark: Go with the force of the flow, or be broken, unceremoniously and unregretted, in two.
For the most part, the willows choose to bend.
Our ancestors understood this lesson, too. No matter how tempting it is to stand upright to face the winds of aggression and try to block their passage, there are times when to do so would be not only foolhardy but assuredly fatal. Recognizing that simple, undeniable fact of life is not assimilationist, nor is it an appeal to the respectability politics of a colonized or colonizing mindset. It’s a recognition that it is sometimes better for all concerned to bend, the better not to break entirely. Flexibility keeps us limber, keeps us strong, keeps us alive. The tree can survive branches bent upon the winds, but a break? That can be fatal. An uprooting, whole and entire, is death itself — not for a single branch and a few leaves, but for the tree and its root system, too.
And so flexibility becomes crucial to survival. This the trees teach us, and the trickster winds, too. But flexibility does not consist in submission, even if it feels like it at times. Flexibility is life.
And living requires not merely work, not merely resistance, not merely the struggle for survival.
Living requires joy, even in the difficult times.
The winds can teach us part of this, and the trees, too, but for real joy, pure and unbridled, it’s hard to find a better teacher than a dog.
Ours know this lesson well.
They are not fond of these winds, either. She-Wolf, on the left, simply lies low, keeping her head down and out of the wind’s sights. Raven, on the other hand, will actively hide from it, seeking shelter indoors and preferably atop a human foot, his side Velcro’d to the leg above it.
But they, too, have learned to be flexible.
No matter the wind, if we are abroad, they will come with us. As long as we are within range, they will wade through the tall grass as the wind bends it around their bodies and sends the tips of their fur as airborne as the dust. And despite the trickster wind’s force, the howl of its hue and cry, they will let it recede into the background in favor of play’s unbridled joy.
The conditions have not changed; only their perspective. Instead of standing at hard angles to the wind and cursing its brutality, they bend and leap and dive and flow with it and with the dance it induces the grass to perform. And somewhere in the middle of it all, they lose the sound, lose the fury, lose the fear.
In the middle of the gale, they are become joy.
We can do the same.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
